Quiet on the campus where I spent my freshman year.
This is a topic that is personal to my family, but I don’t think it’s unique.
Believe it or not, Young Miss Weisman, who was born three months after Dodger Thoughts was founded in 2002, is headed out of state to college this fall. At least, that’s what we thought a month ago.
Sheltering in place has always been a way of life for Misty.
The last time someone outside my family was in our house was March 13.
I love long walks.
#flatteningtheclyde
I want to say something, but it’s less about the what than the why.
What I’m going to tell you won’t be anything you need to know. It goes back, as it always does, to this core dilemma: I have feelings, and I want them to be heard. I want them to be felt, even if they don’t matter.
What’s different now? Less distraction, maybe? I don’t have a commute. That is time I’ve filled with exercise — walks and short runs and sit-ups — rather than writing. But never not thinking.
What’s the same, but maybe more pronounced, are feelings of inadequacy. We are living through the singular event of my 52 years. How am I rising to the occasion? By following the best instructions for hiding.
I have one skill, which is to arrange words into thoughts, and I haven’t been using it. It doesn’t help that the Dodgers aren’t playing, but then again, the Dodgers aren’t relevant. It doesn’t help that I’m at the very, very beginning of turning the first draft of my novel into a second draft, and I’m feeling intimidated by the work.
I’m jealous of people who are producing. I’m jealous of people who are relevant. I’m a jealous person.
If I focus on my family, I’m fine. I’m grateful. I’m grounded. But my mind wanders, to very specific places.
We are living in a life or death world, and I don’t want to be silent.
The last paper I wrote as an undergraduate student at Stanford was for a class called Sport in American Life, one of my favorites. It was taught by a terrific visiting professor, Elliot Gorn, and for me, there was no more perfect capper to my American Studies major than to be able to write an essay on baseball, in particular a comparison of the way fans and the media regarded Babe Ruth and Roger Maris.
It’s not a perfect essay, to be sure, but this lull in our baseball lives seems to me to be as good a time to revisit it as any. It has now been 31 years since I wrote it, or longer than it had been from the time Maris hit his 61st home run the time of the paper, which is amazing to me.
My favorite research discovery was that the same beat writer for the New York Times, John Drebinger, covered Ruth’s 60th homer in 1927 and Maris’ record-breaking blast in 1961. The contrast in style between the two stories by the same man might have partly been a reflection of the times, but it still spoke volumes to me.
Also of note is the clear influence Bill James had already had on me by then. I had started buying his annual editions of his Baseball Abstract in 1981, when they were self-published and advertised in the classifieds of The Sporting News. By the time I was working on this paper, James had become much more widely read but was still very much a revolutionary. I quoted him liberally in this paper, and while my work didn’t approach his, the spirit of trying to distinguish between myth and reality was already strong. In a way, this might have been among my first, proto-Dodger Thoughts piece of writing.
Anyway, here it is. (You might need to zoom in with your browser to read it more easily.)
What happens when three old friends in crisis fall into an unexpected love triangle? In The Catch, Maya, Henry and Daniel embark upon an emotional journey that forces them to confront unresolved pain, present-day traumas and powerful desires, leading them to question the very meaning of love and fulfillment. The Catch tells a tale of ordinary people seeking the extraordinary – or, if that’s asking too much, some damn peace of mind.
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