Heavens To Murrgatroyd

I think it can be safely said, now that the Red Sox are in the World Series, that God is involved in sports once again, but it's hard to hold his attention for long. Nevertheless efforts to engage him continue to be made on the playing field.

Gestures change with the times and it's hard to keep up. We're starting to see the end of the double-fist-bump on the heart, which is good, because I'm always worried it signals palpitations. That's a general salutation anyway, not directed toward the Almighty so much as one's fans. But it's nice and short, and the shorter you keep these demonstrations, the less likely the game will be delayed. Experienced practitioners can whip out a sign of the cross between the wind-up and the first pitch. It signifies that the batter is from the Dominican Republic.

You don't see a lot of genuflecting on the field, though. This should be left to catchers, who have springs for knees. Again, it is important to speed up the gesture and not linger overlong with one knee on the ground, lest the player be mistaken for a black man with an opinion, which is something black men are not licensed to have in this country. If you're at all arthritic you shouldn't even try.

We do not have a surfeit of Muslim baseball players and it's just as well. There's no way to speed up the prayerful position, even if it occurs naturally during a slide into second base, inasmuch as the player would then have to ascertain which way is west and point his heinie in that direction. It's a tough call in a domed stadium.

I do think we are achieving the ultimate efficiencies in God-acknowledgment with the current fad of looking skyward while pointing one index finger straight up. The message being sent here is something along the lines of "glory be to God on high," which is certainly how I would feel if I ever landed on first base with a solid hit. (My usual reaction is "holy shit," actually, but that's close.) So far God has not seen fit to install me on base except on a fielder's choice and that's not the kind of thing people like to give God credit for; not disease or hurricanes or dropped pop flies either, although I would imagine he's equally responsible for those.

The specificity of the direction is interesting. For many people, God has an actual address, and it is almost universally assumed, at least by Christians, to be located "up." If a baseball player hits a triple and points somewhere over the horizon, everyone in the stands would turn and look in case there was an incoming asteroid or something. If you think about it, if all the Christians in the world pointed up at the same time, the whole globe would be bristling with fingers going every which way. Which makes sense, if God is indeed everywhere.

For behold, the kingdom of God is within you, or so I recall from my early training, though nobody wants their baseball heroes pointing at themselves even though they made a spectacular play and have worked hard to hone their skills for years and years. It's just not done. But many ascribe to the notion that if God exists, he exists in each of us, and so it might be nice to level a finger at your teammates, especially if one of them just winged you the ball from a rolling horizontal position just exactly where you'd need it to tag the runner. There's no better explanation for a play like that but that God is directing things from the vicinity of that person's chest. Go ahead and point.

As long as he's not a Yankee.

Nuts And Weenies

When I was working, I scavenged my breakfasts and lunches myself, and Dave took care of everything else. I ate exactly the same thing for breakfast and lunch because thinking irks me. On my days off I'd skip breakfast (too fussy) and have a peanut-butter sandwich for lunch (folded over, to save the hassle of precise bread-to-bread placement). Then the big dinner fairy showed up with a heaped plate of eighteen different vegetables, a slab of perfectly-cooked meat of some kind and all the food groups abundantly represented, including butter, salt and alcohol. We never get sick. All the vitamins are bound to be in there somewhere.

If Dave gets hungry of an afternoon, he might call out, "you want a little nosh?" and I'll say, sure. A little something would be nice. Then ten minutes later out he comes with a plate of sliced apples, an orange, salami-cream-cheese-chili-pepper rollups, olives, crackers and cheese, with a spray of celery and carrots hanging off the side, all arranged so attractively that Druids could use it to line up the equinox. The man's a whiz. Also, he doesn't want to eat the same thing twice.

That whole variety thing goes to pieces during the World Series. For however many days it takes, we eat salted peanuts in the shell, Crackerjacks, hot dogs and beer. I really understand the game, having been well coached in softball. You can learn a lot from the end of the bench. In fact, you will not find anyone with my particular dearth of skills who understands this game any better than I do. I love it. Not enough to watch it all season, though. Every year there is some upstart team that I've never heard of that makes a run at the pennant. By the time I start paying attention, it will be down to something like New York versus the Amarillo Crabwhackers. Amarillo Crabwhackers? I'll say, and Dave says, sure, they used to be the Minot Wheatwatchers. Oh.

I'm a Red Sox fan. I lived in Boston during the '75 World Series, when Carlton Fisk waved his hit fair and hopped up and down and clapped all the way around the bases. I've even done a remodeling job on my memory so that I was there at Fenway watching, although I was really in Somerville in front of the TV, but you could hear the whole town roar at once. They didn't win that year, of course. There's a pain associated with being a Red Sox fan that is almost exquisite, a beautiful ache. It's a concrete shoe for the heart. Victorians used to think there was something pale and sexy about tuberculosis sufferers, and I feel the same way about Boston fans. Yankee fans do not have the emotional stamina to withstand what a Boston fan can withstand. Staying with the tuberculosis-victim analogy, Yankees fans are, um, rich fancy boys who will not die.

October 26, 2010

The Red Sox messed up a few years ago when they accidentally won the whole thing, which wasn't nearly as thrilling as getting into that series at all by coming back from 0-3 and beating the Yankees for four straight games. Since then there hasn't been much to interfere with the purity of our suffering. This year the Texas Rangers humiliated the Yankees to get in the series, and they'll be meeting San Francisco. I don't care who wins as long as the Yankees didn't. We've got the giant bag of peanuts ready to go.

But this year the diet got screwed up early. About five minutes before winter, we got our first ripe tomato of the year, in October. That's it: fifteen tomatoes all season, and we've put them to their highest and best use. That means we've already had BLTs every night for a couple weeks. When we run out of Ts, the Series will start. In deference to our age, we've reined in the menu by eliminating Crackerjacks. So it's just peanuts and hot dogs and beer from Oct. 27 for about a week. I've got a massive case of diarrhea penciled in for the 29th through Election Day. I don't care who wins, but my lower GI tract hopes they can do it in four games.