It’s October. I’ve been thinking …

It’s late October which means baseball is in its crucial weeks. The season always begins in early spring. Even before the final bits of snow have all melted north of the Mason-Dixon Line, pitchers and catchers are already throwing in Florida and Arizona. And spring brings hope, hope for fans in every major league city. “This is our year,” they’ll tell you.
            But spring works its way into summer; and in baseball summer is long. All those spring dreams begin to fade as nine game west coast road trips end two and seven. Your ace needs Tommy John surgery. The free agent savior with a lifetime three hundred average is barely above two-thirty. Dreams begin to die as you see the fade in the standings.

            A few cities meet, maybe even beat, expectations and are in the pennant races. Summer fades into fall and only four are left; then two; finally, one. I get baseball. It is representative of life. You start out young, with dreams, and its spring. But youth fades; life gets tough. If you’re lucky you survive and you make it to fall. You survive and you know the season – your life – was tough, and parts of it didn’t make sense, and you know there’s no explanation why you made it and twenty others didn’t. And you decide no matter what, win or lose, October matters. You will leave it on the field. You will, as Dylan Thomas said, “not go gently into that good night,”

            I’ve been thinking about baseball. October does that to me. I came across a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He said, “History has proved over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.” I knew he wasn’t talking about baseball, but somehow I think Dr. King understood the game because he sure understood life.

            Before someone points out that the good doctor referred to “unmerited” suffering – as if there’s a book you can open that points out how much suffering is merited for a particular wrong – I get that. But, I think he was saying life – a lot of times – is about suffering which, quite frankly isn’t fair in our limited way of understanding fairness. You start with the premise that to be human is to screw up (some worse than others), and you look at what people endure in the summers of their lives and you kind of wonder, is God really directing all this?

Every morning I stretch and pray and recite a dozen or so Bible verses I have memorized.

One – Romans 8:28 – goes:

“God causes all things to work together for good, for those who love God according to His purposes.”
          
  Almost every day I think about those words and I must confess there are days I believe them a whole lot more than others.

            I’ve been thinking about Bill Buckner. Buckner was the Red Sox first baseman in 1986. He had a lifetime 300 batting average and was a solid fielder. Buckner was a major reason Boston found themselves in the 1986 series against my beloved New York Mets. The Mets. From the moment I saw their grass infield at Shea Stadium in 1968, I loved that team. It was easy early on. Ten years old and ball players like Tom Seaver and Tommy Agee, Cleon Jones, and twenty-two others proved to me miracles happen with their 1969 World Series win. God I knew was a Mets fan. God was fair.

            It didn’t last. Baseball’s business side led the Mets to trade the greatest right hander in the last fifty years – Tom “Terrific.” They barely won even half their games. But I stayed and I watched, and every spring I believed this would be the year. It never was until … until 1986.

            The Mets were the bad boys of baseball. They were brash and they backed their egos up with a 108 win season. Then it got tough. October was tough with a seven game series against the Houston Astros. I watched and agonized through every pitch, every inning, every game. And then there were two.

            The Mets lost games one and two, both at home, to the Red Sox. And Bill Buckner, with knees barely able to hold him up, played, He hit, and he fielded, and Boston went to Fenway halfway to the championship that so long eluded them.

            Baseball is like life. You can give up or you can fight. An elderly Presbyterian minister friend put it this way: “We are commissioned to keep the faith, to fight the good fight …” After three games in Boston, the Mets were still alive taking two of three. And they returned to New York for game six.

            Game six. Every baseball fan knows game six. The Mets, down two runs in the bottom of the tenth inning, down to their last strike with no one on base, and their own scoreboard posting congratulations to “The World Champion Boston Red Sox;” and a hall of fame catcher – Gary Carter – skewered by his own teammates because he was too “nice,” telling the umpire “I’m not making the last fucking out,” because it’s better to go down fighting; and the hits start coming until … until … “The ball gets by Bill Buckner.”

            Miracles. Elation. A twenty-seven year old lawyer standing in his living room telling his twenty-four year old wife “baseball is never over until last out!” And there is Bill Buckner. “Unmerited suffering.”

            Buckner had to leave Boston. The boos and the death threats became too much. Boston’s failure to end their World Series drought in 1986 was exemplified by that little red seamed white ball sliding under Bill Buckner’s open mitt as his knees buckled. Buckner, one of the reasons Boston even made it to the series, was alone, exiled, vilified. He didn’t deserve it, but it was as it was.

            Buckner never vented at his enemies. He never fought back. He wore the abuse and the exile and went on. On was a ranch out west, far away from Boston and baseball and failure. Like I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bill Buckner. Baseball is a game for boys. It’s a game you have to love to really get. And Buckner had to give all that up; he had to walk away from what he loved, without a fight; he had to give up the dream.

            I remember every detail when I got the letter. I can recite it from memory: “There is no us. I don’t love you and haven’t for a long time.” The divorce was expected. I’d felt it for years. And, I’d fucked up – more than once. Funny what we convince ourselves is ok to do when we’re afraid. And fear and desperation go hand and hand, and disaster will follow.

            The papers arrived. I read them and my heart broke, I wrote her a letter and mailed her my ring. My friend came to see me. He said my letter made her cry. And then I did nothing. I signed everything away, didn’t try and delay the divorce, and died little by little inside. I couldn’t shake that picture in my mind’s eye when I was young, so young, and had my life ahead of me. And she turned and I saw her eyes and fell in love.

            “… unmerited suffering is redemptive.” I wonder if Dr. King ever uttered those words to a convicted felon while he was still behind bars? Did he ever say them to an aging ballplayer that let a ball slip under his glove? I sit here and watch the new boys of October making a living playing a game, a marvelous, wondrous game and I wonder does Bill Buckner ever say “if only.”

            “If only.” Such small words, yet the weight of our lives hang on them so many times. Can you forgive yourself, can you move on, can you put “if only” to rest? A famous preacher was once asked about the pain he experienced following the end of his marriage. “I am filled with sadness every day,” he said. “But,” he added, “I have no regret. You don’t learn or grow from regret.”

            The Red Sox found themselves down three games to none in the American League Championship Series. They had lost games one and two in New York to their arch-enemies, the hated New York Yankees. It was 2004, and Red Sox fans still felt the pain of all those years of collapse and failure. It was the curse of the Babe, Tony Conigliaro, 1967, 1975; it was Bucky “Fuckin’” Dent and the Yankees, and it was Bill Buckner.

            And Boston resigned itself to another year of hopes dashed, of dreams broken, of baseball’s renewal in the spring being left in pieces in the fall. Something was different this year. The players didn’t look back, and baseball – a blessed game I told my sons God created on the seventh day to remind us that it’s never over until the last out is recorded – was redeemed and renewed in Boston. The Red Sox took four straight from the Yankees and marched into the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals.

            It happened in St. Louis on an October night that Boston buried all the hurt and pain and disappointment from so many seasons. They won. And a city rejoiced … the past was let go.

            The next spring, there on the mound throwing out the ceremonial first pitch with the Red Sox World Championship banner snapping in the crisp April air stood Bill Buckner. With the crowd standing and clapping he threw the pitch and a new season began. I think Dr. King was smiling and nodding his head and whispering “redemption.” And, I think about that moment as I watch this year’s World Series.