There's No Place Like it
Last Tuesday I went with my ex-boyfriend to see the Yankees play the Orioles at Camden Yards, and the only thing I can seem to say about the game is "It was so awesome. SO awesome!"
I have a really hard time articulating how I feel about baseball. I say I love it and my male friends stomp all over me and tell me I don't really love it because I don't know this or that stat and therefore I don't love it at all. I'm not a real fan. I don't know what's up with boys and numbers, or boys and love for that matter, so it's pretty easy to blow them off.
My girlfriends look at me, brows furrowed, when I mention baseball. A few say they only like it because it works well when they are trying to pick up boys, other prefer "faster" sports, some sit and nod, others say it's boring.
I find it riveting.
When I think back to my time in Los Angeles, and a few times when I was truly homesick, I can come up with these examples:
1. When I returned from having been in DC in October to watch the ALCS and World Series. My roomie was still on the east coast and I spent every night glued to the TV with a pizza and a six pack, alone. When the Red Sox won the series I cried with joy, alone, before my dad called me up and I had someone to yell and scream with.
2. Watching the Redskins opener because they actually broadcasted that game on a national network in LA.
3. Meeting Jon Rosen, who invited me to a friends house so I could watch the Skins/Eagles game on cable.
4. Inviting myself over to Jason's house to watch the super bowl. (Avid Beyond Sunset readers will remember how that went.)
And then, somehow, when both the baseball and football seasons were over, I became depressed. Really depressed actually, in Los Angeles. I felt really alone, really homesick. Something was missing...
So I decided to move.
But before I did, I made a list of things to do before I left town. I only accomplished one of them: I went to Dodger Stadium for the first time ever to see them play... the Nationals. I spent most of the game thinking, this is NOT Camden Yards, yelling at a couple 9 years olds (Dodgers fans) who were seated next to me, wearing my Capitol Hill Expos little league shirt that no one really "got," and text messaging my dad.
I remember when Camden Yards opened - that summer - I became addicted to baseball. I tried and tried to find tickets so my dad and I could see a game together, which is really a hard thing to do when you're 10. Or 11... whatever (gah, numbers....). I would imagine walking from the concessions stands into the stadium and seeing the green field sprawl out before me... a vision that made me gasp when I was 10 (or 11... whatever), and made me gasp again last Tuesday.
So there I sat, in the nose bleed party seats, my feet resting on the chair in front of me, drinking beer, watching the Orioles play the Yankees after having been away for what felt like an eternity. I spent the whole time staring at the field and talking with my ex about what would be the most fulfilling moments in sports... the 3 pointer, a hail mary, actually scoring in a soccer game... seeing your team down by 3 in the bottom of the 9th, bases loaded, 3-2 count to have your catcher slam one out of the park to win the game... (which I saw that one time with Chris Hoiles...)
I think of my most memorable sports moments... my first football game (at RFK of all places!), watching the Wizards/Pistons game in those awesome seats with my friend from Michigan, Cal's 2128 game, the 2.5 hour rain delay O's game - on my birthday... then there was the last game I saw at Camden Yards - April 2004 against the Red Sox, the Dodgers game, the first Nationals game I went to (at RFK of all places! The night I got home from LA), then Tuesday, watching the O's beat the Yankees in the bottom of the 10th...
I'm sorry, this is long-winded, I still don't know how to articulate it. It's so sensory... the warm weather, the beer, being elbow-to-elbow with strangers, knowing the field, knowing who hit the warehouse with a homer, and when, knowing the smell of the french fries, chanting "Yankees Suck!" with 30,000 people, feeling the building shake with pride when your team beats the Yanks...
I used to articulate it better. I'd say, I love Camden Yards. "Going there feels like going home," I'd say. And here, 15 (or 14, whatever) years later, it still feels the same.
***
I bought a book when I was in Los Angeles, not long after the ALCS, called Baseball and Philosophy. I thought the essays would help me put into words what I really want to say. However, half-way through the first essay I stopped reading.
The essay was entitled "There's No Place Like Home!" and it made me too homesick to read it.
I pulled the book off my shelf Wednesday night, in DC, and read the whole piece. It left me smiling.
If I were an amazing writer, or a "truly great" sports fan, I could end this piece with some insightful comment that combined some statistic with something I felt and it would all be tied together in some sort of metaphor.
Instead I will leave you with this:
"When it comes to baseball... the goal is to get 'home,' and yet, every batter starts off at home... it's not hard to imagine Jerry Seinfeld asking the question, 'So, Why leave? Why not just stay at home in the first place and forget about first, second and third bases?' The answer is, of course, that 'home' in baseball doesn't count unless you've left it, until you've gone for a 'run' and returned. That's in the same vein as Joseph Cambell's [who I read a bit of in Los Angeles, actually] famous discussion of the journey that literary and mythological heroes often take. Known as the 'monomyth' it says that the hero must leave his comfortable known world, strike out on his own to find adventure, and the return home a changed man... It's Bachelard's dialect: you need to know both the idea of home and the real threat of getting out in order to experience the true satisfaction of truly making it home. The original Homer told us that when he wrote The Odyssey 3,000 years ago: home is all the sweeter when you've braved adventures to get back to it."
~Joe Kraus, "There's No Place like Home!"
I have a really hard time articulating how I feel about baseball. I say I love it and my male friends stomp all over me and tell me I don't really love it because I don't know this or that stat and therefore I don't love it at all. I'm not a real fan. I don't know what's up with boys and numbers, or boys and love for that matter, so it's pretty easy to blow them off.
My girlfriends look at me, brows furrowed, when I mention baseball. A few say they only like it because it works well when they are trying to pick up boys, other prefer "faster" sports, some sit and nod, others say it's boring.
I find it riveting.
When I think back to my time in Los Angeles, and a few times when I was truly homesick, I can come up with these examples:
1. When I returned from having been in DC in October to watch the ALCS and World Series. My roomie was still on the east coast and I spent every night glued to the TV with a pizza and a six pack, alone. When the Red Sox won the series I cried with joy, alone, before my dad called me up and I had someone to yell and scream with.
2. Watching the Redskins opener because they actually broadcasted that game on a national network in LA.
3. Meeting Jon Rosen, who invited me to a friends house so I could watch the Skins/Eagles game on cable.
4. Inviting myself over to Jason's house to watch the super bowl. (Avid Beyond Sunset readers will remember how that went.)
And then, somehow, when both the baseball and football seasons were over, I became depressed. Really depressed actually, in Los Angeles. I felt really alone, really homesick. Something was missing...
So I decided to move.
But before I did, I made a list of things to do before I left town. I only accomplished one of them: I went to Dodger Stadium for the first time ever to see them play... the Nationals. I spent most of the game thinking, this is NOT Camden Yards, yelling at a couple 9 years olds (Dodgers fans) who were seated next to me, wearing my Capitol Hill Expos little league shirt that no one really "got," and text messaging my dad.
I remember when Camden Yards opened - that summer - I became addicted to baseball. I tried and tried to find tickets so my dad and I could see a game together, which is really a hard thing to do when you're 10. Or 11... whatever (gah, numbers....). I would imagine walking from the concessions stands into the stadium and seeing the green field sprawl out before me... a vision that made me gasp when I was 10 (or 11... whatever), and made me gasp again last Tuesday.
So there I sat, in the nose bleed party seats, my feet resting on the chair in front of me, drinking beer, watching the Orioles play the Yankees after having been away for what felt like an eternity. I spent the whole time staring at the field and talking with my ex about what would be the most fulfilling moments in sports... the 3 pointer, a hail mary, actually scoring in a soccer game... seeing your team down by 3 in the bottom of the 9th, bases loaded, 3-2 count to have your catcher slam one out of the park to win the game... (which I saw that one time with Chris Hoiles...)
I think of my most memorable sports moments... my first football game (at RFK of all places!), watching the Wizards/Pistons game in those awesome seats with my friend from Michigan, Cal's 2128 game, the 2.5 hour rain delay O's game - on my birthday... then there was the last game I saw at Camden Yards - April 2004 against the Red Sox, the Dodgers game, the first Nationals game I went to (at RFK of all places! The night I got home from LA), then Tuesday, watching the O's beat the Yankees in the bottom of the 10th...
I'm sorry, this is long-winded, I still don't know how to articulate it. It's so sensory... the warm weather, the beer, being elbow-to-elbow with strangers, knowing the field, knowing who hit the warehouse with a homer, and when, knowing the smell of the french fries, chanting "Yankees Suck!" with 30,000 people, feeling the building shake with pride when your team beats the Yanks...
I used to articulate it better. I'd say, I love Camden Yards. "Going there feels like going home," I'd say. And here, 15 (or 14, whatever) years later, it still feels the same.
***
I bought a book when I was in Los Angeles, not long after the ALCS, called Baseball and Philosophy. I thought the essays would help me put into words what I really want to say. However, half-way through the first essay I stopped reading.
The essay was entitled "There's No Place Like Home!" and it made me too homesick to read it.
I pulled the book off my shelf Wednesday night, in DC, and read the whole piece. It left me smiling.
If I were an amazing writer, or a "truly great" sports fan, I could end this piece with some insightful comment that combined some statistic with something I felt and it would all be tied together in some sort of metaphor.
Instead I will leave you with this:
"When it comes to baseball... the goal is to get 'home,' and yet, every batter starts off at home... it's not hard to imagine Jerry Seinfeld asking the question, 'So, Why leave? Why not just stay at home in the first place and forget about first, second and third bases?' The answer is, of course, that 'home' in baseball doesn't count unless you've left it, until you've gone for a 'run' and returned. That's in the same vein as Joseph Cambell's [who I read a bit of in Los Angeles, actually] famous discussion of the journey that literary and mythological heroes often take. Known as the 'monomyth' it says that the hero must leave his comfortable known world, strike out on his own to find adventure, and the return home a changed man... It's Bachelard's dialect: you need to know both the idea of home and the real threat of getting out in order to experience the true satisfaction of truly making it home. The original Homer told us that when he wrote The Odyssey 3,000 years ago: home is all the sweeter when you've braved adventures to get back to it."
~Joe Kraus, "There's No Place like Home!"
posted by AllDeTime at 1:55 PM
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