I'm Out

Take me out to the ball game. Take me out to any field but the Elysian Fields. Take me out of my misery.

I sound harsh, I know. But also bear in mind that I'm an avid fiction reader and sports watcher -- and have even become quite the baseball fan despite having grown up in Detroit where, for 15 or so of my formative years, the Tigers had little grrrr in them. Today, I'm both a Tigers and a Sox fan and absolutely adore Fenway franks and pricey beers on sunny afternoons. Despite all this, I totally struck out with theElysian Fields Quarterly. 

The baseball review throws out essays, trivia and even poetry about America's favorite past time. The problem for me is that I was a spectator in nearly every one, rather than a participant, which is my preference when reading. I have a variety of tastes in my reading material, but the one absolute is that it must make me feel. 

There were very few pieces that actually hit me in the gut. Ronald L. Brown's "Prelude to a Tragedy" made me feel a slight twinge, probably because of my own memories of Tiger Stadium, when he recounts attending the last game held there: "My friends and I stick around until they kick us out, not in a forceful manner, but gently, the way they tell you it's time to close the casket at the funeral." 

Ironically, in Chris Christensen's "Gutless," I felt a little something, too. The narrator's need to share the responsibility in his coach's failure 40 years earlier to make him into a ballplayer is a bit touching, especially when we learn that Coach Hipple died three months earlier. But it's touching in the way a news story about the rise of deadly peanut allergies is -- momentary. Unless it is your kid with a horrible peanut allergy. 

And so it is with the EFQ. I would assume that baseball players and former ones, coaches, or parents or siblings of them may feel connected to this journal in a way I didn't. Perhaps they would pour over Robert D. Warrington's "Departure Without Dignity: The Athletics Leave Philadelphia," the way my brother used to over the stats on the backs of his baseball cards: "the October 28 meeting," "raised only $1,4000,00 of its alleged $4,000,000 bid for the Athletics," "reaching as high as sixth place only once (1955)," "left 52% share of the club to his wife and young son." Yet, for me, the series of facts and figures didn't add up to the conclusion that "the teams no longer belonged to the fans." 

That isn't to say that there weren't any baseball-related opinions that made me re-think about my own. For instance, in Herschel Cozine's "Don't Penalize Staring Pitchers!" I wondered why I had never asked myself, as he did, "Why must a starting pitcher complete five innings to get credit for a victory when a reliever may be awarded a win without throwing a single pitch?" 

And in "Baseball and the Vietnam War," I found myself agreeing with Brett Walton's speculation that baseball's seemingly indifference to the war was because "many people undoubtedly longed for the unambiguous, absolute terms of an athletic contest, where at the end of it, there was a winner and a loser." Perhaps, in a way, that same argument might apply to my trouble in reading many of these pieces, like Walton's. They seem to deal with unambiguous, absolutes. Many are factual, chronological, coherent. And unlike Americans during the Vietnam War, I long for the exact opposite when reading: the fuzzy areas, the greys, the uncertainty. For that is where emotion tends to reside. 

In most cases, I didn't feel the translation from the spirit of baseball on the field to the pages of the Elysian Fields. For example in Patricia Giragosian's "Remembering Joe DiMaggio," instead of getting a sense of the baseball great, the presence that most resonated with me was the "unremitting starlet, beloved blonde thing," presumably Marilyn Monroe. 

And while I agree with Sally Mars wholeheartedly who describes baseball as "a language I speak with others who do or wish to; it is a bond with a stranger, brief, yes, yet in context significant. We all feel our fathers there, our children, memories of those we've never met or even seen, the great ones, and those we think only we might remember," I wasn't sure if I could buy that from someone who wasn't sure if she went to the Pompano Beach Mets game "once or thirty times." 

So, for now, I think I'll keep my reading and my baseball on different teams. They shouldn't be playing together anyhow. The Elysian Fields Quarterly has a variety of contributors ranging from professional baseball players; previously published writers, including authors of baseball books (even a collection of strictly baseball quotations); coaches; MFA students; high school and college teachers and super fans.