D E P T H

Watching Baseball on TV
You can pay attention to baseball if you like, and the game will repay your attention. The same goes for so much else in American life.

by Jimmy Dean Smith

It is Monday, Sept. 17, 2001, and I am watching baseball on television. On just about any other day in late summer, such precise dating of a mundane act would seem precious, I know. But I also know that you understand what that precision is all about, for you live with me in a world where baseball is no longer mundane. Or, if it is mundane, it is like the first day you live through after burying a friend: suddenly shot through with loveliness and glory and wistful remembering.

For days, we were not sure when baseball would come back. The commissioner, Bud Selig, cancelled the first few days’ games. But weekend games appeared to be on. Then professional football, still smarting from Pete Rozelle’s decision to play right after the Kennedy assassination, cancelled Sunday and Monday’s games. (There has been talk that certain players had thought of refusing to play, not because of Rozelle’s bad call or even because they were finding it hard to focus on the game, but simply because playing wasn’t the decent thing to do.) And so Selig had no choice, even if he did indeed choose tonight for the resumption of the season. For publicity’s sake, it was the earliest day he could have picked.

Because baseball — and movies and television shows — are such mundane things, it has been generally agreed that they had no place, no right place, on those first days after the terrorists attacked. How could we enjoy That Seventies Show or call a double play “brilliant” when there was a war to get ready for and thousands to mourn? How could we even think about enjoying anything at all, as if enjoying were one of life’s options? How unfeeling could we be?

But then we learned — it came to us from the president on down — that it was time to get on with life: to see The Producers, to watch any one of three simultaneously cablecast versions of The Brady Bunch last Saturday night (including Growing Up Brady), to care passionately about baseball as if we were George Will, Stephen Jay Gould and Doris Kearns Godwin hopped up on Cracker Jack and Coke and pontificating madly in Ken Burns’s rumpus room.

So I have been watching the Braves, a heartbreaking major league baseball team from Atlanta, Ga., play the Philadelphia Phillies. During commercials, I have been flipping channels (a fruitful activity now that nearly a week has gone by; one problem of living through the first days of a national crisis is that you can’t channel surf past all that gravity: even Carson Daly turns dour) and see on ESPN that baseball’s resurrection is filled with meaning, sober games for these sober times. The Mets wear NYPD caps and I cry. Jack Buck recites verse and I cry. Larry Bowa cries and I cry.

But then there’s a shift of mood. The Braves’ announcers notice it. The crowds in Philadelphia had begun the evening in the throes of national mourning, but now they are booing umps’ calls. (And they had booed Chipper Jones’s first plate appearance. I was out of the room, so I’ll have to ask you: Did they sing his real name like a playground taunt, “Lar-ree, Lar-ree,” to the tune of that old ballpark standard, “Dar-ryl, Dar-ryl”?) Booing umps’s calls: Sure proof, says Skip Carey, that the nation is starting to recover. Baseball no longer feels the burden of history. Its fans shake off the notion that they are being graded for gravitas and start acting like normal everyday fans, which is to say like wise-ass jerks, as average and amiable as the Kentucky hills outside my window.

You might be one of those people who say that baseball is godawful boring. Assume that, should you do so, I’ll fix you with a Professor Kingsfield glare, inform you that your head is full of mush, and lecture you for what little good it will do. Baseball requires intelligence, it demands your attention, you have to see the game, not merely let its images pass before your eyes. And then, having demolished you, I’ll arch an eyebrow, scowl, and stride manfully away, all the while knowing that, well, OK, baseball is boring.

But so, too, is most American life. In the latest New Yorker, John Updike writes, “Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.” Conversely, when something great and horrendous captures our attention, we want the mundane things to matter more than they do. And that hurts because the mundane things matter quite a lot.

In American Studies, we often think about America as some great big carnival, but that’s not exactly right. The carnival is there if we look for it in America — if we choose to look for it. But, for all the weirdness and magic and goofiness and terror you see when you go out looking for them, you can still sit back and not pay attention sometimes. You can (talking baseball again) read the paper and think about what you’ll have for dinner and keep just one eye on the game; it’s really not that important.

One current running deep through America celebrates the not-that-important. This idea is so simple and so profound, and thus so elegant. If you were a philosophical drunk, you’d growl it inside a dimly-lit bar and all the other drunks would pound their beer mugs down in agreement. If you were an intellectual, unequal to the genuine needs of a nation (or world) in crisis, you’d loosen your tie, roll up your sleeves and get down to what passes for work.

America is based in banality. (Based on banality? You and the other drunks can hash out the nuances, or you and the other intellectuals.) America is banality. It’s red wheelbarrows on New Jersey farms and live-oaks growing in Louisiana. It’s mustard on the hot dog and the score at the top of the ninth and some other things that lovely-banal man E.B. White had to say. It’s the Dairy Queen half a mile from my office (and from everybody’s office or factory or construction site in these parts) and that lovely-banal woman Bobbie Ann Mason worrying us to see, really see, the D.Q. that’s right before our eyes.

Sometimes America is an interesting place, but mostly it is not. This is not a criticism. When Chuck Berry, a black man halted dead at the border of the Promised Land circa 1957, expressed his heart’s desire, it was not for anything so grand as to own a caf”. Instead, it was for the right to enjoy a t-bone a la carte or, more mundane still, the smell of hamburgers sizzling on an open grill.

How normal can you get? How mundane? How shatteringly trivial? Chuck’s going to sit down right here in your diner and run a comb through his processed hair. That’s all right. That’s OK. You don’t have to serve him. He sees the sign, you’ve reserved the right to refuse, etc. But he’s already noticed how those sizzling burgers smell. The white kids down at the other end of the Formica counter, the ones who’ve been here every Saturday night since you opened the place just after the war, they don’t even notice that it’s a kind of perfume. But they will. And then once Chuck’s pointed out the burgers’ aroma, they’ll no longer notice it — as they don’t notice red wheelbarrows, live oaks in Louisiana, and the Dairy Queen in every coalmining company town — till they choose to and it will be a perfect miracle like glancing up from a book to see a bunt laid down just perfectly on TV.

Later: The Braves lose. It is only a game, as the announcers have been telling us all night, not to be confused with real life, so it doesn’t matter in the long run. Still, I can’t help worrying that the Braves are about to do something tragic in their division (though for a decade they have waited till the postseason to break hearts) and thus feel the comforting tug of the mundane. I’ve been in this place before.

Just before I get in bed, Sharee tells me that Letterman will be on tonight. I hadn’t known this and, although I’m getting ready for bed, I decide to stay up for the hour, just to make sure Letterman makes it. We started worrying about Dave last week, the day of, maybe the day after, the attacks. It is not that we are huge fans, though we watch his show most every weeknight. We like him enough, let’s say, and he helps us go to sleep. For our tastes, which are post-post-modern, he’s too often cynical. That fake toughness is what’s got us concerned. Cynics are romantics whose hearts have been broken. And cynics will turn romantic again if you remind them that hearts can be broken more than once. So we have genuinely been worried that Letterman, faced with the hurt to a city he obviously loves, will simply fall apart.

His introduction is masterful. It seems unscripted; I hope it is. He hits every note just right and CBS Standards and Practice has the almost unimaginably good taste to let a “God damn” stand. I hope you have a tape running like we do.

Then Dan Rather appears. He looks old and tired and twice breaks down into tears, once when he speaks of New York’s firefighters, once when he tries to explain what the “alabaster cities’ verse of “America” now means. Both times Dan breaks down, Letterman reaches out to take his hand. As the segment ends (are we hearing this right?) they appear to say they love each other. As Letterman has said, “Good Christ.” We forget that this is TV. This is not mundane. This is life in America turned special once again, a little thing like a newscaster’s visit to a talk show become a national defining moment.

And then Regis comes on. Letterman’s visit with Dan Rather is something I’d like for you to get hold of if you haven’t seen it and his visit with Regis is, despite some affecting moments (Reege’s son was in the Pentagon when the plane hit), not necessarily something that will stick forever in your memory. It’s not going into the official documentary of America Under Attack, let’s say.

But it’s a better segment. It’s art of a very rare kind and I feel lucky to see it. Regis is borderline loutish — he disturbs the audience by at least twice reminding them that they have just seen a well-respected man in his 60s cry — and seems to be going for laughs. He understands the seriousness of America’s situation, but there’s that strange rhythm he has, that weirdly explosive-mechanical jerkiness around the neck and in the eyes. He can’t suppress it: For God’s sake, he’s Regis, he’s a New York boy. He can’t help himself.

And Letterman, who is becoming or has become America’s best television interviewer, senses where this has gone. Dave has made small, funny comments all night (and has made self-condemning faces immediately afterward — what’s wrong with me? he seems to say, there are dead people out there) but now he lets go. From out of nowhere, following up a deadly serious question, he asks, “So how did you meet Joey Bishop?”

What a mundane question. What a perfect question. When Regis’s segment ends, with a joke about Kathy Lee dropping into Afghanistan that stuns the audience, the moment is vulgar all right, but in a dumb, trivial way that makes you forget that for so long every moment has been serious and smart. Holy cow, I think, bad taste on a talk show. God’s in his heaven.

You can pay attention to baseball if you like, and the game will repay your attention. The same goes for so much else in American life: those sad and wonderful little things that suddenly turn big when you focus in on them. That, I take it, is a premise I share with a number of other culture critics. 

We have the tools, we can study Regis to find out what and how he signifies, but being able to go to work at any time doesn’t mean that we have to stay on the job. Sometimes we can just let a hot dog be a hot dog and Regis be Regis (and Regis be a hot dog) and not worry either of them to death. We can simply watch a ball game or we can pay attention to it — the real affront is when we have to pay attention, when a mundane thing has to mean so much, when America has to signify to be America.

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Jimmy Dean Smith is an associate professor of English and communications at Union College in Kentucky.

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The Journal of Mundane Behavior is a peer-reviewed journal "devoted to the study of the ‘unmarked’ — those aspects of our everyday lives that typically go unnoticed by us, both as individuals and as academics."
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