Baseball With Nobody To Call

I cannot properly convey the tremendous uplift I get each spring with the return of the baseball season. Since I retired from sleds and snowball fights, the winter months have been particularly difficult to manage. I get by with new episodes of my favorite television shows and football on Sundays, but there are some days when there’s just nothing interesting going on. All of that changes on opening day, when I no longer have to scour my schedule with a microscope to find a reason to get up in the morning. If it’s spring or summer, there’s a good chance the Cubs are playing. If they happen to be on an off-day, I just turn my attention to the Cordova Confederacy Fantasy League and the odds are good I’ll have somebody to root for or against. But with each euphoria I relish during these next six months, an unfortunate anti-climax will follow close on its heels.

This Monday’s Cubs game against the Florida Marlins is a perfect example. Carlos Zambrano was his usual mercurial self on the hill, alternating between unpredictable flamethrower and off-speed magician. Though the performance was far from the majesty of a Greg Maddux, Big Z proved unhitable save two home runs. It was the type of performance my brother and I love to talk about. We easily could have spent a half hour on Zambrano’s first at-bat alone, a strike-out he punctuated by snapping his bat in half across his knee. This guy is batshit crazy and a watercooler GOD!

Sadly, for the majority of the 2006 season, the Rockwell watercooler diatribes will be tragically infrequent. The full weight of this missing link in my baseball zeitgeist struck me during the Cubs eighth inning rally against the Marlins. Down 3-0, the Marlins opened the door with a number of walks and base hits. Then, with the bases loaded, rising star Matt Murton stroked a liner into center that tied the game.

Any other year, I would have reached for my cell phone and hit speed-dial four: Andrew. We leave dozens, if not hundreds of messages for each other over the course of a baseball season. Brevity is the rule:

“Maddux, baby!”

“Big Z!”

“Murton’s a PIMP!”

Hours or days later, we’d break the voice message cycle and more fully digest the many tagline observations we’d accumulated since our last conversation.

Monday was a night filled with potential euphoric voice messages, but then the blunt reality hit me. I can’t even call my brother. That seems like a realization that would have hit me sooner, but it didn’t. My brother and I only spoke sporadically during the winter months even when he was home. But when baseball starts, we’re locked in a relentless back-and-forth. Only after Jacque Jones followed Matt Murton’s game-tying hit with a three-run blast did it finally strike me that our give-and-take, which is so essential to the baseball experience for me, will be sidelined longer than Prior or Wood.

On the morale roller coaster that has been my brother‘s deployment, I’ve reached a new nadir. Since I’ve started work I’ve shared maybe three or four conversations with my Andrew. I definitely got spoiled by unemployment and our near-daily Instant Message conversations. The big fantasy showdown I was so psyched for ended up on the anti-climactic note. Sure, it ended up being a route -- I beat Andrew 13-5 and threw him into a three-way tie in the cellar -- but my brother still would have had some angle from which to talk shit. He’d call it luck. He’d remind me he still knows more about baseball than I do. Something, anything to add some flavor to our contest. But alas, the week passed with not a word between us. Where’s the fun in that?

So, yes, baseball season is here, and I’m loving every minute of it. But like so many other things in The Longest Year, a very important piece will be missing.