There’s something really elegant about baseball, I think. I think the beauty of fielding in particular is on par with ballet, or can be. I’m impressed by the combination of speed and accuracy required to throw a baseball with such force that it clocks in at 89 miles per hour as it blasts through a very small, very precise box of space. And the men who throw those balls with such speed and precision. I watched one of the league championship games broadcast from Milwaukee a couple of weekends ago, and the sight of the pitcher holding forth out there on the mound, winding up and letting it rip was something else again. Then my sister e-mailed me a three-word message on the morning of the second World Series game: Jaime’s up tonight. So I went across the street to my neighbors’ house and watched, and besides Jaime Garcia’s beautiful, beautiful mouth, I saw very little baseball.
Measured against the nation’s clock, Saint Louis is an old, old city, and in a way that I’ve never seen quite pulled off elsewhere, it’s a place that manages to accommodate itself to the times and, at the same time, refuses to. For two centuries, a lot of people have moved there and a lot of people have left there, and there have been a lot of people born in that city and a lot of people who have died there as well, and what I think I saw watching those baseball games recently, more clearly than anything else, was the ghosts.
There are parts of it that are intact. If you go to Saint Louis during the summer – which I do not recommend – you can still stand in line on Chippewa Street or South Grand and, as long as you don’t collapse – it happens – order a frozen custard concoction known as “a concrete.” They’re so cold they’ll make your brains sore for a minute or two, and they are good. You can still order brain sandwiches in certain neighborhoods. At nearly every grocery store, regardless of neighborhood, you can get a cut of pork that for some reason has yet to arrive on the other side of the Rockies. You can still see cemeteries at a rate that would be alarming if they weren’t such spectacular manifestations of the deep, almost festive reverence Saint Louis bestows upon her dead. The recipe at Imo’s hasn’t changed as far as anyone can tell. Although it was moved for a number of years to Chesterfield, the Strassenfest has returned to its original neighborhood in South City, which is where my brother and sister and I once witnessed, in fascinated horror, a very rotund woman who simply leaned out of an arched brick doorway and puked with a propulsion I’ve yet to see equaled. The river remains mighty and the sight of the art museum in that normally elusive period between sunset and darkness still has its own vocabulary and the first 10 to 12 minutes of the local news is still a quick run-through of the homicides and, if it’s a slow day, the investigations of them. The Arch is still there, and it’s still called, amazingly enough, The Arch.
But people in Saint Louis now work for Boeing, and most of the airport is vacant. Jack Buck and Jack Carney are long gone, replaced from what I hear by Rush Limbaugh, who is from Missouri and now cheapens the airwaves of KMOX, which is a travesty. Styx Baer & Fuller is history, as is Bettendorf’s. Channel 2 is now a Fox affiliate. The Globe Democrat folded – literally – long ago and for years I have not been able to find, even on thoroughfares such as Choteau or Vandeventer, a single copy of The Evening Whirl, a black paper with news stories that were once upon a time, even though rap music had yet to come along, written in rap pentameter. And, as a result of one of the most bizarre and contentious real estate transactions I’ve ever witnessed, as a result of the most indisputable indications that one phase of life has ended and another begun, my sister now presides over the house where we grew up.
And that’s the wall of ghosts I crash into, recklessly, at high speeds and without air bags, at the mere sight of the Saint Louis Cardinals on national television in the month of October, playing against a backdrop of stage-lit courthouse domes and cathedrals and a very tall stainless steel sculpture that is a monument to leaving town.
Which might be the point of sports, professional and otherwise. At their worst I think they encourage a lot of herd behavior, but at the other end of the reaction spectrum, maybe one of the purposes they serve is to remind us of ourselves, to divide the passing of time into chunks that are for the most part manageable. A couple of weeks ago and a couple thousand miles west of my childhood, I was reminded of an autumn afternoon in 1982 when the last, make-it-or-break it game of the playoffs was played down at what is now called, in memoriam, the old Busch Stadium. The high school I went to didn’t shut down early, not officially anyhow, not in a way that was discussed or announced: Everyone just left early. It was a warm afternoon, one defined in my memory by the almost blinding contrast between the golden leaves and the brilliant blue sky behind and above them and by the voice of Jack Buck on KMOX, seeping as sure as cigar smoke through screen doors and open windows as I walked along Big Bend Boulevard. Shortly after I got home that afternoon, the Cardinals won.
