Let's Keep It That Way

A strange thing that I often do is try to convince myself that I'm starting to care less about baseball, my favourite sport, which I talk about constantly. This usually happens when I'm feeling burnt out at the end of a disappointing Jays season and, understandably, do follow each game with the same zeal that I do in April. Maybe I feel guilty about not watching every game? On some level, I definitely do think that it is my duty as a fan to give each Teoscar Hernandez at-bat my full attention, which is ludicrous.

These fits of self-inflicted paranoia about my devotion to the sport are always brief and I feel a huge wave of relief once I realize I'm not a piece of shit or, worse, a bad fan.

During the off-season, I try to fill the void left by the World Series ending by consuming baseball in different ways. In general, this means either playing as a fictional shortstop named Tony Balony in MLB The Show 14, which I haven't done much lately, or reading books about baseball.

My love of baseball literature is something I inherited from my dad, who gave me his copy of The Summer Game by Roger Angell to read as a preteen. This then developed into a fascinated with Jim Bouton's Ball Four, Lawrence S. Ritter's The Glory of Their Times, and, doing his nationalistic duty, W.P. Kinsella.

Recently I've had a hard time reading for pleasure since reading for school takes up basically all of my time. After struggling through a D.H. Lawrence book, I decided to read something about baseball to get my reading habits back on track and picked The Iowa Baseball Confederacy off of my shelf. In high school, I did a project on Shoeless Joe well before I saw Field of Dreams, and then read the short story collection The Thrill of the Grass (one of the all-time best book titles) a little later, so I was well-acquainted with the Kinsella oeuvre. I was surprised then to find this book appealing to me much more than his previous work. Already, I'm getting that deep feeling and can tell that this will be my favourite of his and that rush of relief that I am in fact still very invested in baseball washed over me.

"I saw my grandparents only once. When I was about eight my father and I drove to spring training in Florida. I saw Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts, Allie Reynolds, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Yogi Berra, and my grandparents.

They lived in a very small house on a side street in Miami. There was an orange tree in the backyard. The house and my grandparents smelled of Listerine, peppermint, and Absorbine, Jr.

They left Iowa irrevocably behind them when they retired. They never returned for a visit, never invited anyone from Onamata to visit them, including us, I suspect, although my father never said so.

What he did say, on the drive back, as if he was trying to explain something to me but was not exactly sure what, was, "We are haunted by our past, which clings to us like strange, mystical lint. Of the past, the mystery of family is the most beautiful, the saddest, the most inescapable of all. Those to whom we are joined by the ethereal ties of blood are often those about whom we know the least." I think he was talking about much more than my grandparents.

I listened to my father's tales with half an ear. I knew he was obsessed with something no one else cared about. He wrote letters, articles, talked of a book, which he eventually wrote. Complained. I didn't pay half the attention I should have. Children, thinking themselves immortal, assume everyone else is too. He died when I was a few months short of seventeen."

W.P. Kinsella. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Don Mills: Totem Books, 1987: 25-26.