1. In his memoir The Fifth Inning, Washington, D.C., poet and baseball fan E. Ethelbert Miller tells a story about how baseball is an unfinished story. "In the fifth inning, you know, anything can happen. This could be a complete game. You count your blessings for surviving the fourth. The first hitter sends a ball deep to the warning track in left field. This brings your manager to his feet. He starts to pace in the dugout. He's afraid you're losing it. You look down at your feet and kick the rubber. You're afraid too, and it tips the next hitter off. One swing and you're down four. The next two hitters follow with a single and a double. It's over now. You might as well play catch in the backyard with the kids. The catcher asks the umpire for time and walks out to the mound. Here's comes your manager getting ready to ask for the ball. Inside your glove, you hold it and keep waiting for it to speak. The silence tells its own story, but the game keeps searching for an author. "
2. A trip to visit family in Chicago earlier this month cut into my reading time, but I'm still pretty much reading as usual. Still, I won't lie: As a fan of the Washington Nationals, who have somehow—amazingly, gratifyingly—made their way to the World Series, I may have done a better job of paying attention to baseball narratives than anything I've read on the page this month.
3. Here's one narrative: The "Nats fans aren't real fans" narrative. This one has crystallized around a D.C. actor who attended Game 4 of the NLCS at Nationals Park, where the Nats punched their World Series ticket. A TV crew caught the man after the win and asked him how long he'd been a Nationals fan. "Since today!" he cried. This prompted an NBC analyst to tut-tut that "This is why America hates its own capital."
4. Narrative theory related to this, based on six years living in the DMV: The "Nats fans aren't real fans" narrative is a proxy for the enduring "D.C. isn't a real city" narrative. D.C. isn't a real city because D.C. is full of federal workers, and you know what people mean when they say "federal workers" in a Breitbart accent.
5. Or, to be more moderate about it, D.C. is a wonky company town that has an awkward relationship to traditional urban folkways. Alexandra Petri, who is a very funny commentator—though I can't forget that she once encouraged the internet to dunk on Donald Hall for no good reason—wrote a mashup that made much of the Nats' pennant-clinching game happening at the same time as the most recent Democratic presidential debate. The idea is that D.C. is a place that can't get its story straight when it comes to what kind of place it wants to be. "They hate us 'cause they ain't us," Cardinals fans like to say. What is "us," in D.C.?
6. This one reason why it's been hard to identify a great D.C. novel.
7. We always say a team "punches their ticket" to the World Series. Hero goes on a journey.
8. Or its inverse: Stranger comes to town. The Nats, who've longed struggled to make it past the first round of the playoffs, have now successfully entered uncharted territory.
9. In the sizzle reel MLB Network assembled to distill the Nats' season into four minutes, the word "redemption" is uttered three times, "exorcism" once. Christian narrative. And if you think that's too much to apply to baseball, you don't know baseball. Field of Dreams is just a reboot of the Gospels.
10. But baseball narratives are failure narratives too. Things end too quickly, things don't go right. A haiku by Miller, titled "Seasons": "Spring training again/Young players replace the old/The game is too short."
11. Former MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti: "The game begins in the spring... and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."
12. Am I obsessed? Perhaps a little: I took in the Nats' NLCS-clinching game via three formats. I don't have cable, so I had to pursue other options. One: Gameday on Major League Baseball's website, which on the surface seems to blandly relate the game action, pitch by pitch. But in truth, Gameday trades in agonizing, quasipoetic ambiguity: "in play, no out"; "in play, run(s)"; "injury delay." I recall reciting Gameday's reports off my phone to a family full of Cubs fans during one of their playoff runs. Nothing makes a fan more anxious than uncertainty, and nothing stokes uncertainty like "in play, no out."
13: Donald Hall: "For those who love baseball, its nothings are something."
14: In addition to Gameday, I also had the Nationals' radio feed playing. I admire one of the playcallers, Dave Jageler, for his ability, using solely the intonation of his voice, to convey just how close to the warning track a well-hit fly ball went. At first his voice is deep and serious and fast, then higher and slower and lighter, anticipatory; then back to normal when the ball lands harmlessly in the fielder's mitt. In baseball, failure is the norm.
15. And lastly, Twitter, a home to fan service via the @MLB and @Nationals feeds, plus a variety of bad jokes, analysis, and irruptions of joy and despair. A fragmented narrative.
16. And fragmented further still, because of another thing: None of those three feeds were in sync. Gameday was slightly ahead of Twitter, which was slightly ahead of the radio feed. So I knew the Nats clinched via Gameday, but I kept my mouth shut because I had my 9-year-old son nearby. When the end of the story happened, I held my tongue. It wasn't my story to tell; I wanted him to hear it. (The voice is the Nats' other radio playcaller, Charlie Slowes.) No child ever bounced up and down on a living-room couch, jubilant, because of something they saw on Twitter.
17. Miller, one last time, for closure, because that happens in baseball sometimes:
Let me sit in the ballpark
cap turned backwards and praying
for a rally. I need the sun and sweat
to remind me how much I love the game. How each year
it comes down to the last inning,
the final out.
*
For Majuscule Review, a new online magazine, I wrote a personal essay about Spy Notes, a 30-year-old satire of Cliffs Notes that skewered 80s Brat Pack writers; the book doesn't hold up, but rereading it was an opportunity to explore some of the ideas, good and bad, that got me interested in being a critic. Also, I reviewed Steph Cha's engaging thriller about the long reach of racial tensions in LA, Your House Will Pay, for USA Today.
Patricia Lockwood's funny and astute take on John Updike will likely stand as the definitive essay on his work for some time, savaging him for his sexism and general goofiness while not denying his virtues as a stylist. Zadie Smith returns to a theme that consumed much of Feel Free: the potential of fiction, at its best, to surmount tribalist thinking about humanity. Ahmet Altan wrote a potent essay about the writer's life under Turkey's oppressive regime, and how defeatism can transform into defiance. Jonathan Lethem considers Edward Snowden. Miles Klee considers the saga of Balloon Boy, the ur-text of Twitter-stoked online idiocy. Matt Burriesci drills into the leadership mess at AWP.
Thanks for reading; I’ll try to keep the baseball content to a minimum going forward, but no promises. I'm on Twitter. Email me: mathitak@gmail.com.