Tommy Martin on baseball: The magical summer when I allowed American’s pastime inhabit my life

Los Angeles Dodgers fans occupy their socially distanced seating pods during the fifth inning of a spring training baseball game against the Colorado Rockies on March 1, 2021, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

The Major League Baseball season starts today and America will feel closer to normal.

The 2020 season, a 60-game campaign convened in July, was an unseemly sprint by the sport’s leisurely standards.

The normal, 162-game season unfurls itself slowly, bubbling away in the background of American life before gathering pace for its autumnal climax.

Despite declining television audiences and an aging fanbase, baseball remains woven into the American fabric, the season turning as imperceptibly as the leaves on the trees. It lends itself to casual interest, but also to obsession.

There is a ball-game involving your team nearly every day, sometimes two on the same day. If you want it to, it can inhabit you.

I know this because in the summer of 1998 I followed the fortunes of the Chicago Cubs like they were my own children.

The season was already underway when my friend Pierce and I landed at O’Hare Airport on a J1 student visa.

To say we were ill-prepared for our adventure would insinuate that we had made any preparations at all. We had nowhere to live, no work to go to and not much money to tide us over.

All we had was a vague understanding that two blokes we knew from college had gone out ahead of us to secure an apartment. I imagined a frat house-style pad with ample keg-space, the perfect base for a summer of partying and complicated romantic entanglements with cool, Winona Ryder-type locals.

Unfortunately, when we tracked down our advance party it turned out that they had no recollection of any such arrangement and quickly turned us out onto the streets to fend for ourselves. A bad start, as well as an early blow on the Winona front.

It won’t surprise you to learn that I had a tendency to drift along with things at this time in my life. I struggled to take control, only making decisions when I absolutely had to, as if life was a succession of buses — school, college, coming-of-age adventures abroad — that you sat on until the driver told you to get off.

Some Irish girls let us squat in the basement of an empty house belonging to one of their aunts for a few days, but eventually it was left to Pierce to cadge money from his parents to find an apartment in the local classifieds.

I don’t recall feeling embarrassed at this, because a sense of entitlement is an unfortunate characteristic of the drifter.

In a rare burst of proactivity I got myself a bar job thanks to a fictionalised CV. I took the ‘L’ train back to the apartment in celebratory mood. It swung through Chicago’s northern suburbs and, out the window, I saw it — the famous Wrigley Field, in all its rickety beauty, home of the Cubs. Granted, I only recognised it from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

As luck would have it, there was a game on (it turned out there was always a game on). I spent my tip money on two tickets and dashed the three blocks north to get Pierce and make it back for the first inning.

The Cubs were playing the Montreal Expos and, sitting among the braying Yanks, we eyed the action with the cool detachment of Louis Theroux investigating a Satanic cult. But the innings ticked by and so did the beer and hot dogs (they bring them to you in your seat — no wonder they are the most powerful nation on earth).

And then, in the eighth inning, with the game tight, Cubs’ star man Sammy Sosa whacked the ball out of the stadium, presumably smashing somebody’s car windscreen, though nobody seemed to mind. Everyone jumped up and began to whoop and holler and high-five each other and, to our surprise, so did we.

After weeks of mean streets and dank basements, America had opened its big, meaty arms to us and soaked us in watery beer. Clearly, this was why millions of emigrants made this country a home: You didn’t need to adapt to subtle cultural norms to be accepted, you just needed to raise the roof for a home run by a beefy Dominican.

The Cubs won and I was hooked. They reached the playoffs that season and I listened to the games on a little transistor radio or watched them in the bar with half-interested drunks. When I went to games I liked to look at the fans: Bunches of boozy pals, fathers and kids, couples on dates, old geezers filling in scorecards, all on a stolen afternoon at the ballgame.

I liked the sense of history. Wrigley is one of the last of the old-fashioned ballparks, unchanged in decades. The players’ kits were akin to 19th-century fancy dress compared to the street threads of other sports.

Sometimes they didn’t even seem like sportsmen. My favourite player was a closer (the pitcher that comes on to finish the game when the main guy gets tired) called Rod Beck. He looked like a character from an Adam Sandler movie. He was even nicknamed ‘Shooter’. He had a beer gut, a mullet, and a handlebar moustache and used to flirt with disaster before bringing home the win. He died in 2007 at the age of 38 after developing drug problems. RIP Shooter.

I bought the Chicago Tribune every day for the box scores. These are statistical hieroglyphs that accompany each game, impenetrable to all but the aficionado. I stared at them regardless, convinced that here, not in Steinbeck or Springsteen, was the heart of America.

Mostly I think I loved baseball because it fitted my temperament. I didn’t know all the tactical nuances, so to me games seemed to simply unfold, like my own life, without intelligent design or heroic intervention.

It looked like everyone took up their positions and it all just happened. There seemed to be a choreography: Pitch, swing, run, catch, throw, slide. I think I found that comforting. Even the heightened crescendo of the home run had a fatalistic inevitability: If you are going to keep throwing that ball at a man with a stick, eventually he will hit it into the stands.

The day before I left Chicago the Cubs lost in the playoffs to Atlanta. I never watched another baseball game in full after I came home, mainly because it never made sense to. Baseball was not the NFL. It was about the quotidian background of American life, not worldwide event television.

Sometimes I find a game trundling along late at night on an obscure sports channel and feel I am intruding on a family day out. The only time I sat down properly was in 2016, when the Cubs finally won the World Series for the first time in 108 years. I fell asleep; it seemed kind of fitting.

So I’m not telling you to follow this new baseball season, but if you find yourself in America some summer and you are like me, it might wind its way around your life like the ivy that grows up the outfield walls of Wrigley Field. And tell Winona I was asking for her.