EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

A Rite of Spring Training

Why does the shortest month in the calendar year always seem its longest? Ten consecutive days of extreme cold weather warnings have confined me to the Crooked 9. Why should I venture outside if I don’t have to? I’m relieved I no longer volunteer at the community’s outdoor hockey rink. I’ve been puttering around the house figuratively kicking around the plot of a new novel, a story still struggling to find its way through an incomplete first draft. The cast of characters includes neither a lovesick elite commando or a beautiful, spunky scientist nor a psychopathic sadist hell-bent on revenge; I wonder if I’m wasting my time.

Tuesday offered a mild respite. The Tuesday Night Beer Club emerged from hibernation. As is often the case with Stats Guy, our conversation in the pub soon turned to baseball. San Diego was prepared to pay a guy who struck out to end last October’s World Series $30-million to play third base this summer. For that kind of money you better hit and field perfectly, be the Platonic ideal of the five-tool ballplayer. When I arrived home in the dark the wind had risen and the temperature was falling. Nothing illustrates the February Blahs quite like snow crystal dervishes twisting off the eaves.

Meanwhile down in the southerly climes of Florida and Arizona, major leaguers are loosening up in anticipation of the long season ahead. It’s reassuring to know that spring or some ritual form of it has arrived somewhere in the hemisphere. And so around this time of year, as I have for some 40 past, I will read a book about baseball. There is an art to sportswriting because readers know the score; it’s no mean feat to retell an old and familiar story, the ending never deviating from forever.

Twenty-first century baseball is not an integral part of my present. I think about the sport the way I think about my grandfather Moore, fondly and warmly, sentiments tinged with loss but increasingly fainter with the passage of time; Papa saw the Babe at Yankee Stadium; Papa was there when I got my only extra-base hit in my one season of inter-city baseball. How many hours have I spent sitting in the stands watching the Montreal Expos and later the AAA Pacific Coast League Edmonton Trappers or Calgary Cannons? Those teams are gone now; three strikes and you’re out. In Alberta I’ve paid admission to watch the Canadian Baseball League, the Northern League and the Golden League fail.

These days during the summertime Stats Guy and I watch college players refine their skills, have the nuances of the game drilled into them. The short season Prospects host clubs from all over Alberta and Saskatchewan, green highway sign curiosities rather than actual destinations. I often wonder what it’s like for a player to attend school in California, say, and then play baseball on the Canadian prairie. Edmonton’s ballpark is oriented on the river flats south of downtown. Should the action on the field lag – not an uncommon occurrence in modern baseball – there’s a lot to look at. Sometimes I think I just pay for the grandstand view: the smokestacks of the decommissioned power station behind the left field wall remind me of the cover of a Pink Floyd album; the reflective steel arches of the new bridge over the North Saskatchewan soar before a backdrop of green parkland and blue sky; the ornate and domed provincial legislature is beige sandstone; the grey, majestic and slightly foreboding Hotel Macdonald, a relic from those halcyon days of rail travel, resembles Dracula’s castle, lodgings for the blood-sucking elite, the vampire one-per-cent.

On deck on my night table is a Christmas gift from Stats Guy, a book called ‘Blue Monday’* by Danny Gallagher. The Montreal Expos under the Zen guidance of then manager Felipe Alou were quality clubs in the early 90s. However, the franchise only qualified for post-season play once in its history and that was all the way back in 1981. Montreal’s quest for glory, to become the first Canadian team to play in a World Series, ended abruptly. Los Angeles Dodger and Expo killer like no other Rick Monday’s home run on that frigid Monday afternoon in my hometown was not a walk-off because the host team had last ups, three outs left to win the game in the ninth or at least tie it to send it into extra innings. Everybody knows the outcome.

As February’s cold sorely lingers, I will remain indoors and pick at an old wound, a 38-year-old invisible scar that’s still a little tender.

*In no way to be confused with Montreal playwright David Fennario’s ‘Blue Mondays,’ his second volume of prose published by Black Rock Creations in 1984.      

    

Copies of my latest novel The Garage Sailor are still available and ready to ship. Get aboard at Megeoff.com.