The Catcher

October!

It's that time of year again when we as Americans embrace the ritual of tradition and holidays to distract us from the very real and visceral reminders all around us of the onrushing calamity of inevitable death. Those lovely orange and brown leaves shriveling, detaching, floating and lying listless and stark, only to be stacked into piles for disposal and then callously run through and cruelly scattered by those (chronologically) farthest from dying. This is followed by the ritual excerebration and mutilation of pumpkins--guilty of no offense!--and a satanic orgy of both intimidation and gluttony. All in preparation, of course, as we brace ourselves for the cold bleeding-out of brown autumn into gray winter, with all warmth escaping into the ether like a wheezing last breath, with only a trace hope--but no promise--of, someday, spring. Yes, I'm also this much fun at Christmas.

Also there is playoff baseball!

The qualifier seems a bit on the nose, but there's a very important distinction to be made between baseball and playoff baseball. By itself, baseball is a thing you might go to live because you need an excuse to eat a deep-fried cinnamon roll. Food choices like that only make sense when the impact is diluted by the presence of other people, the more the better. The threshold for making that kind of self-harm acceptable is around 17,000 people. The fewer people around, the sadder it is. If you're eating a deep-fried cinnamon roll at home alone, let's face it, you're probably enjoying it (euphemistically speaking) between drafts of a suicide note. Baseball provides you with this protective context. Otherwise it's not a thing people actually watch in 2015.

Playoff baseball, on the other hand, is a completely different thing. I'm not sure if it's the best thing in all of sports,* but once you get past the meaningless regular season games (roughly 155 of 162 are skippable, and this is a best-case scenario that includes only teams in playoff contention. If you were a Phillies fan this year, this is probably the first you're hearing of the 2015 season at all), nothing can match it for moment-to-moment drama. Well, not all the moments, like the interminable break from pitch to pitch, but the built-up tension and payoff when the ball is delivered, when literally anything within the rules of the game could potentially happen up to and including the spilling of human blood among the innocents, the theater of it becomes a riveting, undeniable spectacle of melodrama on a Wagnerian scale. But with nobody singing about magic dwarfs in German. That was supposed to lead to a joke, but now I honestly can't tell if that's a plus or a minus.

Baseball isn't exempt from the seasonal perturbation and unease, however. In fact, it's a deeply ingrained part of it, acting as a transitional balm to soothe the existential downshift from summer to fall. It has its own rhythms and sounds, a music of its own to lull and to tranquilize, unless your team is participating, then fuck the music, I may have to throw this chair if things don't go exactly right.

Even if your team is not participating, just underneath the pacifying calm is a barely stilled hot-oil barrel of rage ready to atomize and explode any drop of creeping, polluting moisture that might sneak its way in to threaten the sleepy status quo.

Like for instance if a girl showed up. Like, anywhere. But worst of all, speaking where men-types can hear her. On the baseball telecast. And not in a bikini and impractical shoes holding up inning numbers like a boxing ring girl either, like talking about baseball with the regular bepenised baseball people who are supposed to be mulling over the important stuff like which pitch count Dallas Keuchel likes to throw sliders in.

This happened just a couple of days ago. A girl. In a broadcast booth. Talking about baseball. And nobody even tried to stop her. Fuck, for all we know, some lunatic actually invited her. That's the kind of world we live in now, people. The president is a black guy and ladies talk about baseball.

What happens to white guys, then? Oh, just one of them almost loses his job just because he referred ONE TIME to the broadcaster lady as "Tits McGee." It's like you people don't understand that this is supposed to be the hibernation time, where we store up our energy for the long push for the hoped-for thaw so many, many months out. It's a matter of survival that we're allowed to lay out, with everything exactly as we expect it, so we don't, like, die from startle-induced hypothermia some time in the middle of January.

Total peace. Total rest. Except for that one day after Thanksgiving when we break out to beat the shit out of strangers in a contest blessed by the extralegal embrace of multinational corporations. Sounds contradictory, but that's traditional too.

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*Summer Olympic platform diving, another thing I couldn't be pistol-whipped into giving the first shit about every other week of the quadrennial, but when there's a medal at stake, goddamn it if I won't talk all day about the tragedies of over-rotation and the triumph of a clean entry.