Still, there is nothing like the day-to-day exhilaration of a pennant race to lend life-whether it is endured in a crusty New England college or not a hot inner-city alley-a sharpness. Such gaudy perversions have me clinging to the Goldberg's Peanut Chews billboard which one adorned the left field wall in extinct Shibe Park's power alley. It may be a century before products of the sandlots assimilate the Designated Hitter. Even for a dyed-in-the-wool rooter, double-knit uniforms, artificial turf, and blazer-and-turtleneck bedizened umpires all need at least ten years aging before they might be countenanced on the diamond. Judging from the nature of disinterested baseball lovers at Harvard, I suspect I would have to learn how to read only those box-scores that are over ten years old, to develop a compassion for the charred skeleton of Connie Mack Stadium, to preserve the line- ups of the Hitless Wonders and the Whiz Kids, to prepare a comparison of Satchel Paige and Walter Johnson.ĭifficult as those tasks may be, certain heretical aspects of the game as it is played in my ballpark today make historic diversion attractive. But a conversion to such intellectual detachment would mean the adoption of other, more alien, sensibilities. It is at such times that I would like to label the anguishing defeat a historic contest and have done with partisan furor forever. And I submit to this bludgeoning self-disapproval whenever I find myself reeling from a tough loss. There is something contemptuous about the person who pins his felicity on the fortune of nine men he doesn't even know. No justification beyond some stretched definition of civic pride exists for the vehement strain of chauvinism that some people, and I am one, hold for a baseball team. But my disinterested effort to view a baseball game as historic certainly avoids the consternation that a partisan fan must confront when his team loses, and it may also be the more honorable attitude for the spectator to maintain in the crush of the pennant race. Neither of the two teams made it into the World Series, so that pluvious contest will surely never attain the significance I wished for it in my dolor. Afterwards, I washed down the defeat with rancid coffee, several perusals of the damp and dismal scorecard, and the lofty notion that I had, after all, witnessed a game that would slosh itself into history-perhaps as the famous Rain Game. Rain drenched Boston on a particular Saturday in the heat of the pennant race, but I sat through nearly seven hours of baseball in Fenway Park to watch my teams surrender a four-run lead in the ninth inning then lose in the tenth.

Home of the brave play