Jim is Gone - Baseball is Dead

 I started writing this a few days ago and concluded it this morning. As many of you know, my brother Jim went to be with Christ on Thanksgiving Day 2020.

The Major League Baseball season begins three days from now on April 1, and I don’t care. I confronted this realization last week, and it has been working its way within and without since then, the baseball thing is over for me. I’m not saying that Vickie and I may not attend a game or two, I image I’d still enjoy a minor league game; but the myth is over, and since Jim is gone there is no reason to cling to the myth – after all, it was our shared memory of baseball that made it enjoyable – even when we both knew that we were creating our own fictional world, one that easily rivaled anything that Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones inhabited.

I peer into the bottom drawer of the desk and take out a cellophane package of cards. When did Jim give me these for Christmas? Five years ago? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? I should have kept a journal. Well, there are a lot of things I should have done, or wish I had done. I remove the twenty-four cards; twenty-three of them have photos on them of individual baseball players, the twenty-fourth card is a team picture.

I’m looking at baseball cards containing the 1963 Washington Senators, that was fifty-eight years ago. I was thirteen that year, Jim would have been around eight.

While I don’t recall what Christmas Jim gave me these cards, I do recall how pleased he was when we talked about them on the phone. He mentioned Chuck Hinton, Don Lock, Eddie Brinkman, and Jim King; each name invoked a memory that needed no articulation. Yes, we could talk details about these players in our shared mythology, but we didn’t need to, just saying each name carried a story and often a long-vanished hope. These players were not so much about the Major Leagues, as about boyhood, brotherhood, and the mythical fabric of baseball.

It was divinely poetic that the Washington Nationals won the World Series just over a year before Jim left us. While there was a baseball season of sorts in 2020, it was pretty much an abomination and it was not something that Jim and I spoke about much – it was too deplorable, too disgusting, too sacrilegious. It requires an asterisk beside that year and all the statistics associated with it; but it doesn’t matter to me now, Jim is gone and baseball, in the dead of night, has left my soul. This is akin to returning home and finding that someone has removed all the furniture from a room in your house, the furniture of baseball, which was extensive, is gone. It isn’t that Jim took it with him when he left, it is that I have no use for it anymore, not even a mythically aesthetic use.

I began writing this before the start of the baseball season, it’s now April 5 and there is yet more poetry to mention. The first series that the Washington Nationals were to have played, against the New York Mets, was postponed due to covid-19. This makes sense to me, since there is no Jim there is no reason for the National’s to play – they should take the season off in memory of Jim. But then, these are no longer the Nationals, not the Nationals who won the World Series in one of the most improbable of baseball seasons ever; many who were on that 2019 team are now playing for other teams.

You really do have to suspend common sense, and a sense of fair play if you are going to be a Major League baseball fan; after all, how can virtually an entire team cheat at baseball and win the World Series, as the Houston Astros did, and not be meaningfully punished? Jim was pretty disgusted with the hypocrisy in this – had Jim been the commissioner of baseball those players would have paid a price and also had the Series title stripped from the team. Go Jim!

When Bill and Jim and I were kids, it was nice when the lowly Senators won a game here and there, but it wasn’t integral to our enjoyment of the game, we just loved baseball and our local baseball players – every baseball game was an opportunity for us to exercise modest hope that the Senators just might win one. I still recall a team slogan from 1964, “Off the floor in ’64!”. The “floor” of course means last place in the standings, the perpetual dwelling place for the Washington team; as the saying went, “Washington, first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” For a Major League team to simply want to not finish in last place is a modest hope indeed.

What to do with these baseball cards? I think I’ll send them to Jim’s grandson with a note, maybe I’ll enclose what you’re reading. I don’t know if he is a baseball fan or not, but maybe he’ll treasure these, as much as baseball cards can reasonably be treasured, knowing that they meant a lot to his Grandpa when he gave them to me.