No Place I Would Rather Be by Joe Bonomo

Author:Joe Bonomo [Bonomo, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO003030 Sports & Recreation / Baseball / History
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Angell watched Blass pitch and visited a Pirates game with him, but he brings the aggrieved pitcher to life most fully while describing him on his home turf, coaching a Little League game or sitting with his family. (At home Blass seemed wistful: “I noticed that it seems difficult for Blass to talk about his baseball career as a thing of the past; now and then he slipped into the present tense—as if it were still going on.”) What interests Angell the most in Blass’s story is the abrupt failure at an elite level and the uniqueness of his problem. “The frustrating, bewildering part of it all was that while working alone with a catcher Blass continued to throw as well as he ever had; his fastball was alive, and his slider and curve shaved the corners of the plate,” Angell writes. “But the moment a batter stood in against him he became a different pitcher, especially when throwing a fastball—a pitcher apparently afraid of seriously injuring somebody.” As a result, Angell notes soberly, “he was of very little use to the Pirates even in batting practice.”

This unexpected demotion in craft and poise on a profoundly large stage strikes a note of compassion inside Angell. He’s long been cognizant of the unrealistic, even childish, demands that fans place on professional players, a hostility that often stems from envy, especially since the labor skirmishes of the 1960s and 1970s detonated the exploding rate of pay that ballplayers received for playing a so-called kids’ game. As demands on players increase, so does the pressure those players—particularly the highly paid, publicized, and successful ones—feel to live up to expectations, many of which they recognize as having placed on sports heroes of their own when they were young. “Professional sports have a powerful hold on us because they display and glorify remarkable physical capacities, and because the artificial demands of games played for very high rewards produce vivid responses,” Angell observes. “But sometimes, of course, what is happening on the field seems to speak to something deeper within us; we stop cheering and look on in uneasy silence, for the man out there is no longer just another great athlete, an idealized hero, but only a man—only ourself. We are no longer at a game. . . . Sport is no longer a release from the harsh everyday American business world but its continuation and apotheosis.”

Near the end of “Down the Drain” Angell ticks off possible reasons or explanations for Blass’s bedeviling, career-ending syndrome—including fears of being injured or of injuring a batter, a slump that resulted in a loss of confidence, and excessive grief over the death of teammate Roberto Clemente—and speaks with teammates and coaches, many of whom remain as baffled as Angell. At this point in the piece “the reader has gone through a lot,” Angell commented later. “He’s learned a lot, and he hasn’t come to the answer. He hasn’t come to a solution. And then you bring in his friends, who don’t have the solution, either.

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