Taken to the ballpark by Warriors
Updike, who passed away this year, was once in Boston to visit a friend. He knocked on the door, received no answer, so with a summer’s afternoon to kill, he headed to the Red Soxs’ famous old home, Fenway Park, for his first visit. He picked a good day. While the press box was bloated with the city’s jaded baseball beat reporters, Updike, like a scientist who inadvertently discovers a much sought-after remedy, found he was witnessing, from the bleachers, the last game — and the memorable farewell — of Sox giant Ted Williams.
He dispatched a song of a report to the New Yorker magazine recounting poetically William’s typically cranky so-long speech and the home-run that was the denouement to a heroic career at bat. “Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the centre of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs — hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted ‘We want Ted’ for minutes after, he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.” Wow.
Those who stumbled upon the championship game in the B division of Ireland’s baseball league last Saturday may not have realised they had wandered into their own little Fenway, but still I wondered what Updike might have made of the apple pie scene folded into Clondalkin.
Munster Warrior players are stretched out on the grass in preparation for the final game of their maiden season. The motley-playing roster are, in turn, relaxing in fold-up chairs, swapping last-minute tips, talking about their favourite TV comedy (it’s The Inbetweeners) and discussing Saturday night’s planned celebrations in Limerick city. They have a record this year of 12-0. And judging by the mood, everyone expects them to make it 13 for 13 with a win over today’s opponents: The Hurricanes.
One man neatly epitomises the playing of baseball in Ireland. Meet Mynor Murphy, the team’s stout and steady catcher who smiles through his face guard and offers advice to the novices around him. Probably the world’s only Corkman to speak with a Panamanian accent, he fits right in. “I grew up all my life in Panama — in a plantation exporting Chiquita bananas to Europe and the US. Panama has a relationship with the US with the canal so baseball would be the national sport with boxing.
“I came to Cork seven years ago because my father is from there and lives there, and I played soccer because Cork didn’t have a baseball team in the past. Then we formed the Munster baseball team. We have a great team, we are having fun all year and we didn’t lose any match. There are Irish guys with a softball background, a few American guys and the Canadian manager. I feel integrated.”
That Canadian is Eric Kelly, a chiropractor now living on Leeside (the majority of his charges are based in Limerick, where the side play their home ties). Though nursing an injured ankle, he’s togged out in his navy and red uniform. His day started early Saturday morning as he packed the car with three bags — one for bats and balls, one for catchers’ mitts and one for helmets. He then picks up a few teammates in Limerick and they set off for Dublin for the last time this season. “The standard is a little bit lower than I’m used to but it’s getting a lot better. It’s not meant to be very competitive and we have a lot of fun.”
Now, after the Warriors give up six runs in the third inning, Kelly hobbles to the mound to replace the starting pitcher, an American named Bill, who can clock off till next year. It’s the first time all season that the Warriors have been behind.
When one member of the team feels unwell, one of the replacement players, previously sitting cross legged with a cigarette on a fold-up chair, casually filling in the scorecard is pressed into action. If they are to win this pennant, it’ll be the hard way. When he sets for his very first swing against the Hurricane pitcher, he feels the ball bounce off his head and the umpire tells him to walk to first base. “Hey that’s one way to do it!” Kelly shouts from the bench.
Kieran Manning, though one of the team members with little background in America’s game, is one of the most vociferous players in the diamond. “I’m playing about a year and half. It takes ages to get into it, I’m usually happy to make any kind of contact. You have to accept you’re going to make an arse of yourself most of the time,” he advises.
Not so today. To the acclaim of the teammates behind the cage, he darts the ball to centre field with the bases loaded and he manages to round the field with a teammate to tie it up. “So you have played this game before?” he asks an American teammate who greets him at home base after completing his run.
Ultimately, to Kelly’s delight, the Warriors rally and take the win by one run, ensuring they return to Dublin next week to collect their trophy at a special presentation.
For now, they gather at home base for a team picture in the centre of what is affectionately called the Field of Dreams. One-time owner of the LA Dodgers, Irish-American Peter O’Malley stumped up the cash in the 1990s to develop this corner of Corkagh Park in West Dublin.
Updike’s retelling of Williams’ last homer creaks under the weight of his talent but it’s the picture of the rickety, idiosyncratic ball ground that is the high watermark that the rest are still snorkelling beneath. “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.”
In Corkagh Park, a long way from Fenway, the pens are painted green, pitchers complain of an uneven mound that causes them to lose balance and runners admit a weariness of the coarse surface that ruthlessly rips their legs when they slide into a plate. But they built it, and they’ll continue to come.
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adrian.russell@examiner.ie twitter: @adrianrussell
