A FAN’S NOTES

Game Seven on the Radio

“This pitching change brought to you by Home Hardware.” Oh, my boy, there’s lots of pitching changes in modern baseball. “He’s thrown thirty-six pitches already; he’s got to be getting tired.” Where have you gone Bob Gibson? Home Hardware’s pitch is Canadian local ownership. Everything a pitcher needs to doctor a ball always in stock, I suppose: grease, files, sandpaper.

I’ve also memorized the telephone number of Pizza Nova even though I’m certain central Alberta is a titch beyond the Ontario chain’s delivery range.

Toronto Blue Jays, a beleaguered nation turned the spotlight up on you. Ann and I saw them hosting the Boston Red Sox in late September. One of those games that mattered. A road trip for us, a fun and memorable night at the ballpark. I can never be a hardcore Jays fan simply because they aren’t Montreal’s expired Expos. Had the Jays lost the American League Championship Series to the Seattle Mariners, I might’ve shrugged. This World Series wasn’t about cheering for the Jays. It was about cheering against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the big money and the Hollywood glitz.

My friend Stats Guy was mildly torn over the match up. He grew up in California. A lifelong Dodger fan now delivered from any loyalty dilemma by the demise of the National League Expos. International affairs have thrown him a curve. Relations between the United States and what is now Canada haven’t been this fraught since the War of 1812 and the Fenian Raids fifty years later. He was reluctantly leaning Jays. Something of a wincing blustery shout at U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra who has infinitely raised the volume of Ugly American deaf douchebaggery.

The 2025 World Series is now in the record book. The end came for the home team in the bottom of the eleventh inning. Down by a run with just one out. Jays on the corners (They’d loaded the bases with futility in the ninth). Infield grounder. Two outs turned. Series over. Stranded runners don’t haunt winners.

Saturday afternoon I said to Ann, “I’m interested in the final game.”

“Do you want to go out and watch it?”

“God, no.” A crowd of other people. I’m too tired of tribes. God, no.

I can’t remember how many years ago we cut our cable television. As much as I enjoy baseball, Montreal Canadiens hockey and Canadian football, I can’t say I’ve pined for their visual wastes of time. I check the results next morning. Our streaming access is lean too. There’s too much stuff out there unworthy of subscription. Still, this fall’s World Series commenced with a huge hook: Us and the US. And that hook became increasingly huger.

Ann and I drove a little south and a little east of Edmonton last Thursday morning. We were to stay overnight in the “Rose City”. The occasion was an informal wake staged at the Masonic Lodge. A high school friend of Ann’s had died. The scattered old gang would gather in “historic” downtown Camrose. My selfish hope was that the afternoon’s affair would bleed into a World Series game in the hotel bar. Alas, there’s never a convenient time to die. Thursday was an off day.

I said to Ann, “I’d like to listen to the game on the radio. I don’t know if that’s even possible.”

Ann replied, “You used to love listening to baseball on the radio.”

I did. Expos broadcasts were a conversation between announcer Dave Van Horne and colour man Duke Snider, he of The Boys of Summer and the third proper noun in the chorus of “Talkin’ Baseball” fame, California laconic. (A hardcover of his 1988 "autobiography" The Duke of Flatbush is still on my shelf.) Dave and Duke did not clog the air with maniacal recitations of statistics. Dave and Duke simply chatted. And like drop-in neighbours around a kitchen table, they were comfortable with silences even though dead air is a radio crime. The rhythms of baseball should naturally deflate windbags. Why analyze nothing? Much more mercifully, not every moment of action was brought to me by a paying sponsor.

Duke’s in game pitch was for Orange Maison, “The major league taste I really enjoy.” The stuff was sold refrigerated, its container a bulbous orange plastic bottle with a convenient slim neck. Designed to swig. Its two main ingredients were sodium benzoate and floor sweepings from the pulp and paper mills in Alma and Bromptonville which masqueraded as pulp. Orange Maison paired well with vodka.

When the opportunity presented itself, between innings or during a rain delay, Duke would tell Dave a story from his glory days as a Brooklyn Dodger. Me and my friends Glenn and Tim knew Duke wore just three pairs of spikes as a pro: his mudders, his gamers and a new pair that had to broken in. None of these plain black leather baseball shoes came with a paid sponsorship. And we’d riff on Duke’s other stories. “The Dodgers barnstormed through Japan one off-season. And Jackie, Pee Wee and I…” The three of us would add sake, geisha girls, You Only Live Twice rice paper walls, Fat Man and Little Boy. “The Dodgers used to hold spring training in Havana, Cuba. There was quite a fine hotel close by our grounds. One night, Jackie, Pee Wee and I…” And off the six of us would go; Glenn, Tim and me departing from Woody’s Pub barstools.

As a boy I experienced time zone bliss. A rainy night in Montreal and the Expos crackling over my bedroom radio from San Francisco, LA or San Diego. Dave and Duke talking about the weather, the brown haze in the sky or the cold wind off the bay. Central Daylight Savings was pretty good roadtripping too. Middle America, an hour's difference, Chicago and St. Louis, formerly the extent of the major league's reach. Ballparks and cities I hoped to visit someday.

Ann found the Sportsnet radio stream on her iPhone. She plugged her device into the socket beside the landline and above the kitchen counter for me. Then she disappeared. Ann knows her sports when she has to because she’s a good listener and the clichés and Cathal Kelly in The Globe and Mail often amuse her. Ann has her limits. I spent three or so hours alone in the Crooked 9’s kitchen. The miracle of puttering is that even the simplest task can be stretched out for however long I decide it takes. Our supper dishes eventually got done. I scribbled in my Hilroy copy book. I prepped Sunday morning’s coffee. I spot washed the floor. I smoked on our front porch between innings. Long before the Jays flamed out in the home half of the ninth, bases loaded, I sensed the ending. This was going to one of those games where the winning team doesn’t score more runs in one inning than their opponent through nine.

“Well, Ann, you talk about momentum. How is momentum a factor tonight?”

“Well, Geoff, it’s huge, just huge.”

“Does it get any bigger than this?”

“Well, Geoff, as I said, it’s huge. Just huge.”

I can’t recall the names of Sportsnet’s Jays radio broadcast team. I can tell you they weren’t Dave and Duke. Conversation to them is some kind of pre-Apple and -Android abstract. Less than six outs in their stilted patter, their spew of banal inanities, began to annoy the fuck out of me. Listening to the radio with the volume set on MUTE proved impossible.

Doing something the old way couldn’t take me back, couldn’t replicate something I can’t explain, what I was hoping to maybe feel. More disturbingly, I now have positive focus group thoughts about Home Hardware and Pizza Nova because I craved and welcomed their tiresome interruptions.                 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential has been available since June in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Collect the set! Buy Of Course You Did (2021) too.