I’m not great at being a baseball fan.
I was really, really good at it when I was a kid. As people who were fans of the Montreal Expos go (and there were dozens of us! dozens!), I had pretty unimpeachable credentials: I said individual prayers for the best players, I had a lot of cheap merchandise, we watched every single game on the French channel (the English language sports channel usually didn’t bother, and my father liked to hear the game noises but not the commentary anyway), I cared with every fibre of my being, and, every year, my parents would take my little brother and me to Montreal on the train to see two games, twice (best seats in the worst stadium, about $20). The other day of our trip, we would go to La Ronde, which Wikipedia tells me was eventually acquired by Six Flags, further destroying my regard for French-Canadian enterprise. And then we would go to Ben’s (Bens) Restaurant and eat cherry pie. I went back to Montreal in 2004. The pie is not as good now, and Montreal is really cold and the Expos are gone. Oh, wait. Bens is closed now, too. You really can’t go home again.
I pretended that Darrin Fletcher was my husband (he looked a lot like Jason Bateman.) My mom once saw Dennis Martinez on an elevator and had what I now recognize as a spontaneous orgasm. I pretended that I, much like the hero of “Rookie of the Year,” was actually the greatest pitcher the world had ever seen, and got to play for the Montreal Expos and then, obviously, we all doubled-up on rooms and Darrin Fletcher and I got married. I was ten, I didn’t know how these things worked. I had opinions and baseball cards and true love and an age-inappropriate copy of Ball Four, and it was pretty great.
If you’ve ever met me, or read something I’ve written for basically any publication, at some point you’ll hear me talk about the 1994-95 MLB strike. It’s not complicated, but I’ll break it down quickly (not the strike, just what it meant for Montreal Expos fans):
Montreal, under the leadership of the great Felipe Alou (whose son, Moises, was also a potential husband of mine), was pretty much the farm team for the rest of baseball for a long time. Alou brought up players you have actually heard of, they would play for Montreal for a few years, and then we would trade them for magic beans and that would be that. But in 1994, we just happened to have a bunch of the good players at the same time: Wil Cordero, Marquis Grissom, Rondell White, Larry Walker, Cliff Floyd, Pedro Martinez, Ken Hill…Darrin.
I didn’t need to look those names up, because they were all I thought about that year. And, in retrospect, my parents tried to warn me that the strike was going to happen. But we had the best record in baseball FOR ONCE, and we were winning, and I was eleven and stupid and thought the universe loved me.
But there was a strike, and when the dust cleared, people were traded and gone, and then the team mostly sucked, again, forever, and then it folded. Don’t talk to me about the Nationals, it’s insulting, it’s like “oh, your puppy’s dead, here’s a new one and it lives in DC and has some minor connection to the old one.”
I root for the Mets now, I guess. I like them okay. I went to college in Boston (“Well, NEAR Boston. No, not Tufts.”–Toofer), but, I mean, seriously, I came from a team that didn’t have any money, I’m not going to develop meaningful sympathy for a team with tons of money that just keeps failing anyway. Do you know what Felipe Alou could have done with that money? So I like the Mets, even though they have a lot of money and fail too. I like going to Mets games. David Wright is cute, I have a shirt and a couple of hats. But it’s not my team. It’s just a pleasant vicarious experience of fandom. I miss the Expos.
So, you know, I’m phoning it in now, a bit. I say I like baseball, but I just can’t get excited about it like I used to. Now, I think I just like A League of Their Own, and the Shake Shack at Citi Field and men who are just that right kind of doughy-hot in tight pants. I think I said this on Twitter once, so, sorry, but basketball players always look like they’d want to drag you out to clubs to go dancing, and baseball players look like they’d eat nachos in bed with you after you had sex. And I like being in Toronto for a Jays game, and remembering how viscerally I hated the Jays for having John Olerud on first base when we had Mike Lansing, who once dropped his bat while crossing himself before swinging.
But I’m never sure if the fact I don’t religiously follow baseball is because I miss the Expos too much, or because the strike soured me on the politics (unlikely), or if I would have drifted off anyway, even if my team had endured.
Maybe I’m overthinking the whole thing, and it’s what Bob Lemon once said:
“Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.”
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Tags: baseball, childhood, fandom, sports day, the montreal expos
We have a great old-fashioned baseball stadium where I live, and (pre-babies) Mr. Iceberg and I went to see a game (“we must assimilate! Going to see baseball games is a thing that real Americans do!”). It was pretty great, I ate a tiny overpriced hotdog (yum) and some horrifying boiled peanuts (a Southern culinary travesty; the peanuts are hot and squishy, and brine shoots out of the shell when you crack it open).
also nobody actually watched the game, but generally the players were very good looking, which was nice.
Moving teams about is a shitty thing.
(Also, the Dutch word for baseball is “honkbal,” which might be my favorite Dutch word. I don’t even like baseball much and I’m considering going to a honkbal game so I can buy something that says honkbal on it.)
Eee! “Honkbal”! I LOVE IT.
I’m calling it honkbal from now on. Thank you for this!
The majority of position names and whatever are also pretty great. I like “tweede honkman” and “honkslag.” http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorie:Honkbalter…
I grew up in a Baseball House – my mom was a diehard fan of the Cleveland Indians (in spite of their indefensibly racist logo) and I used to fall asleep to the sweet, sweet sounds of her screaming at the television (“GET IT! GET IT! KILL HIM! AUGH!”) I vividly remember the MLB strike, but the true death knell of baseball fandom in my household was my mom actually getting a job working for the Indians in their HR department. (Spoiler alert! Major sports franchises are sometimes “Old Boys’ Clubs” who don’t want women around telling them they need to stop sexually harassing people and end hiring discrimination against minority groups.) She switched teams and became a Boston Red Sox fan. I never cared much for baseball beyond dollar hot dog night, but it’s still so, so sad to see someone lose faith in something.
Yay baseball! Oh, baseball. It’s just so soothing to go to a baseball game or even listen to it on the radio on a beautiful summer day.
I have a terrible confession to make regarding my team allegiances (don’t tell my dad, although I think he already suspects it). My mom and dad are fans of the two teams in my home state – one NL, one AL. My dad won out, because he watched baseball around me more when I was younger and took me to games, but my mom is pretty passionate about it too. So I was all my dad’s team all the time, even when I moved to another city with a competing team in the same division. I held out for years. My dad’s team was better anyway, so I could kind of root for both and not feel bad, because my new city’s team was not very competitive.
But then they got a little better. And it was like an underdog, and who doesn’t love an underdog, and I started going to games more often. And I have a boyfriend who is a born and raised fan, and slowly but surely he roped me in. Now I root for new city’s team. Even when they’re playing Dad’s team. Even though they’re not doing well again.
It’s my dad’s worst fear come true.
The first time I heard “the F word” was from my mother, during a game against the Pirates, when Orlando Merced hit a grand slam.
The summer she was pregnant with me, she was trying to knit a scarf, badly, and whenever Andre Dawson got a hit, she dropped about four stitches. It was like a low-grade version of the scary lady from “A Tale of Two Cities.”
“dozens!’ Lol.
Did you really just write an entire essay about the Expos and not mention Youppi!?
He hugged me once, but I don’t want to make people jealous.
BASEBALL. I’m going to ONLY my second Tigers game of the season tomorrow (highly active babies complicate baseball outings) and I’M SO PSYCHED. Prince Fielder: epitome of doughy-hot. Ohh could he get it.
In sad baseball related news: a longtime fixture of Tigers games, a homeless man named James who would start the Eat Em Up Tigers chant, was killed in a hit & run with his (and my) friend Dreadlock Mike a few weeks ago. He was buried in a Detroit Tigers casket :*(
I have beef with Fielder (or, as he’s known in my house, Fat Can’tPlayHisPosition WearAShirtThatFits Bastard), so I’m glad to know that he’s loved elsewhere. Because baseball is love (and tedium and pointless grudges and sunshine and light dozing and yelling at umpires).
Oh, baseball. My mom was always big into baseball, much more than any of the rest of us, but we rarely went to games. It turns out that this was because I grew up in Minneapolis and my dad thinks indoor baseball is an abomination.
(BUT! Remember that time the Twins won the World Series twice in five years? Remember Kirby Puckett and The Catch and how our moms woke us up to tell us the Twins had won? I can still sing every word of “We’re Gonna Win, Twins.”)
Now I live in Denver, where we have a shitty team (usually), but a STUNNING stadium. I didn’t go to my first outdoor baseball game until I moved here, and then I suddenly understood my dad’s noisy protests. We took my parents to a night game when they came for a visit a few years ago, and listening to my parents bicker about strategy and scoring and…other baseball-y things was like listening to two strangers. It was kind of awesome and amazing to see a whole other side of them.
However, I STILL haven’t been to a Twins game at the new Target field, which bums me out every time I see it on TV, because it is gorgeous.
I went to my first baseball game ever in Denver last spring. It’s a lovely stadium! I have since been to Yankee Stadium and Citi Field, and Citi Field is pretty amazing.
Your dad is right. Indoor baseball is an abomination. Let’s call them honkbal stadiums.
I clicked through on “Ball Four,” wondering if it was another addition to Ron Luciano’s wonderful “Umpire Strikes Back” series. (It wasn’t.) I read those as a kid, and was at the time a huge Tigers fan — inescapable for a kid in Michigan in the mid-’80s. Those books were really a great gateway into the “inside baseball” genre. I’m a fairweather fan of most local sports in Detroit (and an outright anti-fan of the Lions, who have abused our hopes too many times), but if I were more inclined toward strong fandom, Luciano’s screwball insights really would have helped solidify the game’s hold on me.
I loved those books! All of them. RIP, Luciano.
I feel like I’m such a bandwagoner, so it’s really interesting to read about someone who has gone in the opposite direction: being a big fan at a young age and then losing interest over time. There seems to be a lot of (former) baseball fans like this though.. the strike and the doping scandals really hurt baseball fandom in North America.
Growing up in Maryland, I’ve always been a very casual, very passive Os fan (with the additional baggage of disliking the Yankees, because the two go hand in hand*). But their growing success since Buck has joined us has really made it much more exciting, and one of my biggest takeaways from this current era of Os baseball is learning how much tension, anticipation, and suspense there is in baseball. And how if you lose it while watching the game, it can so quickly become background noise. It’s so weird.
*I would say hate, but it’s not like we’re the Red Sox. I don’t think we can lay claim to that kind of intensity of feeling.
I remember thinking (briefly, before returning to wild celebration) when baseball came back that it was too bad another city was losing their team the way we had. Baseball is a cruel mistress, as the Nats have gone on to demonstrate in a number of exciting/heartbreaking/crushing ways. But you can follow that minor connection (Ian Desmond, one of/ the last former Expo still on the team) on Twitter! He is as fun on Twitter as he is on the field.
Ahh, “too bad” sounds callous. I’m sorry they took your team away, Nicole!
It’s weird because Ive never really liked sports, but there’s something so fascinating about reading about other people’s relationship with sports as it’s always a little more complex than you expect. Any way, this piece was really beautiful.
Nicooooooooole have you ever read Wait Till Next Year, by Doris Kearns Goodwin? It’s about growing up and being a Dodgers fan in 1950s Long Island, and I really enjoyed it even though I know nothing about sports, and the ending is almost elegiac in its discussion of the Dodgers and Giants moves. (I may be biased because my dad was also a Dodgers fan growing up on Long Island in the 50s.)
I am actually trying to track down a super similar novel with basically the same name and about the same thing, but it’s fiction and about a young teenage dude. I read it a ton.
The Expos logo is probably my favorite logo of all time.
the “e” for expos, the whole thing is a big “M” for Montreal, and the “b” for baseball. Expos de Montréal Baseball.
I would take exception with that concluding quote, as an adult baseball player, but it’s true. The league my friends and I put together started out as a bunch of punks and weirdos having fun playing a game we missed playing as kids. Now I notice as the league expands, jocks are starting to show up making it a lot less fun. We might just have to split off and start all over again next season, NO JOCKS ALLOWED.
I abandoned baseball fandom after that stupid Yankees fan kid (Jeffrey Maier, you’re on wikipedia for being terrible dude!) caught that damn ball and ruined the Orioles. It probably wasn’t *because* of that incident, but that was the last time I remember thinking passionately about the Orioles or baseball. It also didn’t help that I was approaching adolescence and Brady Anderson was not nearly as cute as Leonardo DiCaprio.
…and now I’m a Nats fan (sorry Nicole!). So, I’m sure I’ll have a very pleasant future. Ha!
I am great at being a baseball fan, dangit. I meet so many lapsed lady fans and former lady fans and it’s hard to find women my age who are still absolutely on board with baseball. I still remember my first baseball game, watching the As play the Cardinals, watching Mark McGwire strut up to the plate, a huge hulking man – but not in the steroid sense, at that point in time, simply a mammoth and imposing man. I’d like to say he crushed one out of the park, but apparently everybody in history says that they saw one get crushed out of the park at their first baseball game.
Since then I grew up a Giants fan, through the lean and the fat years. (By this, of course, I am referring to Barry Bonds’s head.) I still remember the week my family had tickets to the annual Jewish Heritage Night through my mother’s synagogue. That entire year we’d been watching Barry Bonds creep closer and closer to the record. San Francisco did and still does have a very complex relationship with Barry Bonds. We always knew he was on steroids, we just weren’t sure if we cared. The rest of the game dumped shit all over Barry Bonds and made fun of San Francisco, as though he were the only player taking them, and sure enough now that allegations are coming against players on every team and everybody’s getting suspended, all of a sudden you hear, “Who cares?!” Anyway, we realized there was a chance he would break the record at the very game we were about to attend, and we watched the night before desperately hoping he’d be walked. Sure enough, he hit his record breaking home run as we screamed in frustration from our couch. The next night we went to the game, where they naturally replayed the home run over and over again. To our delight and surprise, Barry went ahead and played in that game, where he actually did crush one out of the park. So in a very technical sense, I did watch him break the world record.
It’s impossible to describe the 2010 season to somebody outside of San Francisco. That season sounds like something out of a movie and it is a source of deep bitterness within me that nobody else cared! West Coast baseball is completely ignored by the rest of the country, even when it’s phenomenal, even when it’s inspiring, even when it sounds like a sports fairytale. It is simply impossible to come up with a more dramatic story than the 2010 Giants, and then they won, and the city erupted. As far as I can tell the only thing that’s even comparable is the 1981 49ers Super Bowl victory. I had a hard job hobknobbing with politicians, and baseball was the only common ground we shared. I talked about baseball with the mayor. I talked about baseball with the bartenders. I talked about baseball with people on the morning train. The night of the last World Series game, I left my office and walked through the Financial District which is a ghost town after 6 PM. It was a warm night and every bar, every apartment, every office building had their windows open. My single greatest memory of that year isn’t the parade, or the endless hours spent in bars screaming with strangers. It was that night I was able to walk down the street and hear the game floating through the air from every open window, as the entire city stopped what it was doing and watched the game together with their breath held. And how, like some miracle, like some wonderful cliche, like a movie you’d never believe, it actually happened – we won.
That’s why I love baseball.
beautiful last paragraph. 🙂
As a religious Texas Rangers fan this was one of the worst weeks of my life. It helped a teeny tiny bit that I really liked the Giants team that year.
I still haven’t emotionally processed the following year.
I can relate to this a lot, though baseball did lure me back after the strike. I grew up a Yankees fan because my dad grew up the son of an embittered Giants fan before the Mets came to town and my mom isn’t that into baseball but is from the Bronx. I remember the strike year and the season Paul O’Neill was having and collecting baseball cards with my four-years-younger brother and putting them in binders and consulting the magazine that told us which ones were worth anything (hint: none of them). The Yankees were terrible in the early nineties, so it wasn’t quite like rooting for Goliath, and my brother and I would mix cranberry juice with coca cola and call it Noakes Cokes after Matt Noakes, the catcher.
I was pissed off for a couple of years, but 1996 and the comeback against the Braves and Scott Brosius and his barehanded plays in 1998 had me back with a vengeance. This time, my brother and I were older and we would memorize box scores and stats lines and quiz each other by guessing the game or player by the stats. We were insane and my mom thought we’d both go on to be GMs. But I went to college in California and college meant a lot less time in front of the TV watching games. So the playoffs sometimes, and cheap seats at the Angels games before they got good. It was fun, but I certainly didn’t remember who was hitting .305 with 18 homers and 98 RBIs come September of my sophomore year. I felt bad sometimes, like I wasn’t an “authentic fan” anymore, not realizing that there might be something dark underneath that pressure.
Four years in NY and I was watching regular season games again, but without the same furor. Then I met my now-husband and while he was superficially a Yankees fan, too, in truth he hated watching baseball and would complain if I had anything but the most exciting moments of the most exciting games on our TV. We moved to California for grad school and I’m too cheap to pay for the baseball package. Now I’m a fan in the sense that if my out of market team is on national TV and I’m home, I watch it until I cannot possibly put up with the nagging anymore (note: this is proportional to how close and how important the game is). Am I not as “authentic” as I was? Probably. But back then I gave up plans with friends to stay home and watch meaningless summer games, so all in all I’m probably happier.
I have beef with Fielder (or, as he's known in my house, Fat Can'tPlayHisPosition WearAShirtThatFits Bastard), so I'm glad to know that he's loved elsewhere. Because baseball is love (and tedium and pointless grudges and sunshine and light dozing and yelling at umpires).