Love and Baseball

By BetsyG

I’m a tad obsessed with baseball, and in particular my 11-year-old son A’s “career.” Baseball in general is a sport for which my appreciation has grown over the years. When I was younger, I thought it was about hitting and scoring—the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, full count stuff of movies. But as I’ve become a more knowledgeable spectator, I’ve learned that the real drama is in the pitching, in keeping the other team from scoring. Just watch one inning of Jonathan Papelbon closing out a game and you’ll know what I mean.

I don’t come from a background in which sports figured very prominently. In terms of watching, museums and plays won out to attending sporting events something like 20 to 1; in terms of participating, I’d need to get into imaginary numbers to measure the ratio.

But now I find baseball to be a thing of beauty—balletic if you will. My son pitches—pretty well, I think—and I’ll take any opportunity to watch him throw the ball. I get almost the same rush watching him pitch as I do looking at a painting or watching a Broadway musical. When that rush gets tied up with whatever chemistry is triggered when you watch your child do something you’re proud of, it’s a powerful force.

Unfortunately, A had a bad experience this past season, in part because he didn’t play enough, and that force has since morphed into obsession. When you’re denied something you love, your need for it becomes ever more intense. More importantly for me, my child was unhappy, and that created an irresistible parental urge to fix it.

Realize that I’m a writer, which makes me prone to fantasizing. When I follow an intriguing thought—good or bad— I lose myself in a sort of stoned delirium. I don’t know what chemistry is involved, but I think of being in that place as continually going at a scratch-and-sniff card to keep the reward coming.

That effect is getting wrapped up in baseball, with the strangest result. I’m around a lot of men in baseball. When the sport was just a checkbox activity for my non-athletic older sons, I barely noticed the men except for one unusually nice and good-looking fellow who was giving me the eye (and turned out to be divorcing), who I ended up dating.

But since this obsession thing started, I have found myself becoming attracted to whatever single men I come across in my baseball world. The level of attraction appears to correlate directly with a positive association between the guy and my thinking he might somehow help the situation. For example, during this past baseball season from Hell, one of the dads knew a lot about hitting and was working with the kids individually, plus he provided critiques from the stands during games. (You can imagine how well that went over with the coaches.) I found an attraction for him building, despite the fact that a) he barely acknowledged me, and b) he chewed tobacco. Yes, he spits in public (and not very well at that), yet I believed myself to be attracted to him as I held out hope that he might somehow repair our broken season.

Similarly, I later found myself persistently fantasizing about someone I felt might help get my son more playing time. I’d already decided months earlier that this guy was no-go. Yet once the idea of him got tied up with this thinking, he became as desirable to me as—oh, I don’t know—Johnny Depp.

In both cases, my baseball hopes went bust; the season with the spitter ended on a particularly nasty note in which most of the parents—including Mr. Patooie—took their balls and went home rather than putting on a show for the kids that it wasn’t the worst season ever and saying goodbye. The other situation didn’t work out either.

And you know what? Suddenly neither guy appealed to me anymore. The display by the parents made me feel so bad, I don’t even want to talk to any of those folks again, let alone swap murky spit with one of them. It was goodbye to Johnny Depp, too. Those scratch-and-sniffs were played.

The baseball obsession is behind me now, so baseball dads are out of the romantic lineup. Now that I understand this weird thing about my brain though, I’d better be careful with what I obsess about and what men are nearby when I do—or invest in a spittoon.

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