All About the Steak

“The great thing about baseball is when you're done, you'll only tell your grandchildren the good things.”
-- Sparky Anderson


About a month ago, I entered the bookstore on a Friday. I wasn’t working, but I came in to write in seclusion from the media (television, internet) that so commonly exacerbates my writer’s blocks. The first thing I spotted upon entrance was a particular feature display dead in the middle of the drive aisle.

The first two, single shelves cradled the fresh-from-the-printers hardcover Juiced, by Jose Canseco. The cover resembled a baseball card though Canseco’s unaffiliated jersey and helmet, marked only with his number, 33, perfectly symbolized his allegiance to himself rather than any particular ballclub. A star precedes the title, perhaps a satirical asterisk added by the designer, referring to the career statistics that descend from the corner.

That week’s Sports Illustrated filled out the display. When my eyes fell on Stephen Wilkes’ cover photograph, I was overcome by a sour melancholy. It nearly brought me to tears. The picture was simple. No digital trickery involved here. But it was the subject that made me ache: The Field of Dreams. No other symbol of the game, including the lush green ivy of Wrigley Field, will ever resonate with me like that field does. The final exchange of dialogue in that film breaks me every time. And not in a manly, grit my teeth and maybe a tear will escape sort of way. I devolve into a blithering infant every time Kevin Costner utters that line:

“Hey, dad? You wanna have a catch?”

Oh man. Give me a moment.

Seeing that humble field in Dyersville, Iowa captioned with “Broken Dreams” tugged every heartstring I had. But I kept it together long enough to pull a copy off the rack, and find a secluded table where I could peruse Gary Smith’s article “What Do We Do Now?” on the congressional steroid hearings. In the article, Smith phoned and interviewed a few dozen various devotees of the game (from an unnamed Sunday school teacher, to Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, to Hank Aaron, Jr.), asking what this new scandal has done to their love of the game.

I read the article with interest, but kept the proper perspective on the answers offered; as thoughtful as many of the answers were, they were all, nevertheless, knee-jerk reactions to a news event that occurred only days, if not hours before. I did not want my consideration of this topic to fall under the purview of rash castigation (or woe or justification), so I waited only a few days, for the first pitch of the regular season.

That’s all it took. One pitch and I had my answer.

Only in Spring Training could Gary Smith have pulled off an article filled with such loss and sorrow. I don’t blame him. The article was an immediate response to what felt like a bitter disappointment, if not embarrassment, for many a baseball fan. I bought that issue of Sports Illustrated. I wanted to have it in case the sky did fall on baseball. But all it took was one pitch, and I pitched it into the wastebasket.

I cannot overemphasize the head-shaking that cramped my neck for days after watching home run savoir Mark McGwire’s over-coached heming and hawing, introducing his carefully crafted platitude “I’m not here to talk about the past. I’m here to be positive about this issue” into the annals of inanity. You can only slap your forehead so many times before your eyes go crossed, and I had a good start on it after enduring ESPN’s sound-byte record-setting over the next week.

But twenty games into the regular season, it all seems so – as Big Mac would say – in the past. With Steinbrenner shitting bricks about his basement dwelling Yanks, the Cubs showing the Red Sox what a curse REALLY looks like, and teams like the Dodgers, ChiSox, and Orioles blowing past many experts’s expectations, a few measly weeks quickly reminded me why that corn-cut field in Dyersville carries such reverence.

Spring Training sometimes causes us to forget the raomance of the game just as it reminds us of the promise to come. The circus of the steroid controversy could only have cast such a dark cloud during this transition stage. The regular season is the main course, and when you’re busy drooling over the juicy steak of division rivalries, the last thing on your mind is how dry the breadsticks were.

Welcome to the regular season boys and girls. Dig in.