Pops by Michael Chabon

Author:Michael Chabon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

The Old Ball Game

I didn’t want my son to play baseball that spring. I tried to talk him out of it—twice. The first time was in the car, over my shoulder, in an exploratory way, half-joking, with weeks to go until the sign-up deadline for NOLL/SOLL, our local Little League. The second time, just before the fee was due, I actually sat him down. I assumed a grave manner and dwelled on all the reasons I thought he should reconsider. I described the appalling tedium of standing in the outfield, three thousand miles from home plate, cognizant in a vague way that somewhere on the far horizon another nine-year-old was busy striking out swinging, or striking out looking, or walking on three gopher balls and two wild pitches (the league rule being five balls to a walk), or taking his base after getting drilled on the leg or plunked on the helmet.

Batter after batter, inning after inning, week after week, all spring long. I pointed out to him that at the level he would be playing, the games endured six full innings—or three hours, whichever came first. I reminded him that baseball was a hard game to play, a game rooted in failure, glorying in failure (who could forget Merkle’s Boner? Not, God knows, me), a game in which you try to hit a hard little ball with a very thin stick. Finally, I broke the news to him—in so many words—that fatherhood is a favorite sideline of assholes, a truth more frequently proved on the baseball diamond than anywhere else. But my son was having none of it. He saw himself out there in the sun, slouched and ready in those white, white pants, with a snappy script name appliquéd to his jersey and a pair of redoubtable cleats. His mother sent in his forms, and we equipped him with a new mitt, and I found myself compelled to expound the gruesome reality of the protective cup.

I suppose I could have simply forbidden him. That’s how my own father handled the situation when I was eight or nine and eager to play. My father is a fan—the original fan, in my world—but that seemed to have no bearing on his feelings about my joining Little League. “You aren’t particularly athletic,” he informed me. “And the other fathers will disparage you, because they become crazy.” I was kind of upset, in fact, as I sat my son down, because I was behaving in a manner that so starkly echoed my father’s with me, and I had always resented his having prohibited me from playing Little League.

Like my father, I love baseball, and when I say “love,” I’m really talking about a state of being—fandom—with no ready verb of its own. I study baseball like a scholar and a scientist; I dissolve myself in it like a mystic in mystery. In my mind, my history and American history are pegged like currencies to the index of baseball. From the time I

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