I watched the Pirates and the Rockies yesterday afternoon on the small TV at the back of Murphy’s, the one nobody fights over because it’s bolted at a dumb angle and the sound’s been off since the Bush administration. Score was 4-2 in the sixth. Two guys on. A pitcher I’d never heard of throwing strikes to a catcher I’d never heard of. I sat there with a club soda and a basket of fries and I’ll tell you something I haven’t told my doctor or my wife: I was happy.
This is dog days baseball, and dog days baseball is the best baseball there is. Nobody important is watching. Nobody is doing a podcast about it. The graphics package is tired. The sideline reporter is somewhere else, probably at a beach with her family, where she belongs in August. The game just happens, the way games used to happen, before every pitch had a sponsor and every swing had an exit velocity readout that looked like it came off a missile.
Coach DiMaggio used to say August baseball is where you find out who actually likes the sport. Anybody can love October. October loves you back. August loves nobody. August is humid and pointless and your team is fourteen games out and you’re watching a guy named Brendan something hit a soft single to right and the right fielder is jogging because what’s the rush, really. That’s the game. That’s been the game. Anybody who can’t enjoy that is just along for the playoffs, and people who are just along for the playoffs are the same people who showed up to the wedding for the cake.
I called Ray Kowalczyk about it last night because Ray is the only person I know who watches more meaningless August baseball than I do. Ray has the package. Ray watches Marlins-Nationals at noon on a Wednesday like it’s a court summons he’s grateful to attend. Ray said, and I am writing this down verbatim, “Duke, I watched a kid named Cisneros pitch six innings of two-run ball against the Reds and I cannot remember which team he plays for and that’s the gift.” That’s the gift. That’s the whole religion.
You will not find this experience at any other point on the sports calendar anymore. Football preseason has turned into a thirteen-hour content factory where rookies are debuting their podcasts before they debut their footwork. The NBA is on a beach in some country I can’t pronounce filming a sneaker commercial. Hockey is, mercifully, asleep. Even the Olympics, which used to be a nice late-summer break, is now a 24-hour parlay opportunity where my grandson can bet on Slovenian water polo from his bedroom.
But baseball, in August, on a Tuesday, between two teams whose seasons ended in May — baseball just keeps showing up. Nine innings. Same shape it had when my father watched it on a black-and-white Zenith with the antenna wrapped in a coat hanger. The pitcher pitches. The hitter hits. Somebody on the bench spits something into a cup. The manager goes out for a visit and you get thirty seconds of nothing, which is the most undervalued commodity in modern American life. Thirty seconds of nothing. They should bottle it.
I’m not saying it’s good baseball. The Rockies committed an error so unexplainable I had to put my fries down. The Pirates ran themselves out of an inning on a play that would’ve gotten one of Coach DiMaggio’s kids benched until Halloween. The pitcher I didn’t recognize gave up a home run to a hitter I didn’t recognize and the camera caught a fan in the third row genuinely asleep, mouth open, holding a beer at a forty-five-degree angle that defied all known physics. That fan understood something the rest of us are working toward.
My grandson came by Murphy’s around the eighth and asked if I wanted to leave because the game was, and I quote, “a nothing game.” Son, I told him, every game you’ll ever love started as a nothing game to somebody else. He said okay Grandpa and looked at his phone. I let him. Some lessons take.
Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says it’s a no-bean recipe she got off a woman at the pool who got it off her sister. Pirates and Rockies play again at one. I’ll be at the end of the bar.