Originally published July 5, 1994, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe
CHATHAM Last night, they played a game in this pretty old town where a bandstand adorns main street and a ballfield sits at the edge of a road not far from a cove filled with small boats rocking back and forth in the twilight breeze. Orleans took on the locals in a Cape League contest that attracted hundreds on a beautiful evening when the sound of fireworks mixed with spectators cheers.
The scene stood to remind you that baseball is still our best game, by far, and that no matter how hard they try to screw it up at the major league level, the sport will survive. It will be there after all the greed, ignorance and selfishness of millionaires representing both management and labor end up in the dust of history.
Baseball was meant to be played on the Fourth of July. And it was meant for postcard perfect parks filled with people who look the way families used to look in America: grandparents sitting on lawnchairs alongside their children and their children’s kids who run freely after foul balls or popsicles sold off an ice cream truck.
It is a lazy kind of game for an increasingly lazy country. It is a wonderful sport we take for granted, the same way we take liberty, prosperity and peace for granted. It’s all just there for us.
In Colombia, they killed a soccer player when he helped lose a game in the World Cup. Imagine if we took things that seriously in the United States. Why, Jeff Russell, the relief pitcher with the room temperature IQ, would have been dead for years now.
In Boston, we are outraged because the Olde Towne Team doesn’t have a lock on the American League title at the halfway point. We are so spoiled, so silly and so provincial that we figure we’re the only fans and only city to miss out on a World Series victory. We watch the Red Sox with an unearned crankiness, always more eager to scratch a sore than simply appreciate a sport.
For some bizarre reason, too many fans seem to feel .500 baseball is an indication of a club’s lack of character; that the real reason some players make errors is they are bad guys.
We cannot accept the fact that Roger Clemens is no longer young and pushing the ball past batters at will. We don’t understand why he does not win 20 every year and strike out 10 during each outing. In our minds, he must be hurt, not telling us something when the reality is he is like the rest of us: a great pitcher getting old on an old team.
I don’t really know what it’s like to invest so much of yourself in what athletes do in towns like Chicago, Philadelphia or New York. But I have to figure that Boston leads the league in negativism.
We carry this false pride and love to read or hear that we are the best baseball city in the country when we are simply the noisiest. We shout and scream on talk shows. We arrive at the Basilica in the Back Bay with an angry edge, almost wanting the boys to blow one in order to provide proof of our cancerous cynicism.
And this is what Red Sox fans truly hand down across generations: the somewhat despicable legacy of a perenniallosers culture.
The young general manager is entrusted with the job of dragging the organization into the 20th century. The team is slow and lacks the kind of athleticism that results in a string of successes. The ballpark is going to have to be replaced but from Vermont to Cape Cod we sit and wallow in false tears, figuring no flag will ever fly here because we are doomed, subject to a stupid curse.
What nonsense.
There are a lot of things wrong with baseball in Boston, and every other major league city too, but the game is not one of them. The umpires are mediocre and operate without accountability. The players are spoiled, have the loyalty of vagabonds and assemble daily as 24 corporations instead of as a team. The owners are merely dumb.
The game, however, remains great. Eyesight alone tells you that when you sit on the side of a hill a hundred miles from Fenway Park and watch college kids and minor league hopefuls play harder and more happily than the vast majority of millionaires who take their skills, their riches and the rewards of their talent for granted.
It’s a little like life: players in the Cape League want to get someplace, they want to succeed, move up, get noticed, go to the big leagues. They work at baseball the way most Americans used to work at their jobs: harboring the belief that effort would result in excellence and security.
Even here though, on a soft July night when youngsters gather to play catch behind the backstop, emulating the moves of bigger boys with greater dreams, the prospect of a strike lurks in the distance like the threat of angry thunderclap. And if it happens that a handful of people steal our summer, they will only be picking their own pocket and helping to kill one of our last great treasures: a marvelous game called baseball.
###