The diversionary allure of desperate times

by David Benjamin

“I learned how to read the distance of a flyball from the crack of the bat over the radio and the tone of Earl Gillespie’s response (he never, ever hyped a warning-track quail as a dinger).”
—David Benjamin, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked

MADISON, Wis.—It wasn’t an every night thing.

I’m reputed for my exceptional recall, but I couldn’t tell you how often I had these summer evenings of intimacy in bed with Earl Gillespie. The memory, however, is vivid because it was so secluded and sublime.

I spent my first eight years in a yellow cold-water, no-toilet bungalow on a nameless street that the neighborhood simply referred to as The Alley. That period ended suddenly one day when Mom got fed up with my dad’s behavior and ran out on him, dragging three fairly surprised kids along with her.

The bungalow wasn’t the only dwelling on the lot. Uphill, facing Pearl Street, was my grandparents’ actual house. They had an indoor toilet. Over my first thirteen years, they also provided refuge for Peg, Bill and me from the vale of tears traveled by Mom. Occasionally, in one of my summertime escapes to Archie and Annie, when oil heat was not necessary and I could pee off the back stoop, I got to bed down all by myself in the abandoned yellow bungalow. Maintained spotlessly by Annie, the little house had gone from cramped to cozy. My only companion, on those halcyon evenings, was Earl Gillespie, the voice of the Milwaukee Braves. Earl taught me all the landmarks on the field at County Stadium, from the batter’s box to the short porch. I learned about ground rules and foul poles and Texas Leaguers. I learned about the twin killing (McMillan-to-Bolling-to-Adcock) and came to the realization that the infield fly rule was more abstruse than the theory of relativity. I remember Gillespie gleefully describing the comedy of a rookie outfielder hitting the slope—Cincinnati’s version of a warning track—at Crosley Field and falling on his ass as a routine flyball bounced toward the wall. I remember the Mets in the Polo Grounds and the suspense of Marv Throneberry circling, in an exquisite prose-poem by Gillespie, under a pop fly.

My favorite broadcasts emanated from the West Coast, where the Dodgers and Giants were peopled by the gods of California, Koufax and Drysdale and Podres in L.A., Mays and McCovey, Cepeda and the indomitable Juan Marichal in Frisco. Those games didn’t start ’til 9:30 in the Midwest and they kept me awake and taut with suspense, glued sinfully past bedtime, often beyond midnight, to a little black Philco clock radio. I read books between innings.

I’m reminded of all this because spring training is winding down and the calendar is creeping toward Opening Day—which it has done faithfully since long before I was born. Baseball has changed vastly since Honus Wagner’s rookie year in 1897, since Babe Ruth’s peerless ’27 Yankees and Dizzy’s Gas House Gang, but it has been perennial through every American summer all my life, through all the lives of everyone I’ve ever known. As far as I can tell, it has never done any harm to anyone—with the possible exception of Shoeless Joe Jackson.

This, of course, reminds me of the speech intoned majestically by James Earl Jones’ character, Terrence Mann, in Field of Dreams—based on W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe.

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by, like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.”

Nowadays, I find myself almost painfully nostalgic for the voice of Earl Gillespie, the only sound at midnight in the yellow bungalow on The Alley, holed up and—for nine innings— oblivious to the world beyond County Stadium (which they tore down 25 years ago). I’m not alone. America is being rolled lately by an army of steamrollers that seems unstoppable. I have friends who are are afraid of watching the news. We’re tempted to crawl under the covers, to withdraw in despair, let the high and mighty have their way and wreak their havoc while the rest of us, desperate for relief, seek diversion in something like, what? Netflix? Taylor Swift? Video games? March Madness?

Or baseball?

Ah, there’s the rub. I recently re-watched another baseball movie, Fever Pitch, based actually on a Nick Hornby memoir, Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life about the British author’s obsession with Premier League soccer. In the movie, Jimmy Fallon portrays a young man whose life revolves around the Boston Red Sox. He’s immersed in a diversion that blocks out whole vast stretches of time, reality and human contact. Yet, reality keeps insinuating itself. There are, every year, five months without baseball—four if you count spring training. During that time, Fallon’s character, Ben, becomes, in the words of girlfriend Lindsey (Drew Barrymore), “Winter Guy.” He’s a gifted high-school math teacher who uses pop culture and current events to engage his students. He barbecues in the Boston Common. He roams the city, reads the Globe, goes to movies, falls in love. Winter Guy is fully engaged in the midst of life. This applies even during the baseball season. Summer Guy, after all, has only three hours each day—not to mention “off” days—of the Red Sox.

The rest of the day, he still works, he’s still crazy for Lindsey, and he has to somehow balance the woman he loves with the pastime he loves. He cannot escape all that real life around him, which is why the word “diversion” applies to baseball, as well as to Netflix, Taylor Swift and “Grand Theft Auto.” When diversion escalates into obsession—Jimmy Fallon depicts this deterioration—it cuts out everything else important in life. It’s a permanent retreat under the covers, where it’s stuffy, dark and hard to breath.

At best, it’s heartbreak. At worst, it’s madness.

My romance with the Braves, serenaded by Earl Gillespie, ended cruelly in 1964 when Atlanta stole Henry Aaron from Milwaukee and insisted on calling him “Hank.” But during that splendid, life-defining diversion from Mom, Dad, the bullies at school and even the murder of Jack Kennedy, I resisted the urge to hide under the covers. Baseball was constant, a touchstone that marked the time, defined the seasons and offered a measure of solace in desperate times. But even when I was a kid, I knew. It was just baseball.

Between innings, I read books.

Now, between news blocks, I still read books.