Poor Ty Cobb's Had an Accident -- So Might You All

Baseball has started for real and for earnest now, and today was an off day for my new team (sorry, Molly and John). However, NESN has my back, and I am watching my old team as we speak. The literary benefits and connections of baseball are ancient and storied, and attract both those you'd expect (George Will) and those who, not so much (transgressive women's blog Jezebel.com). This blog, as the two of you who read it know, loves baseball. Here are some thoughts on baseball as it has resurged to its proper place in my life, and the (of course) bookish implications of baseball season.

My uncle's stepdad Wes told us the other day that he had seen a BBC telecast of Wimbledon back in the day, and that it was astonishing for its quietness -- they just shut up and let the tennis players play tennis. While it's true that there is a lot of commentator noise in all sports presentations, baseball is a special one for the amount of talking (rather than reporting) it generates (as that Jezebel post notes, "conversation is not only possible but encouraged"). Since the game isn't timed, you have lots of time to just sit around and talk about it. My soccer-loving friend Nils claims some statistic about how the ball is actually in play for about six minutes of the two and a half hours needed for a baseball game proper. Nils bemoaned this because he is from South Africa and only ever thinks about soccer, when the ball is in play for however many minutes they feel like should constitute that soccer game. However, all that down time means that there is plenty of time for talk -- and, just from watching the last few days, it is the chunks of language that bounce around baseball games that have the most comfortable familiarity to them, the things that make me most satisfied that the best time of the year has really showed up once again.

Someday, I will write on here what I think of the Major League Baseball Rulebook. I wanted to make the MLB Rulebook an entry in the Book Club, but people said that no one else would ever read it, that that was silly. Luckily, I have been eased of such responsibilities by the fact that no one reads the books except for me. So someday, probably in June, I will announce the Rulebook as the book club pick and those of you who don't like it may resign and get all your dues money back. Whatever I say about the stylistic pyromania and majesty on display in the MLB Rulebook, bear this in mind: it is the total opposite of what I'm about to say about baseball words. A batter "works a count". A team has "double-barreled action" in the bullpen. A starter has "done everything they've asked him to do". "Free baseball" for extra innings. In the real world, this is cant. It is stuff that gets said so often it doesn't really mean anything, and in the real world it is obnoxious. But in baseball, as teams change (they're not even the Devil Rays anymore!) and players are revealed to be more and more embarrassing as athletes and human beings, the cant -- the dreck -- is what shines on. I grinned four or five times watching two teams I didn't care about at all, because Jon Miller and Joe Morgan kept saying things like "depth of the rotation" and "save situation". The words were the same, so this made me happy enough for then.

This makes people like Roger Angell think about the business of caring. It made me think aboutGrendel (remember Grendel? this is a song about Grendel). Grendel wouldn't have liked Roger Angell at all, and he wouldn't like me, based on what I said about baseball, either. (That's ok, because I'm not so hot on him either; the person who's derived by far the most enjoyment from my copy of the book is my cousin Kelly, who thinks the Grendel on the cover is a bear and roars at it every time she sees him). Grendel might've liked Dr. Johnson, might've been happy to clear his mind of cant. That's what he hates about the Shaper, and what the Shaper lets Hrothgar think about himself. In his freewheeling nihilism, Grendel thinks that damn near everything is cant:

"Not only ancient history--the mythical age of the brothers' feud--but my own history one second ago, has vanished utterly, dropped out of existence. King Scyld's great deeds do not exist 'back there' in Time. 'Back there in Time' is an allusion of language."

That is some pungent, Joe Cruz-style epistemology. Grendel is grumped out about tricks like Unferth and the Shaper's constructing pleasant narratives for themselves because they seem false to experience. Calling the specially designed area in which overpaid relievers practice a bullpen is probably false to experience too, but I'm sticking with it. Grendel's blunt crankiness with everything he sees -- from his opening rage at a goat to his final nastiness toward some other woodland denizens -- seems like a kind of truth that I'd rather not stick around for. But I find myself more and more drawn to the character of Grendel, wondering what he would think about things: in a way, his powerful self, for all its ugly rawness, is attractive, or at least commands serious attention and remembrance. As a scourge, Grendel matters to us in a way that is directly opposite to the way in which baseball's comfortable signifiers matter to us, but he will matter to us nevertheless. Ah, Grendel! Ah, monstrosity!

If anyone didn't guess, the "sweet line" mentioned in the Emma post was that last one. And to settle everyone's office pools once and for all, the next book of the Unpacking My Library book club is....Author Author by David Lodge! And, in a doubtless fascinating colloquium on fake Henry Jameses, it will be followed up by Colm Toibin's The Master. So, get ready for some exciting months of writing about Henry James. Old Crow! Buy a copy! Ryann! Expect one from me next time I visit. Everyone else! As you were. And don't worry, I promise to write about whatever other books I think of, whether club-related or not, as I continue, for you, to unpack my library.

(That was a sweet signoff, I may use it more often).