Joy in Mudville?

I love baseball more than most people would think rational or wise, but I am usually not one to wax poetic about it. I roll my eyes when people talk about how baseball is a game of failure (a strange notion when, like almost all sports, one side wins and the other loses, that is fueled by the use of a poor metric for one side of the game without using that some metric for the other side), or the perfection of 90 foot baselines (as if the way fielders position themselves wouldn’t change our notion of what is or should be a close play were the basepaths longer or shorter – which is not to say that 90 feet is sub-optimal, just that any notion of perfection is steeped in familiarity bias), or the notion that American baseball has its root as a pastoral game for farmhands rather than as a game played by what we might now consider urban, white collar yuppies. And yet...

I can occasionally be moved to admit in writing for the whole world to see that I do view baseball with a touch of mysticism which I carefully cloak in rationalism, and that it might be something of a bittersweet feeling at that. Which is odd because there is no artifact of human civilization is a more reliable instrument of joy to me than baseball. Is a tiny hint of the melancholy tucked into that package simply because of the human condition? Or perhaps it is a result of the circumstances of time and place. I root for a team that has not won the World Series in my lifetime, or my parents’ lifetime, and while it has in the course of my grandparents’ lifetimes, three of them still lived in Europe when it happened. A team that to boot had a history before that of finishing in the first division but rarely with the brass ring, that then went into a prolonged depression that delayed my emergence as a baseball fan (although thankfully made a dramatic emergence at an opportune moment for my fandom), and then has proceeded to lose three World Series, the last two in extra innings of the seventh game. Or maybe it is living my whole life in a place in which the cycle of the natural seasons and the baseball season correspond so well that the clichés about spring being about baseball and rebirth really do ring true, and that when baseball goes away it really is cold and dark and foreboding?

My primary way of interacting with the game is watching copious major league games on TV and attending fifteen or so a year in person. My other main outlets are sabermetrics and scorekeeping; the former does not engage the mystic at all, while the latter I suppose could, but while I do derive some nostalgia from old scoresheets, I ultimately view scorekeeping more as a precursor to the analytical, even if I do very little analysis of what is recorded on my scoresheets.

So where might I turn to engage the mystic side of the game? Fiction is always an option, but baseball fiction is horrible. I am generally not a fan of movies in general, so perhaps I am hopelessly jaded, but the only baseball films I don’t hate are Major League and Moneyball. I also don’t care much for novels, because baseball fiction, like most fiction, can never be as interesting or as rich or as deep as the real world of which it is a pale facsimile (who could ever make up Rube Waddell or the 1951 NL pennant race or the American Association)?

What about music? The state of baseball music can be summed up by the fact that the greatest songwriter in modern history, who spoke more truth about the world in one song than most philosophers wrote in their careers, wrote one baseball song and it is, um, not great:

There is exactly one day a year on which it is acceptable to like “Centerfield” and that is today (“we’re born again, there’s new grass on the field”).

There is one genre of baseball music that I do like, and it is most likely some strange circumstance of time and place that I would not be able to explain in any kind of rational manner. But the music of baseball video games of my childhood is inexplicably able to capture more of what I feel about baseball than any of the aforementioned types of art.

Triple Play ‘98 was not a good game, but the arrogant swagger of the introduction is still something to behold:

Segueing into the roll call of the menu music (“We got Yawkey Way, the Big A, the South Side of Chicago, Queens, the City of Brotherly Love, the Cuyahoga…”)

Bridging the gap between the arcade-ish Triple Play and the attempt to have something like a serious simulator was Hardball 5 and it’s terrific theme music:

But it was the Front Page Sports series that was always my favorite. The exclusive Camera Angle Management System (CAMS, TM!) which I thought was so cool. There was player aging (which didn’t really work that well)! You could have a AAA roster with 15 players and a Low Minors roster with 10, and it sort of functioned like a real 40-man roster! I had all three, starting with the buggy FPS ‘94, and I probably played FPS ‘96 the most. FPS ‘96 had a soundtrack that included two Terry Cashman songs, “Talkin’ Baseball” and “Play by Play”, which cemented them on my very short list of approved baseball music.

But the real gem of the FPS musical canon was the untitled Track 8 (nothing in the final of the three installments of the series, FPS ‘98, would top it). It may not have an official title, but I’ve always thought it should be called “Joy in Mudville”:

I can’t articulate exactly what it is about this track that strikes me as so quintessentially baseball. The melancholy rising to a crescendo, but with a hint of the melancholy still tucked inside the notes flowing out of a mid ‘90s 16-bit SoundBlaster speaker. I guess as is often the case with music, you had to be there – you probably weren’t there, but I was, and I will listen to this today and just feel good about baseball.