snapshots from the ballpark

Last night, Sister and I went to my last game at Fenway for — not forever. But for a long time. Of the three games we’ve been to, and the few I’ve seen on TV, all have been the Sox versus the LA Angels.

A year and a half ago, she grudgingly passed over the ticket to my first-ever ball game. She chose the Angels because she knew I wouldn’t be able to follow the game, and figured the Disney connection might capture my interest at least. She knows me well.

Baseball is, it seems to me, the most literary sport, and I’ve been reading about it a lot. The ghoulish strains of the organ, the eerie too-white light floodlights cutting through the mothy blackness of a spring night, cutting the warmth of the evening with a cold beer. That deep bright hope — for the team, for the hometown, for the idea of a simpler, better America that we all imagine existed, but that I don’t think any of us has ever known.

Last night’s game wasn’t anything like that, of course.

The evening started off at 57 degrees, sheets of wind, rain periodically cutting down all evening, fast and hard like a special effect from a low-budget crime movie. I was dressed for early summer and got caught in the weather, and was pissed as hell about it. Before we even got inside the park, my clothes had shrank damply on my skin, and the black dye of my flipflops bled up to my feet, dyeing the soles and nails a bloated-corpse green.

Our tickets were standing room, uncovered. Of course.

We came straight from work and hung around the concourse for a while, having the kind of completely demented meal you can only have in a ballpark. Before we headed up to brave the rain, we got soft-serve sundaes from a chatty woman with a thick Southie accent.

“This is my sister’s last game at Fenway,” my sister told the lady, because it was that kind of transaction.

“Oh, you’ll come back,” she said. “You’re a true Bostonian. My sister moved to Las Vegas, and that’s what I told her. You’re a true Bostonian. You’ll come back. She did.”

I’m not a true Bostonian, of course, and I won’t be coming back — not to live, anyway — but it was nice to hear her sound so confident about it.

Up in the stands, it was a miserable night for a ball game. When I signed that dotted line to shoot myself back to California, I broke up with this city. Boston and I are two soon-to-be exes riding out a lease, and the weather of this mopey self-loathing spring — Boston weather, for me, is that roommate who likes to get drunk and pee in the sink, then scatter his toenail clippings all over the bathroom floor. I might look back on it with weird fondness in a few years, but for now it just makes me count down the days.

The elbow ledge of the barrier in front of our section was a giant dew drop. I dug through my bag for a printed draft of an awful story I’d written, and we used it to squeegee away the worst of the water and got ourselves settled. Half an inning in, water had soaked through the elbows of my paper-thin t-shirt and moved up the sleeves and neck through capillary action.

“You want the shirt I wore for work today?” Sister asked. “It won’t make you much warmer, but it might help.” I said yeah and she grabbed it from her bag. Turns out we’d dressed that morning in the exact same shade of purple.

I don’t know. Little things are the hardest to capture.

The game itself wasn’t much. When someone who knows as little about baseball as I do notices the great pitching and outfielding, you’ve got to figure you’re running a game that’s pretty light in the offense. By the bottom of the fourth, the Angels had one hit, and the most action we’d seen from the Sox was one man walked. Then another sheet of the bad special effects rain, and park employees ran out with the tarps for a rain delay.

Have you ever seen them unroll the tarps before? It’s fantastic! Twenty-five guys in matching red shirts running in perfect step with one another, unfurling what looks like an enormous slip and slide (um, yes please), then, through some complicated choreography, reverse-origami-ing it to comically oversized proportions. I was completely transfixed. Hey, if the Angels are going to pitch a no-hitter, you can sign me up to root on the Boston Pro-League Synchronized Tarp Unfurling Expo any day of the week.

Under the lights, the grass of the outfield was a lurid, late-60s-restored-color-sitcom green; all the changing shapes of the tarp brought back childhood field day memories. A slip and slide! The flutter of a make-believe superhero cape! Parachute day in gym class! The downpour held steady, but it started to feel like running through sprinklers.

By the time they were done, Sister and I were the only people left in our area; everyone else was huddled under the lone bar awning for warmth and rain protection.

“Hey,” she finally said, “as much as I’d like to see how this tarp thing plays about, uh, what if we got out of the rain instead?”

So we ducked to the covered section below us, where rain ran in fat drops through all the screws in the steel beams overhead. People streamed out of the seats through the aisle in front of us while we leaned on the leaky beams and sang along with the music pumping through the park.

Familiar strains filtering through the voices around us — “Crocodile Rock,” my parents’ song. The noise of the crowd and crackle of rain covered our voices as we sang along, loud. I took Elton John parts; she always sings the laaaaaaa la la la la la’s. When it got too loud to follow the song, we kept going anyway. I never knew me a better time / and I guess I never will.

We left not long afterwards, chalking it up as a bad night to be playing baseball. Four innings, one hit, no runs. Best damn night of baseball I’ve ever had.  It’s never the things you expect, is what I’m saying.

That, and next time we watch the Sox versus the Angels, it’ll be when she’s visiting me in sunny Southern California, ’cause no way am I shivering my way through 50-degree weather on a May evening ever again, not even if I love the home team.

Tagged as: dudes who have no business writing about baseball writing about baseball, fenway, i concede that there are things i will miss here, mourning the loss of my beloved flipflops, please don't ever be the doesn't-clean-up-toenail-clippings roommate. or clips-fingernails-in-bus-or-library dude. WHO DOES THAT?!, red sox, she takes the la la la la la's 'cause i sound even more like scuttle than usual when singing them, tell me i'm not the only one who watches baseball and gets a sepia dose of god-bless-america faux-nostalgic patriotism, turns out they restarted the game at 11pm and it went 13 innings. dodged that bullet!, ugh why am i feeling feelings