The Books: Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader, ‘Not So, Boston,’ by Roger Angell

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader, by Roger Angell.

“Not So, Boston” describes the 1986 World Series, as well as all the championship rounds leading up to it. It’s a painful read, for any Sox fan (I mean, the title alone …). The first World Series I remember following, and knowing what was happening, and investing in all of it, was the 1975 World Series. I was a child, but I was born into a baseball-loving family (which, for us, meant Red Sox), my first blurry memory is of being at Fenway Park, and rooting for that damn team was the atmosphere I was raised in, similar to being raised Catholic. It may seem like an inappropriate analogy, but whatever, it’s true. Being a Red Sox fan was a given, in my Boston Irish family. And being Catholic was a given, too. There are some things that just are, you know. And of course when you come of age, you can make your own way, and choose what team you want to root for, and what religion you would like to practice (if at all), but as a kid, there were certain givens and being a Red Sox fan was one of them. (My siblings are continuing the tradition with their own children.)

The 1986 World Series was (agony notwithstanding) one of the most amazing World Series experiences in my lifetime. It was epic. It was operatic. It was written by a playwright from ancient Greece. It had tremendous heights, and devastating lows. For the duration of the Series, you felt like you were suspended in No-Man’s Land, the only thing you could do was get ready for the next game. I felt that way in 2004 too, and would experience strange moments of dislocation, mid-series, especially when I would meet up with friends who are not baseball fans, who had no idea what was happening. I was so caught up in it, my life totally dominated by that Series, that it was so WEIRD to meet people whose lives were still … normal.

As epic as the 86 Series was, for a Red Sox fan the entire thing can be summed up in one terrible image:

It is a scar on the psyche of the Red Sox fan.

Back in 1986, I remember worrying, almost obsessively, about how bad Bill Buckner must have felt about that moment. I know I felt bad, but I worried about him. I hoped his friends and family were surrounding him supportively. This is how painful that moment was!

Anyway, enough about me. Roger Angell, whose heart belonged to both the Red Sox and the Mets, had a hell of a time himself during the 86 Series, which he lays out in this monster essay. Reading it brings it all back! He was torn: should he go to Houston? Should he head to New York? Should he go to Fenway? While you were sitting at one game, crazy shit was going on at another game, and it felt like the entire WORLD had gone baseball-crazy. Angell starts the essay sounding almost amazed that it had all gone down in the way it did:

What matters now, perhaps, is for each of us to make an effort to hold on to these games, for almost certainly we won’t see their like again soon – or care quite as much if we do.

The series was arduous, tough, messy. Each team fought like hell to stay in the game. There was a sense that this was more of … a chaotic brawl rather than a nicely set-up baseball game on a pretty little diamond. Shit went awry. People went crazy. People messed up BIG and had to claw their way back. It felt like it went on forever. Angell writes:

More and more, we fans wanted each game to go our way, to come out right, to end the right way – our way – but again and again, it seemed, that wish was thwarted or knocked aside, and we would find ourselves tangled in a different set of baseball difficulties and possibilities, and pulling for that to end right somehow. We wanted to be released, and until the very end the games refused to do that; the baseball wouldn’t let us up. And if we were sometimes sorry for ourselves, because of these wearying repeated pains and disappointments and upsets, I think we felt worse about the players and the managers (sometimes the managers most of all), because they, too, were so clearly entwined in something they couldn’t handle, couldn’t control or defeat, in spite of all their efforts and experience and skill.

There were times when you would think to yourself, helplessly, “Please, God, let this end soon. I have a LIFE to get back to.”

In “Not So, Boston”, Angell walks us through it, game by agonizing game. The experience is fresh for him, there’s not much retrospect yet. He is still amazed by the whole experience.

There’s so much to this essay, but the excerpt I want to share has to do with Game Six of the National League Championship Series. Angell wasn’t even present, he had to piece it together, and obviously talked to a bunch of New Yorkers about their experience, and he puts it together into a hodgepodge of impressions that are hilarious, and really give a sense of how CRAZY the entire experience was. The setup is important:

Angell was in Boston, at Fenway Park, for the American League finale. Meanwhile, the Mets and the Astros were meeting up in Houston at the Astrodome. All of this was happening simultaneously. Angell was in the stands at Fenway, and there was a guy in front of him listening to the game going on in Houston, so Angell was keeping track of two ballgames at the same time.

Meanwhile, in New York, the entire city was caught in a time-warp. The game in Houston started being broadcast at 3 p.m. New York time. It ended at 7:48 p.m. Awkward timing for a work-day, yes? Angell talked to many folks in New York and got their stories. They are so entertaining and really captures, for this baseball fan, what baseball can do to us. I love the anecdote about the woman at the party who was initially dismissive of baseball, didn’t understand it, didn’t care about it, and by 7:48 p.m., she had lost her goddamn mind. YES. Also I love the guy at the opera.

This is what baseball brings us to. When the Red Sox won in 2004, I was watching at a Red Sox bar in Hoboken with my dear friends David and Maria. And remember there was an eclipse that night, happening AS the Red Sox were winning, I glanced up through the skylight at the bar, and saw the moon going into eclipse. You cannot make this shit up. In the mayhem that came with the win, I glanced around wildly at one point, and saw a guy, a well-dressed regular guy, standing frozen, like a Pentecostal preacher, arms in the air, tears on his face. It was not melodramatic. It was absolutely appropriate.

Angell captures a similar moment, in all its specificity and humor and emotion, gorgeously.

Excerpt from Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader, ‘Not So, Boston’, by Roger Angell

An art critic who lives in the East Village wrote, “At our apartment during the late innings of Game Six were my wife Brooke, our daughter Adam myself, two dinner guests, and two people who had dropped in on short notice and then stayed around. One of the guests was Nell, a film director we like a lot, even though she’s one of those people who can’t believe that anyone of your intelligence actually cares about baseball. One of the drop-ins, an Australian poet named John, knew nothing – nothing – about baseball but took a benign attitude, asking polite, wonderfully dumb questions about the game. The other drop-in was Aldo, our neighborhood cop on the beat, a Mets fan and a friend. Aldo was in full cop gear, and voices crackled from his walkie-talkie: cops out there talking about the game.

“Nell is one of those people who don’t know any policemen and who can’t believe that you do. She looked at Aldo for a while and then said, ‘Excuse me, what are you doing here?’ I had to explain that it was all right, he was here for the game.

“I don’t remember it all, but of course I do remember the growing delirium – like trying to explain to John what a foul ball was and how to throw a slider, and Nell becoming more and more agitated, and Brooke assuming her old rally posture in a particular doorway we have, and then, at the very end, all the whooping and hollering and inaccurate high-fiving, and some wild hugging. Nell was leaning out the window shrieking with joy.”