I listened to the parents

June 06, 2003

I listened to the parents at the baseball game. I tuned out the game and started my senses working on the soundscape, the smells... the general and specific at the same time. If you stop caring about the score it all changes for you. The vested interest in your own child up to bat is what usually colours the entire situation.

Baseball is about numbers and anticipation. Pure physical skill can lose to smarts. Philosophically I am all for this type of game. The right combination of these two attributes creates balance leading to pure poetry. This is what we all need in everyday life. Sport is just a science experiment in a controlled environment. Team sport is a scientific demonstration that left and right brain must meet in equal portions. If I had known this as a teenager I would have talked at least one teacher into allowing me to do a directed study in this area. Credit for working on something that doesn’t seem like work at all is really the way to go. In university I did a fair amount of directed study in the rock band area. Team sport can make for simple, cut and dried sociology, psychology, medicine, political science, philosophy and english projects. It is a gold mine of metaphor and behavioural broad strokes. When you get down to the nuances it becomes even better.
For instance ...Here’s what I took away from last night’s behavioural observation of our little league lab rat playground. Premise: parents hand down autistic linguistic patterns to their children. Baseball could be the doorway through which stuttered and repetitive rhetorical speech loops are handed down from generation to generation. Their function warrants more study but I will riff on it a bit.

“you got him swingin’, got him swingin’”. “put a little pepper in there, put a little pepper in there”, “good eye, good eye”, “way to watch ‘em, way to watch ‘em”, “swing batter swing”.

I was waiting to hear “ten minutes to Wapner, ten minutes to Wapner”. Its the rhythmic cadence and circular nature of the chants that is the most interesting. You say everything twice or more. The key phrases are handed down to the next generation. Perhaps its an attempt at hypnosis. The crowd attempts to control the play by hypnotizing their young charges. Parents relive their childhood through these phrases and its as if they never left the moment that they were at bat. In this way the egos and nerves of the kids are soothed and they begin to perform better under the power of suggestion. Parents also achieve some sort of immortality through the language as well. Maybe Raveen was the best baseball parent. “Man Raveen’s kid has got a hot hand tonight” said parent #1. “Doesn’t he ever get a gray hair in that immaculate beard and pompadour”, says parent #2.
In hockey its all shouts of, “skate! skate!” and “ref are you fuckin’ blind?!” and “get back!” and “ fuckin’ rights!”. This seems less helpful and less interesting. It all just adds to the clutter of such a physical sport and nobody gets any younger in the process. You need to PLAY hockey to stay young. I once saw an Entertainment Tonight snippet in which Mike Love of the Beach Boys claimed to not be getting any older. He sleeps with women half his age, performs self massage, takes vitamins, lives in hawaii and syphons money from his more talented cohorts in order to, in his own words, “stop the aging process”. I should write him and tell him he could become less of an evil freak if he just played hockey. It keeps you in touch with your inner child and allows you to drink a lot of life preserving beer. If he gave it a try This would also give select Brian Wilson fans a good chance to line him up from thirty feet at twenty miles an hour. But ...I digress.