Blowfish Chronicles: Sleepy Time

MONDAY JUNE 9 v WILMINGTON SHARKS

Sleepy Time

The Blowfish lost to the Wilmington Sharks on June 9 by a score of 8 – 1. I was at the Cap, but I write four days later amid the rush of Midtown Manhattan, remembering not one play of the game, my notes being now of archeological interest.

I turn first to the last entries, which include the number 12, for our first baseman and designated hitter, Jesse Barbaro; the letter B, for the first of two pitches tossed Barbaro’s way, judged a ball by the ump; and the phrase “Fly Out to Deep Center,” which documents the failure of the Fish in the bottom of the ninth to buck the long odds, to tie the game or win.

I turn back to the first note. It reads “100 fans at start” and refers to a crowd sparse enough at the beginning of the game to be counted person by person. Official attendance was eventually computed at 667, a figure whose accuracy I should not for an instant doubt. But those 567 late-comers must have become 568 fair-weather friends, for I would bet ninety-eight bucks that only ninety-nine of us were still around to see that last ball Barbaro hit descend from the stratosphere to make its safe landing in a Shark mitt.

I turn again to the end, and there see also “Sleepy Time,” which I remember jotting in just before we survivors heard the song of La Señora Gorda. They are not, as some may suppose, words in exasperation of boredom. The mere feeling would have been a heresy, not to be confessed, even to myself, even in a doodle, for the first and last commandment for any true-believing fan is Thou shalt follow thy bliss until the game is over. There are rewards, small but sweet, for this obedience. “Sleepy Time,” composed when the score seemed truly hopeless, denotes whole seconds, in the Cap, of Quaker-meeting silence, seconds that make precious the solitary sounds that ensue—a cough, a cry of exhortation, the connection of bat and ball.  

Those silences and the sounds they celebrate prepare us for the benedictory spectacle. The teams form two lines, walking along each other in opposite directions, everyone on one side shaking the hand of everyone on the other, victors and vanquished together, young men of summer hinting at a furtive bond between opponents greater than the bond they share with their fans. Then the teams retire into their separate clusters, to receive words of criticism, condolence, or praise from their respective elders, and a man seated on a little machine like a riding mower to which is attached a wire mesh screen drives in circles around the wide base paths, perfecting them for the next performance, and other groundskeepers cover the mound and the batting area with tarps, securing them with sandbags that look like statues of geese, and the dog named Sophie, a Cap resident for some fifteen years, frolics and then comes to rest on the grass near first base, licking the pile of ice shaken from a drink cooler.

One night, years ago, when I was living in Boston, I lingered so long in the bleachers after a game at Fenway Park that I became the only fan inside, so far as I could see, and there came this clicking, like the click of a home breaker switch but a hundred times as loud, and the towering lights went dark, and the famous field, lit by nothing but the Citgo sign and the moon, was for a moment mine.  

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