The musical, based on the novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,
chronicles a rejuvenescent middle-aged real estate salesman named Joe Boyd
leading the woeful Washington Senators of the 1950s to the pennant as a
result of a pact he makes with the devil.
To those of us who sat in the Griffith Stadium bleachers through the late
1950s, a Joe Boyd-type savior seemed to be the Senators' only hope. The
club had never finished higher than fourth since the close of WWII, and
of the two winning seasons it enjoyed before leaving for Minneapolis in
1961, its best record was a .502 percentage (potentially good enough for
a division or wild card berth these days) and fifth place. The team had
finished dead last in '55, '57, '58 and '59, the years I watched them play.
Such harrowing and hilarious ineptitude produced the Washington adage, "First
in war, first in peace, and last in the American League." The third
part we were resigned to as fact, though we never lost hope. I'll not speak
for my seatmates' opinions about the second part, but my own sentiments
then indicate I've yet to outgrow my boyhood callowness.
The bleachers were part saloon, church, public square and union meeting
hall. In the bantering camaraderie of government bureaucrats and forklift
operators in those cheap seats in left field, I first beheld D.C.'s Deep
South color- and class lines being breached. Jeering at our ill-starred
charges engendered crisp solidarity: "Yeah, tha's right Throneberry,
I'm talkin' to you. You call 'Faye' a man's name? Gimme that damn glove,
fool. G'wan home and cook me and my friend up some food!" Disappointment
and infrequent success on the field had similar similitude in the stands;
family histories were shared, anniversaries and births were celebrated,
and divorces and scrapes with the law elicited their due commiseration.
Preparation for Friday night games began in the bars and storefront takeout
parlors along Florida Avenue. We gathered in the limp air of summer's dog
days in overalls and coats and ties and quaffed revenge on the travails
of the week, keeping time and lending harmony to the Flamingoes or Dinah
Washington or Billy Ward's Dominoes as the kids in cutoffs cavorted through
the fading light outside and the swells moved down the block to the supper
clubs and jazz lounges.
A couple of those summers I spent as CIA clerk. At that time the sons and
daughters of employees were hired as vacation help (don't worry, I only
did it for the money). I worked in a cable-receiving unit and read reports
of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and the first batch of messages
detailing the discovery of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. Rumor had it that
the Senators' Cuban "bonus babies" players were under surveillance,
and thereafter I hung around the pre-game batting cage and looked nearby
for spooks taking notes on the significance of Camilo Pascual spitting in
his hands and running them through his hair. At 17, during the last season
the Senators played in Washington, I committed my first tentative act of
political defiance. The agency was in the process of destabilizing Laos,
and one day I was asked to deliver a large package to Director Allen Dulles'
office. Inside, I discovered, was a topographical map of Laos. I immediately
took a two-hour lunch. When I finally arrived at Dulles' office a brigadier
general was waiting in the reception area and made a rather exerted inquiry
as to where the fuck I had been. A Faustian bargain, as Joe Boyd taught
us, does have its reward.
There'll be a lot of glib pronouncements at the conclusion of this World
Series about how "baseball has come back." I won't begrudge an
acknowledging nod to the baseball-is-life crowd: As a marker for the depths
of the nation's psyche, the game has enabled us to reclaim our innocence
and the pristinity of our ideals. The long narrative of baseball becomes
reverie and reverie becomes our history.
The disconnect in that history reveals baseball's current problems. The
urban, blue-collar origins of the sport have been dismembered, and yeah,
when the concerns of working people are again addressed, the health of the
game can be restored. The ascendancy of Bud Selig and his gang are merely
an outgrowth of the pattern etched years ago by the O'Malley, Stoneham and
Griffith clans. I'll forswear a Jackie Chan leap and decline to insinuate
that the corporate lunacy of holding cities economic hostage began with
that impious trio of baseball owners. I'll simply await the surely forthcoming
decision of the owners to sign a collective bargaining agreement with their
own workers.
Baseball, as Tony LaRussa maintains, will survive because it's better than
all of us. To anyone who has ever loved the game, the mysterious geometry
of billowing right-angles and triangular muscularity burrows to the bone.
Even the bilious among us admit to its lingering enchantment. I must confess
that I watched every second of the Series' fourth and fifth games, and it
appears the old daydreams of this middle-aged child of midcentury are still
intact.
My fantasy, if you don't mind my sharing, has an expansion team in Washington
again. Over the course of one winter I perfect a knuckler and make the squad
as the short-relief man. The writers dub me "Instant Niekro."
The season winds down to two outs in the bottom of the ninth in the last
game of the league championship series, and I get the call. But then, how
else would you have it? Naturally, we are playing the Yankees. The crowd
is on its feet, a congregation rustling out of the pews of time, the roar
moving over me like some old a capella song drifting buoyantly down the
track of years. My catcher positions himself, his glove a target of dreams.
I peer in at the batter and have the feeling I've been preparing for this
all my life. Are there any words adequate to this moment I wonder, and then
just before I start into my windup I glance out toward left field, to the
cheap seats, and the only voice in the stadium is my own: "First in
war. First in peace. And first in the American League."