A Letter to an Estranged Friend

[Matthew Trueblood]

Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer. Labor Day also kicks off the very best stretch of any season in which to be at a ballpark. Alas, this year, that only makes it an even more bittersweet milestone than usual.Baseball bills itself as the summer game. It wants to live in your mind as the official sporting sponsor of sunshine, vacations, and the Fourth of July. Owners make most of their money by packing their stadiums on summer weekends, selling not only tickets and jerseys and parking spots, but lemonade and ice cream to kids, and beer and nachos to kids’ parents. Even a bad team can often draw a pretty full house on occasions like those, because the clientele is families of five and six, and the product isn’t really baseball, so much as a memorable and stimulating evening of entertainment for all of them.

 

When the game presents itself to you that way, though, it’s essentially trying to sell you an illusory sense of escape and immortality. Come, baseball says, freeze time with us. Summer will last forever, if you can have enough days and nights like this one, surrounded by noise and excitement and (mostly) friendly, low-stakes confrontation. This food doesn’t count against your diet. These hours don’t drag the countdown clock to the resumption of school or the end of your vacation any closer to zero. Of course, none of that is true.

 

Baseball also wants to sell itself to you as a perpetually credible contest, between teams with real chances to win something they might mark as meaningful. That’s the tremendous virtue of the 162-game season, and is why the recent uptick in aggressive rebuilding projects has raised such a red flag for so many around the game. The game is built on the notion that, for the lion’s share of the season, everyone is in the hunt for the postseason, and every game matters, but that each game matters in only a small, survivable kind of way, because the team will have a chance to make up ground tomorrow if they lose today. Of course, all of that is only partially true even in the best of times, and (in so many ways) these are not the best of times.

 

I love September because, invariably and inexorably, it comes along to dispel and dismantle baseball’s myths. Go to two games in a week this time of year, as the dwindling of our daylight hours accelerates toward the equinox, and you’ll notice the sun dipping through the space between the roof and the upper deck a half-inning earlier. The morning and midday wind picks up, and while the chill of autumn doesn’t really ride on it yet, that chill does start to creep into the heavy, still air of late afternoon. Whatever lies you were told, and whatever lies you told yourself, you’ve been getting older as you’ve watched this summer’s games, and now the year’s supply of baseball (like that of hot days and late sunsets) is running out.

 

With that shiver-inducing return to reality, though, comes a wonderful vulnerability and vividity. What happens on the field in September matters more, to the average fan in the ballpark, as well as to the players. September baseball patrons form families of choice. They’re not there just to get drunk and carouse; that part of the party has changed venues, to football stadiums and tailgate lots. The kids are back in school, so fewer families can attend games, and those who do consist of hardcore fans for whom baseball is a nightly dinner-table topic.

 

Teams in contention still pack the park in September, but the fans’ attention doesn’t need to be called back to the field as frequently. For teams who are out of the running, fans show up to savor the game itself, before it’s beyond their reach again for a while, and to see the young players on whom their hopes of being better next year rest. I’m a son, a friend, and a father. I don’t resent the families killing time or the buddies killing brain cells. I love baseball when it rises up to fill the entire physical and mental space before me, though, and because of that, September ballpark people are my people.

 

This is why baseball will always mean more to Northern cities and their fans. San Diego, Los Angeles, and Atlanta are fine baseball towns, but they don’t live as fully in September, because they don’t have to wonder how far behind the end of baseball will come the beginning of winter. The smells of a ballpark in September are similar to those of a ballpark in July, but in the North, the experience of smelling them is different, because as you draw in that air and catch a whiff of grilled sausage and onions, that olfactory sensation mingles with the visceral, almost tactile sensation of the air—now crisp and cold, or getting there, instead of thick and warm. It’s the same smell, but it’s not the same feeling at all.

 

There’s no better place to feel the fall rushing at you than in a ballpark in the northern part of the United States, and especially in Target Field. No park in baseball saves up and shows off the last lights of summer the way Target Field does, with its limestone accents inside and out, with the nested lights around the roofline preserving the fans’ view of the Southern and Western skies, and with its earth tones throughout, including large amounts of wood and a heavy use of forest green. The way the stone catches the sun, the way the ballpark (with the smallest footprint in the major leagues, with the field set below street level, with the high wall in right field and the soaring triple-deck grandstand beyond left field and the scoreboard above that) wraps itself around you like the collar of a good jacket—it all allows you to embrace and accept the end of one season, the beginning of another, and the promise (or threat) of more to come, in safety and solace.

 

All of this now stands in sharper relief than ever, because we’ve been denied September at Target Field, and at every other ballpark. This fall is settling over Minnesota with only digitized, insubstantial signals. In reality, we can all still step outside to catch the cold air in our noses, but we can’t smell the same symphony of ballpark odors. In our minds and hearts, it feels like the opposite is true: we have the trappings of a season change here, but not the thing that makes it real for us.

 

The fact of autumn is here, but the feeling is muted. Without the ballpark to ground us, it feels like this fleeting baseball season is something less than halfway over, and its end doesn’t feel as perilously close as it really is. Out of necessity and good sense, we’ve retreated from the physical act of attending games, but in doing so, we’ve numbed ourselves to elements of the games (and the very lives of which they’re a part) in a deeper way than we might have realized. I hope we can be back at ballparks in April next season, but even if we are, we will have lost an entire September, and next September seems excruciatingly far away.

 

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[Baseballislife]

I felt like I was at a September game. Great article!

[Joey P]

Beautiful, beautiful!

[rdehring]

Thanks, Matt. Hopefully next spring, summer, September and October will be somewhat back to normal.

[twinbythebay]

Thanks for this Matt, reading it transported my mind to the ballpark for at least a few fleeting minutes, which is what good writing should do. Now if you'll excuse me, I have the sudden urge to go pick up some brats and onions and throw them on the grill for lunch...

[insagt1]

This was the first year of my life with no Red Wing baseball to attend. It was terrible. Whats worse is we have no way of knowing if it will even return in April. Minor league sports must have fans....and that is a huge problem at the moment.

[Castinofan]

Ironic that we have to go to a sports blog to find such beautiful writing. Just marvelous,Matthew. Keep writing, please.

[bighat]

Great letter! Thanks for sharing.

[DocBauer]

A beautifully written piece that tugs at the heart strings as well. Wonderful!

 

To me, baseball is not just a sport. It signifies spring when it starts. The oncoming of better and warmer days following the gray post holiday winter months. It brings hope and promise. It means another game, another day of possibility even after a loss. Even in dark seasons, there is that next day opportunity. Who will shine that day? What young player might emerge next? What new thing do my dad and I have to talk about?

 

That's baseball to me.

 

I am so disappointed in a short season. But I embracing each week, each game as something rather precious that could have been missing for the whole year if not for this abbreviated run. And so, just like a normal year, I embracing both today and tomorrow, no matter what happens, how it turns out, and celebrate what happened while getting amped up for next season all over again. Hopefully a full season with fans and milb to enjoy and debate as well.

[VivaBomboRivera!]

The _New_Yorker_ is trying to call you. Should I give them your number?

[70charger]

Great writing. Very evocative.

 

This will be the first year i won’t make it to a game at Target Field since it opened, and I’m really missing it.