The Boys of Late Summer

I love my adopted home of Boston with all my heart, but the winters here profoundly suck. Yes, the first snowfall is gorgeous, but then they get old pretty quickly. And the skies are gray, the driving treacherous and parking impossible, and on its worst midwinter days the city looks like something out of The Road. 

Herman Melville, another transplant to New England, wrote bout “growing grim about the mouth” in November. I know the feeling, and there’s a whole lot of winter left after that.

I think this aversion to the season helps explain why I start to lose interest in baseball about this time of year, just as it’s heating up for many people. And it’s not just that the Red Sox seem to be executing a truly special meltdown this September. I’d feel the same if they had a lock on the playoffs. Because while the playoffs are great fun they’re just forestalling the inevitable, which is the end of baseball and the start of winter.

So the countdown to the playoffs feels like the countdown to the end to me. To nights without Don and Jerry coming into my living room from Fenway. To months without the possibility of a triple play or a triple by a catcher. No more cutters or 12-6 curveballs. No more “Sweet Caroline” and “Shipping up to Boston.”

I watch waaaaaaayyyyy too many of the 162 regular season games, usually with undivided attention. Doing so brings me peace, especially when the Sox have a lead and I have a beer. I watch in the hopes of seeing something extraordinary, whether it’s a 13-pitch at bat, an outfield assist, an inside-the-park homerun, or a knuckeball that travels over 60 feet without completing one full rotation. I also watch to try to understand the sport better, because there’s a lot to learn, no matter how much you already know.

The poet Mary Oliver is one of my sages, and I know she’s right when she writes this about not mourning the coming of fall:

I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

Red Sox baseball is one of the sweets of every year for me. So as the team plays its last regular season home game tonight I’m going to watch, and be content, and try to follow Oliver’s advice.

It’s been a great season.