191. Baseball Pain (12). Doubts in the Torture Antechamber.

Now a look at baseball torture.  Or will it be a look at baseball nuts, torturing themselves? 

If that's what it is I shouldn't be rolling the drums, I should be chuckling, as Mike Schmidt did (in the one conversation I've ever had with a ballplayer) over this radio fan of his in Philadelphia who went into the bathroom every time he came to bat — because that's where she was when he got a hit in an earlier game of this series she oh so wanted to win.

"She was in a lot worse shape than we were," Schmidt said, admitting that yes, there was player tension but going on to point out that on the field you weren't ever hanging on the outcome.  It was right in front of you, whether you had or had not made the play.  This poor lady with the transistor in her ear had a space in which she could imagine all kinds of horrors.

That's the way it was with the nuts who lived right in their team's city.  If you lived 150 miles away, as I and a high proportion of Reds' fans did, you had the additional strain of uncertain reception.  If your town station weren't carrying the game, as happened often, you had to pick it up from WSAZ Cincinnati, which came and went — meaning that in every crucial situation it went.  And opened, thereby, a larger space for horrors to rush into.

I don't know what the proportion of nuts to normals was on the Burger Beer Baseball Network but, by its size (it stretched well into West Virginia and all the way down to Alabama), I think we can say we're looking at plenty of them.  We're clearly talking major, Philadelphia-level strain and pain here.

And I don't think we have to concede any points for intensity.  The towns carrying the broadcast were for the most part towns on rail lines leading not just to Cincinnati but to a terminal only a few blocks from Crosley Field.   Fans could, with a bargain excursion ticket, ride in on the B&O from West Virginia, walk over, see a doubleheader, and be back by bedtime.  They could do the same, I'm sure, from Tennessee, or southern Indiana, or eastern Kentucky.  (Remember, there was no major league team in Atlanta then.) Do that a few times and (I'd say from my experience among them) you were as nutty as any fan in Price Hill, Cincinnati's baseball-nuttiest suburb.  (Pete Rose grew up there.)

All right, for a nut moments of uncertainty fill with heightening strain.  On this night coming up (or in the chamber we are about to enter) there are going to be x number of nuts in x number of towns along those rail lines glued to transistors (television? then? ha!) that are failing, moment after moment, to give them certain news of what is happening.  I can tell you what they are getting in those moments.  Like after they hear, "Rose leads from third.  Here's the pitch," they will get, "SHU-SHU-shu-shu, SHU-SHU-shu-shu."

And if that isn't enough, add this: the voice they are waiting for, the voice that will end the uncertainty, is that of an old ballplayer.  He's learned his trade, he's as impartial as he can be, he's trained himself to stay cool behind the mike, but at moments of high tension he's back on the bench.  Three words you'll get, a grunt, and then, "Oh no, he dropped it!"  A worse uncertainty.

And if that still isn't enough, add this.  Out beyond a hundred miles, and depending on the sky wave, there may be nothing but SHU-SHU-shu-shu, SHU-SHU-shu-shu for a whole minute.  Those out at that range have learned to read through the shu-shu.  If there is loud cheering, and they listen closely, they can pick it up.  It goes ye-AY, ye-AY and comes through at a different rhythm, discernible as the shu-shu dwindles.  When it does this after they've learned that they have a man on third they know that he has scored and, if it's the ninth inning or after, they know that they have won.  The strain ends, anxiety turns into relief and pain turns into pleasure.

When the ye-AY, ye-AY does not come through they feel pain and look forward to continued anxiety.  The pain may be the greatest of the game or, if it's a pennant-decider, the greatest of the season, but its moments won't be those of the greatest strain.  Those will be the moments when the poor nut can't tell whether a cheer is coming through or not.

The thing is, the nut knows all this when he turns on the radio.  What he's in for.  Can you see how that will increase his pain, like an exponent or kicker?  It cinches the pathology.  He's deliberately doing this to himself.  He's crazy, he knows it, he knows everybody knows it, and if they don't he's now going to demonstrate it by submitting himself, publicly, to a play-by-play of this absolutely crucial game with the Pirates.