Remembering Baseball

Guest Blog by Jean Hastings Ardell

Jean Hastings Ardell works as a writer, editor, and memoir instructor in Corona del Mar, California. She frequently writes about baseball and is co-chair of the NINE Spring Training Conference, held each March in Arizona. Her book, Breaking into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime, was published in 2005 as part of its Writing Baseball Series by Southern Illinois University Press. The book continues to serve as a text in numerous sport history courses across the country.

A few years back, after the Boston Red Sox had knocked the team we root for, the oxymoronically named Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, out of the post-season playoffs, my husband and I spent a couple of days in deep funk.

            “Aren’t we getting too old for this?” I finally said to him. “Maybe we care too much.”

            “Nah,” came the quick reply. “Besides, look at all the fun we’ve had.”

He was right. Ever since my father brought me to Manhattan’s Polo Grounds to see his beloved New York Giants, I’ve been engaged by this slow-moving, 19^th-century game. Baseball permits conversation in ways that more frenetic sports do not. Countless hours have I spent with my father, my husband, who played the game professionally, my sons, and my baseball pals discussing the evils of the New York Yankees, the questionable virtues of the designated hitter rule, the nuances of the infield fly rule…. Conversations that offer respite from the cares of this world.

Baseball nourishes body and soul: (Okay, we know that hot dogs aren’t the healthiest of food choices, but might the dietary gods grant dispensations for ballpark franks? I hope so.) The game actually evolved out of ancient and, in some cases, some fairly earthy, religious rites -- a glimmer of which I see at the beginning of each season in the spring, a time of hope, optimism, rebirth.

Now it’s October, and the Angels didn’t even make it to the playoffs this year. But my dad’s old team, the Giants, now of San Francisco, did and came back in thrilling style after dropping the first two games to the Cincinnati Reds, to make it into the National League Championship Series. Wish he were still around to share the joy. I lamented with my older son that fact that his Atlanta Braves lost in the National League Wild Card one-game playoff. On the other hand, our East Coast friend’s beloved Baltimore Orioles, after fourteen straight losing seasons, have played tough against the Yankees in the American League Division Series. When the Birds won in the twelfth inning last night to tie the series at two-all, I texted our friend, “Mazel tov.”

I can report on all this because this is what I’ve been doing all week: Playing hooky from the cares of work and the political campaigns that so concern me, from all of “real life,” I suppose, to watch baseball’s post-season dramas play out on TV. I’m having a heckuva good time, whether I’m too old for this or not.

Traveling to Europe with Children

We spent a year preparing for this summer’s trip to Europe with all our children and grandchildren, 22 strong.  Ranging in age from 5 to 11, the eight grandchildren had finally reached an age where we thought they could appreciate being in Amsterdam, where Toby and Hinke are raising their family.  Once we had planned five days of Cousin Camp Amsterdam, it was an easy decision to tack on three days in Paris, just a short train ride away.

We thought it was a hugely successful trip and I want to share what we’ve learned.  I hope these tips will be useful if you’re planning to travel with kids.

Travel Preparation:  The key to successful foreign with children is preparation.  If they have not been prepared for the trip, their attention won’t move outside a 10-foot radius of where they are at any given time.  During Cousin Camp 2011 at home, we had a world map, with flagged pushpins bearing each child’s and each adult’s name so we could see where everybody lived and how far it was to where the Amsterdam cousins lived.  Each child also got a postcard with their very own famous Amsterdam painting and a whole year to figure out what the picture was about and to send all of us an email explaining what the artist was trying to show us.  There were children’s versions of the Anne Frank story, a Dutch/English CD from the Amsterdam Sterlings and fill-in-the-blank worksheets about famous landmarks in Amsterdam and Paris.

Public Transportation:  One of our goals was to familiarize the kids with public transportation which they rarely use in our automobile-oriented U.S. culture.  We worked on how to identify bike lanes, pedestrian lanes, tram lines and auto lanes in Amsterdam.  We studied maps of the Paris Metro and prepared the kids for where we would get off and what line numbers and colors to follow for our next transfer.

Lessons with Grandma and Grandpa:  Every day in the late afternoon, we would gather up the children—in a nook in the hotel lobby or spread out on blankets in a park—for a lesson with G&G, usually focused on planned activities for the next day.  We discussed the dangers faced by Hollanders who helped bring food to Anne Frank’s family and analogies between the Nazis and bullying in school.  They learned how to say “Bonjour, Madame” and “Au Revoir, Monsieur” before leaving or after returning to the hotel, much to the delight of our French desk clerks.

Safety:  In our meetings, we practiced what to do if you get separated from the crowd and how to use your green silicon wrist band, bearing the words “Sterling Cousin Camp 2012,” along with Hinke’s cell phone number.

Hotels and Restaurants:  Small European hotel rooms are generally designed for two adults, sometimes with accommodations for a third person.  “Quads” for four people are

common in the big U.S. chains, but you have to look hard to find rooms for four in small European hotels.  But by working through one of the online travel sites like Trip Advisor and specifying Travel with Children, you can find such rooms in child-friendly small hotels.  With a group as big as ours, we couldn’t expect to pop into a nearby café or brasserie on the spur of the moment.  We generally had our lunch and dinner spots targeted ahead of time and tended towards family-friendly places our kids knew about in Amsterdam and Paris chains like Hippopotamus or Bistro Romain.

The Schedule:  There’s not much room for spontaneity with a big crowd that includes children.  A schedule with times to meet in the lobby and routes to follow on the tram or metro system will ensure you get to all the places you want to see.

Politics and Football

With the heat of political rhetoric spewing out of the convention halls and the passion of fall football in the air, I can’t help wondering about the source of our all-too-human need to defend our own tribe and to defeat the enemy at our gates.

I’m a sports fan, but I guess you’d call me a fair weather fan because I can ignore the victories and defeats of any of my favorite teams if I’ve been too busy to keep track of them for a while, especially if I don’t recognize many of the current players.  But once I’ve watched a couple of games, something switches inside me and it seems hugely important whether they win or lose.

There is something deep in our DNA that causes us to identify ourselves as part of a tribe.  Guess it goes back to our caveman days when we had to band together to fight off marauders—animal, human and everything in between.

Politics is like that.  When we feel threatened by a political group out to defeat our favorite candidates, the adrenaline starts flowing and we’re ready to pull out the old club to defend our brood.

I’m not saying this tribal instinct is good or bad.  I don’t think we could do anything to change it even if we wanted to.  But it’s worth remembering that the people in the other tribe have the same instinct toward self-preservation and the same visceral adrenaline response when they feel their village is about to be attacked.

The woods are going to be filled with Neanderthals between now and November 6^th. 

Lance Armstrong and Doping

Coming on the heels of several Major League Baseball suspensions, Lance Armstrong’s tacit admission to use of performance enhancing drugs during his spectacular cycling career has led to a massive media condemnation of cheaters.

Use of terms like “cheaters” and “cheating” appears to be favored by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which probably hired the same marketing experts who train our political candidates—experts in the use of inflammatory words to frame issues in a certain light in the public consciousness.

It’s hard to argue against the effort by professional sports organizations to do what they can to eliminate use of these steroids and hormones, which have serious health implications for the athletes later in life.  But the bitterness and acrimony towards these “cheaters” who are trying to get ahead at risk of their health strikes me as over the top.

In baseball, many of the players who have tested positive are young men from extremely poor families in Latin America who are risking everything for a chance to make enough money to help their families achieve some security.  And, it’s not as if these athletes haven’t continued to work hard to improve their natural talent.

The idea of a level playing field is a fantasy.  Most exceptional athletes had the good luck to be born with physical capabilities that permit them to excel at sports, probably including naturally high levels of testosterone.  We don’t penalize basketball players, after all, for their unfair advantage of being born tall.  Or the son of a professional athlete whose dad can afford to buy a batting cage for the backyard when the boy turns six.

What if we decided to level the playing field for college admission by prohibiting wealthy families from sending their kids to SAT prep classes or hiring consultants to work with them on their essays?

I’m not arguing against better and more frequent drug testing.  But I just don’t go along with subjecting these guys to public humiliation and shame for their bad judgment.

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Will You Support the President in 2013?

Depends who’s elected, you’re probably thinking to yourself. 

But, think about it.  Supporting a president you voted for is just getting what you want.  It doesn’t say anything about your commitment to a better future for our country.

I don’t mean to dismiss your heartfelt belief that one candidate is better than the other.  We should all do our best to understand the issues and decide who we want to support.  Then we should fight for what we believe in—speak out, work the precincts and contribute money if we can.

But the concept of a “loyal opposition” stands for the proposition that we can continue to work towards the type of government we want without demeaning the presidency and the country by attributing wickedness, stupidity or illegitimacy to the winner of the election.

When I was on executive staff of a Fortune 1000 company, the CEO had a rule.  Important decisions about the company’s direction (which product lines to pursue and which to drop, whether to restructure reporting lines of major units, etc.) would be made one of two ways: (i) exec staff consensus or (ii) CEO edict.  When exec staff was trying to reach consensus on one of these important decisions, people would fight like cats and dogs for their preferred outcome.  But the CEO had a rule:  Once the decision was made, everybody must agree not to sabotage it by complaining to their staff, delaying implementation or putting up road blocks.

I wish our American democracy had a rule like that.

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Cousin Camp 2012

Just returned from Cousin Camp Amsterdam, with a three-day finale in Paris.  Our big family of 14 adults and 8 children from 5 to 11.  So many highlights…

In Amsterdam, the block party at Toby and Hinke’s, Parents’ Night Out, Anne Frank, a sign for Grandma and Grandpa engineered by Hinke and visible from the Westerkerk tower, Nemo and the ship, a side trip to Madurodam, the wonderful canal boat trip hosted by Hinke’s parents Riky and Lambert, Vondelpark, Van Gogh and the Rijksmuseum.

In Paris, climbing the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Sainte Chappelle, cafes, Montmartre, pony rides in the Luxembourg Gardens, learning to ride the Metro and the long walk back to the hotel through the Tuileries Gardens and down the Champs Elysees, where the Arc de Triomphe was visible from our hotel.

But mainly it was about the family being together and the shared experience.  Three lost baby teeth, lessons every afternoon with G&G about the next day’s adventures, serious shopping with euros earned from online math lessons from the Kahn Academy,  all eight of them learning to say “Bonjour, Madame” or “Au revoir, Monsieur” to the desk clerks as we left the Paris hotel.

Precious memories.