jeffrey emerson can’t think

The only problem with writing about sports is it’s temporality.  Can I use that word?  What I mean is, you gotta stick with it, it changes, teams win, and people go home.  It’s temporary.  If you’re gonna write about baseball, you should really write about every pitch.  That’s the beauty of baseball:  every pitch.  I learned that from watching the Yankees and the Mets with my uncle in his apartment on the upper east side.  He has two twin beds in his bedroom.  He refuses to get cable in the living room.  If you want to watch baseball, you gotta watch it in the bedroom.  So we walk down the street, eat at the same restaurant every time, and come home.  I lie on one bed, and he shifts between the other bed and smoking his pipe at his desk.  When I lived in New York, it was a weekly ritual.  Now that I live in Los Angeles, we watch baseball once a year, usually in June for about five days.

  I can ask Uncle Bill anything.  If it’s an obvious question, he’ll look over his glasses when he answers it, as if I’m retarded.  This usually occurs when I get the Leagues and their different rules mixed up; a lotta questions about the DH, a lotta questions about the pitcher batting, pinch hitters and runners, and the order. He’s happier to answer questions about splitters and sinkers, and he demonstrates how you hold the ball for each pitch; the difference between a 2 seam and a four seam fastball, and when and how you use them. I used to place teams in the wrong league  (which made him mental) until I realized that it’s just a feeling.  National League teams are scrappier, they have mascots, they seem to have a little more fun.  American League teams are elite; they’re machines, they’re legit.  It could be said that when comparing pitchers from the two leagues, you add one full run to the earned run average of the National League pitcher. Why? Ask Uncle Bill.  I haven’t written since the beginning of the League Championship Series’ because there’s just too much to write: pitch by pitch.  I didn’t pick a team.  I started watching the Sox Indians when the Sox were down 3-1.  I found my team.  The underdog remember?  I went to school in Boston, a lot of my friends are from Boston, and the favorites are down 3-1. 3-2. 3-3.  Every pitch. The favorites go to the World Series.  Every member of the Sox stretches and reaches and hits and sacrifices and steals.  Even old Lugo. Even Coco Crisp.  Everybody contributed.  There is no I in team. 

 I grew up in Colorado when the hometown team was the triple A Denver Bears.  I left before they became the Zephyrs (a gentle wind) and was long gone before the Rockies got to town.  My dad and stepmother have lived in the same house in Denver for 27 years.  They were rooting for the Colorado Rockies.  Cinderella Story, outta nowhere, the Rockies ran over the Dodgers, the Padres, the Mets, the Phillies, and the diamondbacks(I won’t capitalize the diamondbacks). They won 21 of their last 22. How could you not root for such a scrappy team?  The pursuit of excellence is how.  Watching baseball played the way it’s supposed to be played is how..  Two Boston rookies and an old man lead the Sox to a sweep. Everyone on the team hit.  They pinched, they rotated, they played National League baseball better than the National League Champion. 

 For game four, I went to a bar down on La Brea that is Boston as soon as you walk in.  The crowd was enormous, way over capacity;  the air was dank with sweat and Drakkar Noir.  They made fun of the commercials: ”Hey lady watch out for the cahr, don’t run into the cahr lady, look out! Ohhhhhhhhh!”  When the commercials sucked, two quarters were dropped in the juke box and they danced to the theme of The Departed by the Drop Kick Murphys. When the following weekend’s Patriots game was advertised it was greeted with a deafening roar.  I stood there with my college mate from Brockton, and my girlfriend from Newport, and basked in the Dunkin’ Donuts of it all. It was, and is, 1993 in that bar, the first year I went to little Emerson College.  Red Sox jerseys, Patriots jerseys, beaded necklaces, goatees, shorts with sneakers and white socks, and a brown eyed girl in a backwards Red Sox cap, who got in front of me at the bar, ordered “another” hot dog, and ate it.  I’ve lived in Los Angeles for four years, I drive by Pink’s every other day, and I have never seen a girl in Los Angeles eat a hot dog.  What could more perfect?  Sox win. The “Yankees Suck.” “Let’s go Patriots,” beer in the face, beer down the neck, let’s eat some hot dogs.  The crowd collapsed out into the street, where they screamed and waved brooms at passing cars.  People who watched the game at the bar drove past and yelled Yankees insults.  I was one of those people.  My girl and I went around twice, I screamed “Dustin Pedroia is my illegitimate father!” “She screamed “Yankees Suck!” and they all yelled back, and it wasn’t Los Angeles, not even for a second.  It was 1/159th of Landsdowne Street, a name I can no longer spell because I haven’t been on that street in eleven years.  It was home.  It was real.  And I watched a girl in Los Angeles eat a hot dog.