Spitball

In which I become a baseball fan and discover that sports mirror literature

Okay—it wasn’t in the act of writing “Down at the Yards” that I became a baseball fan. But this is the first story I wrote as a baseball fan, when I started following the Baltimore Orioles and their star shortstop-eventually-turned-third-baseman, Cal Ripken, Jr. At this point, he still had his Iron Man streak going, playing in consecutive games for a total of SIXTEEN seasons. Obviously, that’s very impressive, but what interested me about Cal during the season that unfolded as I wrote this story is that he was in a tremendous batting slump. There was much talk about benching him. There were even boos from fair-weather fans. What does a prolonged slump do to a man accustomed to excellence?

“Down at the Yards” was published in Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine, which I’m guessing I learned about from reading the magazine Poets & Writers (still a magazine, but also a website, natch). This is the Summer 1994 issue, No. 47, so an oldie—which is why it’s doubly-exciting to see that Spitball is still around, still a print journal, and still edited by the founder, Mike Shannon—!! Also, if only I’d known: apparently I could have bought a lifetime subscription, which seems like a bargain in retrospect. Here’s an interesting tack the journal now takes: to submit work, you must first buy one sample issue, which allows you to submit as often as you wish. Another quirk: here’s one of the few lit journals free of Submittable, because they ask writers to MAIL their baseball-related stories/poems. (Remember how to put together an SASE??)

With so many old-time vibes around the journal, it’s no surprise that I felt much nostalgia rereading my story, which is about Brian, a mid-level manager, living a life of quiet desperation, but finding solace in Orioles baseball. He has to lay-off a bunch of employees (then gets laid off himself); his son is lurching into uneasy adulthood (and might even GET A TATTOO, lol!); he and his wife aren’t connecting; he’s grieving a lost child and his stoically admirable father, who died painfully, who made life and fatherhood seem effortless. To top it off, Cal Ripken isn’t playing well, and the team sort of sucks. Even so—there’s beauty in keeping score, in pondering life during the slow rhythms of a game, and Camden Yards is a jewel of a park. In the end, there’s a small moment of triumph for Brian and Cal, and the understanding that there’s another season ahead.

So much nostalgia for me reading the description of Camden Yards, where I haven’t been since forever. My baseball allegiance shifted to the Washington Nationals once they came to DC, and nowadays, most of my baseball-watching is our local minor league team, the Winston-Salem Dash. But nothing can compare to that early wonder I felt for baseball in Baltimore (back when one could reliably drive up 95 without slamming into a mountain of stop-and-go traffic).

This is one of the glories of being a writer, isn’t it, how you can capture and hold a magical time and place in your life by sliding it into your story or novel or poem? There’s an allusion to Faidley’s crabcakes (IYKYK) which made me curse the shellfish allergy that I developed several years ago. Yet again in my fiction, there’s a quick reference to the son working a movie theatre job, which is the job I held throughout high school and early college. Brian keeps score in the program just as I used to do with rabid attention (sigh…how I miss printed baseball programs). Here’s a moment that captures what baseball is for so many, as Brian heads to Opening Day alone:

Alone is maybe better, is okay. Those of us alone on Opening Day feel we are the true believers. We are the ones for whom this new stadium was built. We understand what this is all about.

I sent this story only to three high-level publications before trying Spitball. Maybe I could have tried a few university journals, but I’m pretty sure that the timeliness of this story felt urgent. While I invented the rest of the team, Cal Ripken, Jr. and his consecutive games streak were real and always one bad, injury-causing bounce or one ill-advised trade away from disappearing. Plus, when you write a story that might seem niche, there’s nothing wrong with finding readers who love that niche!

I spent a lot of time at baseball games back then thinking about how 9 innings are the perfect number—divide by three, and you’ve got the classic story structure of a beginning, middle, and end. Any sports story has heroes and villains, just as literature does. There’s clear narrative drive and a quest: win the game. And best of all, most sports stories have a “surprising yet inevitable” ending. (Just look at this weekend’s World Cup games!) As for Cal himself, what can be more inspiring to a writer than a man who is (slowly) becoming famous for simply showing up to work, every day, day after day, putting in his time?

Lord knows there are definite challenges to writing about sports: some readers/journal editors will immediately tune out, and it’s difficult to translate the thrill and urgency of a game playing out in real time onto the page. There’s a lot of specialized jargon that your reader may not know—but if you dumb things down too much, the knowledgeable readers of, say, Spitball will be annoyed. Also, you must get the facts right! No one loves to make an esoteric correction more than a bunch of seamheads fresh from their pilgrimage to Cooperstown. (Translation: seamheads = baseball fans; Cooperstown, NY = site of the Baseball Hall of Fame.) I love sports, and I love the challenge of writing about them; I’ve taken on baseball, hockey, and football. My approach is to write about the games as little as possible and to focus on the people. Probably decent writing advice in general.

I picked this story because I wanted to feature one of my baseball stories during the MLB All-Star break, and here’s a good paragraph:

For fun, here’s a game between the Nats and the Orioles from my scorebook, after I transitioned to rooting for the Nats:

While I always appreciate lit journals that make an effort with the artwork, this isn’t what Brian looks like in my mind!!

Here’s the Table of Contents…pretty male-intensive line-up!