All of the Errors Forgotten

My time of late has been consumed by youth baseball, so I found myself the other day sitting along the first base line watching one of my son’s practices when I looked up to see a radiant image. Framed between two, aged oak trees shrouded with Spanish Moss, the fall thunderstorm clouds in the distance, and the sweeping stratus clouds supervising a silhouetted scoreboard, the setting sun announced the finality of the day.

The pleasant scene allowed for quiet reflection on the memories of my own playing days and drifted into thoughts about how superstitions exist to help us, not only to just get through our days, but also to process complex emotions like fear and anxiety. The idea is that by taking some sort of acute, immediate action, we will be blessed with good luck, good health, or something else. Baseball has no shortage of acute, immediate rituals one may perform for good luck, and along with other thoughts, I recalled an old blog post that will be forever seared into my memory about a woman consumed with the thrall of pandemic superstition.

Baseball is my favorite game because of the lessons it teaches. First, it’s a team game that individuals play: your at-bats and fielding are yours and yours alone, but they are put to work in the service of your team. Second, and most importantly, it is a game of individual and team failure: you are out more often than you are on base, a team winning percentage of .550 – .600 — just more than half of your games played — is a championship-caliber team, and each attempt is isolated. It is recorded. There is nowhere to hide the miss. The game forces you to live with failure as a normal outcome.

Maybe as a result, a wide range of superstitions and rituals developed and many have been passed down through the generations. You never talk about a no-hitter or perfect game in progress. You will never step on a foul line. Players develop their own custom rituals for how they tap the bat when they step up to the plate. They have lucky shirts or seats when they are winning. There is the enduring Rally Cap. Lastly, there are the curses: the Billy Goat, and the Bambino.

All of those are pretty silly, and they often make for great comedy in movies like Major League and Bull Durham. I will absolutely be the first to admit I have worn the inside-out rally cap with paper cups on my ears because along with all of my teammates doing the same — that is what would win us the game! 

Whenever I think about my playing days in baseball, I find it is really hard to recall any of the bad things that happened. I can’t remember a single error I made, even if it made us lose the game. I can’t remember any of the team politics. I can’t remember any of the stupid rituals I made up. I can’t remember specific times that I was a bad teammate and maybe said or did things to hurt other teammates. In fact, I can only remember lots of good things.

One of the funny things about a memory is its specificity and similarly, its flexibility. Seared into my mind is an image of a poor woman circa early 2021. What I thought would be easy to find, though, was difficult: The search function on the website didn’t work at all to help me find it. It was something else that burned it into my memory. 

The blog post is titled We Have a Winner, and it shows the image of a woman riding the escalator in the San Francisco Macy’s in February of 2021, just less than a year after lockdowns began in March of 2020.

The post itself is completely forgettable: It simply documents that this poor woman was wearing two face masks, plastic gloves, and a face shield. The magic that placed it into my mind forever was a comment.

For many people, daily life becomes a threat. Of course they don’t realize it’s happening at the time, but they start to view life as something they have to get through.

Those types of people are most likely to have gone off the deep end on covid. This person exemplifies that. It’s not really covid she is scared of. It’s life itself. Covid is merely her problem of the day.

I have thought on this comment and its wisdom often over the last several years. 

For far too many, survival — the very essence of life — was tied to wearing really silly things that did not do all that much except declare that something was being done. Objects and gestures became the way to survive until nightfall.

Logical fallacies are to sophistry what double masks and face shields are to performative prevention: both offer a placebo of symbolic protection.

Symbolic protection, might also be called superstition, which is something every baseball player is well aware of as they carefully step over the foul line when taking the field.

Maybe in that way, wearing a hat inside out, stacking them on top of a single lucky person’s head, having paper cups doing whatever paper cups might be able to do, well, maybe in that way, I’m not all that different from the plastic face shield, double-masked, glove-wearing woman on the escalator.

Those silly things just a way merely to handle our problems for the day.

I wondered, if things had gone differently, would the pandemic’s superstitions have hardened into folklore the way Baseball’s did? Over time, the silly superstitions building themselves into a mythic narrative? Maybe in a parallel world, there is still a version where even the youngest of children know that you just wear a mask! After all, even the youngest of baseball players today know that you never step on a foul line! 

As the sun began to set below the tree line and the practice I was watching began to wrap itself up, the calm tranquility of the moment was interrupted by the tension of the thought — How would we all remember the events of the Pandemic? 

Would it be like my days playing baseball? All of the errors, bad things, and failures forgotten? Would we remember the small and large slights, the exclusions, the performances? Or would we brush much of that away and only remember lots of good things?

My son’s practice was over. There wasn’t a foul line marked on the practice field, but I watched as all of his teammates dutifully stepped over where it would be as they left the field to pack their bags. 

The sun had set, and he and I walked back to the car in the gathering dusk. He plays on a good team now, and he was positively giddy. He felt when he pitched that he could throw more strikes because all of his teammates could field the ball and turn outs. His feeling of increased confidence brought out only by the abilities and attitudes of those he now finds around him, and thereby making everyone better. 

He is still too young, and doesn’t quite understand yet that — the very essence of life — is not in merely surviving, but in individuals performing for themselves in a way that benefits the team, which, in turn, elevates everyone.

Or maybe our memories will go the other way. In 1945, P.K. Wrigley removed a ticket-holding goat from his stadium saying, “The goat stinks.” Billy Sianis answered with “Them Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more,” and later, after the Cubs were losing, “Who stinks now?” A small slight became a curse that lasted for 108 years. 

The pandemic had its own violations of ordinary decency. Small exclusions, performative protections, and too many moments where the living were treated as a smell to be shown the door. Will we let indifference keep the score, remember only good things, or rather, like Wrigley’s Billy Goat, will we be cursed for a century? 

It was dark when we drove home and the radiant sunset had transformed into a moonlit backdrop of Florida thunderstorms threatening in the distance. Lightning flashes violently split the night sky, yet the storms were so far off the thunder only crashed with silence. 

My son’s school mascot is The Thunder, and he plays the violin badly in the school’s orchestra. All of his baseball player friends were assigned the cello. An orchestra is a lot like a baseball club, it is only separate people until each part makes a larger whole. It was then that the far off thunder cracked with a question: “Dad, will you teach me to play the cello?” 

Republished from the author’s Substack