Look, It's Baseball, continued

I crossed baseball off the list of things we talked about. Nonfiction by Brian Mihok.

This is the 2 / 2 installment of “Look, It’s Baseball.” The 1st installment can be found here.

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

In Florida, when my father is truly ill, we talk about only the following: baseball, old television, the neighborhood, the family, and school.

***

Robert Pollard was a three-sport athlete growing up. His father pushed him and his brother Jim to excel at sports. Pollard was told he had a golden arm. He could throw a baseball at 95 mph his senior year of high school, and in college, he threw the first-ever no-hitter in the history of Wright State University. In 2010, Pollard wrote the score for 4,192, a documentary about controversial baseball great Pete Rose.

***

For 18 years my father volunteered for the Company No. 2 Fire Department in town. He began that streak before I was born, and it continued up until we moved to Florida in ’93. The fire department teamed up with the police department for a softball team and they were a part of a statewide league of civic department teams. My father played third base. He dove to steal doubles down the line. The diving grab and toss to first was his specialty. My mother, seemingly in awe of little my father did, was in awe of his prowess with the glove. All his dives! she still says sometimes. This was fast-pitch softball for men who recognized the dangers of hardball but couldn’t let go of the thrill of fierce competition. In our house there was a hutch, and on top of the hutch were a dozen championship trophies because my father was an All-Star on an All-Star team. They barnstormed New Jersey for a decade and left no survivors in their path. I am more impressed with this now than I ever was then. When my parents argued, which was often, my mother would call him Mr. Pop-up. The hole in his game was his hitting. She knew just where to strike.

***

In the end, before I knew it was the end, I would mention the Yankees on the phone and he would say yeah and nothing else. I lived in California and all we could do was talk on the phone. But I knew he had not been reading about them, not been watching games. He had too much pain in his body to care about such things. I crossed baseball off the list of things we talked about.

Don Mattingly leads off third base after having doubled and moved to third on a hit or a walk, I can’t remember which. This is 1992. Seeing his number 23 right there in front of me is shocking. My father and I are guests of my uncle, and we sit fifteen or twenty rows up from the field on the visitor’s side. Mattingly strides down the line toward home. I am somehow looking at the history of baseball. Babe Ruth played on this field, I think? The spectacle of the event is confusing me. Time is wrapping around itself. I look at my father, my uncle, and their two friends sitting next to us, strangers, the white sky, the beige scoreboard bulbs at the old Yankee Stadium, but nothing returns my look. Nothing seems to feel the shock, the constricting time. I want to grab everything, the world, by the collar and shake it. Are you seeing this? I want to scream. Can you see it? Is it real if you can see it? I am desperate for it to make sense. How can there be a bridge between the image on television and this scene before me? And how can it be that I am the bridge?

The day my father died, the summer fresh and infinitely ahead, I had flown from California to Florida to celebrate what was likely his last birthday. My youngest brother, who still lived at home, picked me up from the airport. When we walked in the back door, we found him on the living room floor in diabetic shock. An ambulance came but they could not revive him. My mother came home from work and a nurse stayed behind to ask questions and perform duties none of us understood. My middle brother, having flown down from Jersey, showed up later that day. When the commotion had quieted, the four of us were left in a strange state of what now? My mother encouraged us to go outside, throw the ball around, anything. She probably needed time to herself, looking back on it. My brothers and I grabbed our gloves, a bat, and a few balls, and we drove a mile down the road to the Rec Center. The Florida sun was sharp and the humidity suffocating. We sweated, we teared up, we shook our heads because we didn’t know what was right or wrong to do at that moment. We threw the ball hard, swung hard, made catches, and kicked the clay into the dust, coming up with answers to no questions.

***

In the room where I wrote most of this, on the wall, was a photograph of Don Mattingly and Mickey Mantle. They stand in a locker room, both in uniform. Mattingly is in a dark top, probably for Spring Training, and the Mick, considerably older, is in full pinstripes. They both hold bats on their shoulders and smile for the camera. The signatures of both men are scribbled across their bodies. This is a facsimile I bought at a garage sale when I was 13. I carried it around in a box for about 23 years until I hung it up in this little space in our apartment we called the café room where we put pictures and art. Below this photo was another, a team photo of sorts of my father’s softball team in its heyday. It is a black and white 8×10. The players stand in a line and look exhausted, their jerseys darkened with sweat. My father is third from the left, and his two brothers, my uncles, are a few players down. There are ten men in the shot and they appear to be standing along the foul line. They look so young. This was taken before I was born. He resembles my youngest brother with a mustache. In the upper left of the photo, behind and above the team, a pair of stadium lights are illuminated because it is night. The bulbs look like headlights on a dark highway in the sky.

Now it is 2023 and in two years it will be twenty since my father died. This does not yet outweigh the length of time I knew him, nor does it seem like it could be true. Didn’t he just die? Weren’t we just watching the Yankees win the World Series in ’96 and ’98 and ’99 and 2000?

In a song called “It Is Divine,” Robert Pollard sings about the summer, its color, the plants, trails, cows, the smell of chlorine, and piss on the hot street from a vagrant. The chorus is desperate in its reverence, It is divine, my child/and it only lasts a second. Upon first listening, I took it to mean the summer only lasts a second. But with baseball, the summer stretches out. It extends. It lasts forever if you’re not careful. But what is divine? Is it the mixture of beauty and ugly in the song, the heat of the marathon? How long was the time between the first memories of my father throwing me a Wiffle ball to hit with an oversized red plastic bat to the moment I had to say goodbye 18 years ago?

This season the Yankees were terrible, and I’m glad he did not have to watch loss after loss, calls for the manager to be fired, for shakeups, for the shifting of all routines. But as awful as it is to watch your team crumble, most of the pain comes from the season-ending, from the elation of the playoffs giving way to that thin sliver of baseball-less autumn, the transition from the warmth and life of summer to the cold and hibernation of winter. Of having to wait out the long blue ache until pitchers and catchers report to training camps in February, as the marathon begins another cycle, seeming infinite in its number of startups throughout your life, even if it does only last a second.

---

Brian Mihok is a writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in Fast Company, Cagibi, The Disconnect, Publishing Genius, Vol 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. His novel, The Quantum Manual of Style, was released in 2013. He also co-founded Matchbook, an online literary magazine that ran from 2009 to 2022. Find him, his writing, and his films at brianmihok.com