Baseball's Afterlife

n 1997 the expansion Florida Marlins (established 1993) beat the Cleveland Indians (established 1901) to claim their first World Series title. Baseball purists scoffed at their victory. They hadn't paid their dues. They hadn't been around long enough. Wah wah wah.

The Marlins then disbanded the team and lost 108 games in 1998, the worst finish by a defending World Series champ ever. Since 1999 (including their 2003 World Series title year; average attendance 16,089), they have never finished better than 15th in attendance (2000), only better than 26th that one year.  Hoo-rah.

In baseball more than perhaps any other sport, this is justice. No one should play 162 games a year and win it all by mistake goes the thinking. Stretch this thinking out and no one should have one great year and make the Hall of Famer. No one should do one great thing and be awarded keys to the Pearly Gates. The highest honors - immortality, never to be forgotten, remembered for eternity - come with time. That's tradition. Tradition is built over time.

A number of religions offer versions of the afterlife and baseball is no different. Baseball, the religion of Bull Durham's Annie Savoy, offers its players, executives and broadcasters a whole slew of options: Cooperstown; retired numbers; days at the stadium in one's honor; fans booing new players who try to wear your old number; and for those lucky enough to play for the Yankees, Old-Timers' Day.

With the days of gold watches upon retirement and pensions going the way of the Expos, the tradition of Old-Timers' Day becomes a bit more precious. While I find it hard to believe the Yankees are the only team that has retired players that their fans are willing to come out and see again, I have no idea why only one out of Major League Baseball's 30 teams celebrates their retired players every year. But as they say, the less of something there is the more precious it is.

The same can be said for induction into the Hall of Fame or having one's number retired; the odds of such achievements make Mario Mendoza look like a Sunday beer league batting champ. Assumption into baseball's afterlife depends on performance (either wonderful or wacky) over a long period of time.  That's tradition.

At the end of the day, whether you're let in by St Peter or the Baseball Writers Association of America, you gain immortality. In other words, you are not forgotten. You are remembered for eternity.

What is unique about what the Yankees have done by making Old-Timers' Day an annual event is that they have made heaven a living tradition; whether you were an all-star or not. You wore the pinstripes, you did us proud. Put the uniform back on. Play in the sun. Tip your cap when the crowd cheers your name. Thank you.

As the '97 Marlins learned, it's possible to be great and to be forgotten by one's fans. Had the long-suffering Indians won the '97 Series members of that team would be heroes in Cleveland forever because the Indians have tradition. The team has existed longer than most of their fans. In other words, by existing longer than the lives of their fans there is a foreverness about them. The Marlins, with the newfound celebrity of a lotto winner, could not claim that.

To write about an expansion team in The Boston Squeeze is to write about those on the short end of immortality; those who lay the foundations of the tradition, a foundation that can eventually support immortality, a foundation similar to the ones we build with our lives, our families, our communities and so forth.

The Squeeze Is On

n recent years it has become de rigueur for authors - rookies in particular - to handle their own marketing. At first the idea grated on me, especially when it made the marketing folks of publishing companies look redundant which didn't stop them from taking their cut. Now with groups such as Kickstarter, I like the idea of putting together my own marketing campaign (probably because I'm not paying some clown to watch me work).

I mention this because as you may have noticed my posts recently now bounce back and forth between the business end of getting Hooey Savvy off the ground and writing the next book. So for Hooey, I'm working on how to present my project on Kickstarter and acting as project manager.

The next project, a collection of baseball short stories I'm tentatively calling The Boston Squeeze, is coming along. I originally wrote it as 10-12 independent short stories, but now I'm working them together under the umbrella of the Squeeze, Boston's fictional National League expansion squad. That idea alone has me tickled, but I'm also excited about the new process I've developed to write this one which I'll discuss next week.

They All Laughed

esterday the old Gershwin tune, "They All Laughed" came to me. While the song has a romantic angle to it, it's based on once-considered laughable business ideas; the thought of Edison recording sound, the Wright brothers saying man could fly, Whitney's cotton gin, Fulton's steamboat, Henry Ford's Tin Lizzie. It's also about how quickly the public changes its tune once the laughable idea becomes popular.

Yesterday someone told me I couldn't contact a certain illustrator about my kids book on financial education, Hooey Savvy. Why would a five-time New York Times best-selling illustrator want to work with you, this person asked. Maybe it's because I have a really good fucking idea, I thought.

And so today I emailed Mr Peter Brown proposing my idea and why I thought his work complemented my story well. If you'd like to get in on the act, email Mr Brown and say:

"They all laughed at Mardus,

When he asked to work with Brown.

They all laughed at Hooey Savvy,

Now they've all got it down.

It's the same old cry.

They laughed at him writing you

Said he was reaching for the moon.

But oh, will you come through

and make them change their tune?"

Have a good weekend everyone!

Seeing-Eye Single

ormer baseball commissioner and Yale professor Bart Giamatti once wrote in his essay, "The Green Fields of the Mind":

Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.

The last couple seasons I've indulged in baseball the way some indulge in drink adopting the quotidian schedule of my team and its players in lieu of my own. This past summer, though, I started to chart a different course. No, I did not stop following or playing baseball. That's heresy. Rather, I started started writing a collection of baseball short stories.

Why spend the off-season doing what I did every off-season (Reading DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall, watching The Bad News Bears and waiting for pitchers and catchers to report) when I could create my own?

That's part of the reason for the collection. In truth, I find that I only write about something when I find there to be something seriously off-kilter about it. I wrote Any Color You Want in 2007-08 because I thought it priceless that the U.S. continued to send Peace Corps volunteers out into the world, but that we couldn't take care of ourselves (and wouldn't take help from others). I wrote Hooey Savvy because despite all the talk about the financial crises, people are still afraid or uncertain about how to talk about money, never mind teach kids about it.

So what's out of whack about baseball? Like any religion or family, baseball has its traditions. Whether we know the origins of those traditions is another matter. Whether we follow those traditions is yet another. Those are two angles I look at.

Otherwise, the language, history, and culture of baseball lends well to stretching out metaphors. Once upon a time writers used symbols and metaphors to avoid political persecution. Today, it seems, symbols and metaphors (indirect speech) are the spoonfuls of honey that we coat our crushed up pills in. I can rewrite E.B. White's essay Here Is New York and deride the quaint 18 inches of privacy of his extinct city (to a chorus of Bronx cheers) or I can write a comedy about a ten year-old blogger of a minor league team who is called out by the players (to a chuckle or two) and make the same point. I prefer the haha route.

Plus, I'd like to have the book have its own corresponding set of baseball cards for all the characters in it. If nothing else, that'll force me to focus on giving my characters detail.

In my previous work, I've swung for the fences with big ideas. This is more of a seeing-eye single before I go back to the home run derby later this year.

Progress Update: The fourth draft of my kids book on financial education, Hooey Savvy, is done. And yes, it is more memorable than it was a draft ago. 27 stories, 80 plus songs, 120 pages. I've passed it on to some teachers and folks who know far more about economics than I for their feedback. Now I need to read up on the competition. I'd also like to hit the road to conduct interviews in areas with average low credit scores to learn what failed and what education is or isn't doing to remedy the situation.