Friday Night Baseball: Game 7

It is Friday night. I am getting to this post a bit late. I have an excuse, or a few.


My son Sid and I have been spending a lot of time with the World Series. It is baseball. The best of baseball. It calls for my attention. Even now, as I type, Game 7 is pulling my attention from this craft. That is my story of the moment. Baseball is full of many more.

One of the big ones this year is Ron Washington’s story. Ron Washington, former Twin, former 3rd base coach for the Oakland A’s, and current manager of the Texas Rangers. He has led them to their second consecutive World Series. Interesting man.

He is getting a lot of attention for his animation in the dugout. They call his stirring “The Wash,” a dance of excitement that shows his emotion more than what we see in most Major League managers. He stops his feet as his players round the based and waves his arms.

This dance is not just about his personality. “Wash” is a Major League manager by merit, but a 3rd base coach at heart. The 3rd base coach, as his players round the bases on their way home, has to guide them home, using hand signals and moving his feet as quickly as a player to get in position to relay the signals to a fast-moving base runner. It is one of the most exciting dances in baseball. Windmill arms, the body English guiding a runner to home.

Being a 3rd base coach also requires a quick mind that can communicate complicated instructions to base runners and batters using an even more complicated system of clandestine hand and body signs. The job requires a fast-paced understanding of baseball situations, individual players and strategy. In short, a good 3rd base coach is smart.

We don’t hear much about Ron Washington’s intellect. It is hard for Black men to get that piece of respect. On top of having the visible animation and the smarts to run a team, he also has the quality of being able to understand and respond to the emotional disposition of his players. This was never more evident in how he spoke with Game 4 of the World Series, meeting this young pitcher at his emotional apex.

Sid and I, along with his friend Otto, went to see the movie “MONEYBALL” a couple of weeks ago. It is the story of how Billy Beane built a winning team for the Oakland A’s, a team that had far fewer resources than large market teams like the New York Yankees. It is more than just a good underdog story.

Sid loved it. So did I. Still, our favorite line is when Billy Beane and Ron Washington are visiting are talking to Scott Hatteberg about playing first base after spending his whole career as a catcher and having nothing left in his arm–and Billy says, to Hatteberg that first base isn’t all that difficult and turns to Ron Washington and says, “Right, Wash?” and without missing a beat, right on the tail of Beane, he says, “It’s ineradicable difficult.” It was one of many laughs tow baseball fans

I am writing this as the last game of the 2011 World Series plays next to me. I am writing this to describe why baseball is a love of mine, and my son, and some other people who find the stories of human character and beauty. And the complications of social realities, shortcomings of that human character and what we do to make our way past the imperfect.

I will finish watching the game, this time without Sid sitting next to me on the sofa as is the usual (apart from those moments when he jumps up in excitement as one of the many nuances and not-so-subtle events that make fans cheer or groan). We’ll see how this story turns out.

The Eternal Paper Anniversary

The Eternal Paper Anniversary

A 5-year-old's cardboard box Valentine's day has “be mine” written all over it. This, often our first social lesson in love is such unfair pedagogy, veiled in the simple aesthetics of arts and crafts. It was said that “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten, ” where we learned that love flowed from that red and pink heart shape.

Can you recall the shock upon seeing for the first time a picture of a real heart? We learned what it really takes to keep blood and live surging through our veins and to keep us alive. But why did we not find a new course for our scissors, still cutting out the same heart shape, pasting in over our chest with a happy smile of undying immortality?

And do you recall the shock when, after all those years, when our life's love faded as surely as the red construction paper in a sun that could not compete with the coursing throbs of life's true passion? And even though we knew what the heart really looks like, we go to cut out our heart shape, like a young lover who still has not see what the heart looks like?

He said, “She is not the construction paper cutout that I married.” She said, “But I cut the edges so carefully. Why does he not like it?” I said, “I would never make that mistake. I will be sure to buy different paper and use a better pair of scissors.”

One Reason Poetry is Important

Last night, my son Sid and I went to a poetry reading. I will go blue in the face trying to explain why it was important to be there. I am glad that I did not have to explain why to Sid, that for some reason, he knew, that he would go there for more than the several out-loud laughs he had or for the treats that did not come until after the reading.


It was important to be there. It was important to learn, remember, and respond to and from those words, the ideas, the emotion. How much can we learn from poetry?

Last night's lessons: They are about poetry, art and life, and why humans need all three.

We learned that there are things that we will say in poems that we won't say to our parents, won't say if we are shy and won't say if we are pretending to be polite at the expense of telling the truth. That there are things that “people” will say in their sleep, and you can make wonderful verse by just capturing those words. We say, “people,” but in the poem, it reads true, reads “lover” or “the one I love.” Sometimes we are so shy, but how else do we learn what people say in their sleep?

I was reminded that the devil so someone who will ask you to accept a deal that he himself would never accept. And that such men will call themselves gods in order to justify their carnivorous appetite for human mortals and their love and their souls.

I was reminded of what it takes—what factors must be in place—for a grown man to take the life of a boy: how he gets to take the safety of other children and women to whom he is privileged to become too close.

I was reminded that the collection of people with whom I share last night's event is a sufficiently rare collection in that we all understood that to take things like this is wrong.


We learned that we had a place where we could talk about it, even if changing the world would require us leaving that comfortable space. We were happy to know that just as those snippets of art moved us, we, too, could move people and the world will change just a little.

And it is time to write. For all of us, it is time to write, and share. And we won't have to explain why poetry is important, because, today, even though I put them to paper, I am at a loss for words.

someone told me

today

i don't believe in these things

almost as strongly

as if i did not believe in God anymore, and

the moon, stars, sun, wind, are

just cruel props

setup to help lure away the best of

my attentions

because it was not real

an illusion

or just so paper thin that

it is an easily pierced ear drum

that will never hear again

except maybe a faint whisper.

careful, I was not

are the sea, the moon for real

or are they a hoax?

did the Apollo ships really go there?

did Columbus not fall of the edge of the earth?

or is the horizon, a tired trick

that keeps getting repeated

as we chase it?

all a mock discovery

i am the fool, like the horse that runs

into the barn after it has been

set ablaze while today

someone tells me

it was the “for real”

shelter from danger

someone