Going, Going, Gone!-tology

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A speculation: the most common result of cracking Don DeLillo’s Underworld is that the reader finishes the brilliant 50-or-so page prologue and sort of gives up after that. Underworld, along with other tomes like Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, and Ulysses, is a common culprit of inflicting a certain trepidation in readers. “Big-Book-Trepidation Syndrome.” BBTS is a very real condition that paralyzes otherwise competent and intellectually curious readers from diving into the great masterpieces of world literature. But Underworld, unlike these other books, offers up an aforementioned prologue that functions jointly as a standalone story. Readers with chronic BBTS should count themselves lucky that this prologue is by far the best section of Underworld (although J. Edgar Hoover at the masquerade ball is, alone, worth reading further). It also happens to be one of the greatest pieces of fiction about American sports, specifically baseball, ever written.

The story, which takes place in and around the Polo Ground Fields, home of the former New York Giants baseball team, on October 3, 1951, recounts Bobby Thomson’s famed “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” which handed the team the pennant over their bitter rivals and opponents on the day, the Brooklyn Dodgers. The way DeLillo writes about day is decidedly historical. The juxtaposition of the size of a baseball with the metaphorical weight of the 20th century. J. Edgar Hoover attends the game in DeLillo’s telling, and receives new intel that the Soviets performed hydrogen bomb tests. Cold War looming in the midst of bedlam. Young boy who caught the ball (Cotter Martin) juxtaposed with Hoover. The minor vs. the major. Teams that don’t exist anymore duking it out. The present vs. the past and future. The hope of the 50’s is a ball-game, within which the seeds of future discord are sewn. The present as past and future. When I talk to people about this story, I always mention the home run ball as literally being history. Entire micro-economies are fueled by this sort of memorabilia. My deceased uncle had an entire room dedicated to this shit: baseball cards, signed Browns helmets, miniature reconstructions of Cleveland sports stadiums. American (male) fantasies fueling reality, making it bearable, willing it to be reality. Before Aaron Judge hit his 62nd home run of the year, auction houses were offering two million in advance to whoever caught the ball. An offer Cotter Martin, or even Hoover, couldn’t refuse.

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The reason I bring up the prologue of Underworld is to (1) say that I similarly have, and always have had, a relationship to sports (specifically attending games in my home city of Cleveland) that involves a kind of romanticization/historicization which makes the event in question much more important than it is in any rational metric of actuality and (2) because we are in the midst of the MLB playoffs, baby, and the Cleveland Guardians (neé Indians) are, for the moment, in it. And I want that to mean more than it does.

The scene: it’s noon on Friday October, 7th. The Guardians are playing against the Tampa Bay Rays at a hilarious hour (small market teams=non-primetime TV slots). The Cleveland economy will not be doing its part in the world economy today given how many people have seemingly taken off work to fill the stands. I guess you could send some emails between innings. Shane Bieber, with his boyish charm, takes the mound against the Rays’ leadoff hitter Yandy Diaz. Fireworks have already been deployed and the atmosphere is electric. “Icky Thump” by the White Stripes booms from the stadium speakers. Bieber hangs a slider and Diaz hits the shit out of the ball to all-star second baseman Andrés Gimenez of Venezuela, who gets knocked on his back while fielding it, getting right back up and throwing him out. The crowd goes wild. The former cop, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba, sitting next to my dad and I, belts, “VAMOS ANDRÉSITO!!!” Something is happening and I am a part of it.

Cleveland is always thrown under the bus, culturally speaking. Our ex-mayor Frank Jackson called us the “butthole of America,” incredibly. Our river burned in the 80’s. The more hipster choice for classic Cleveland moment, the thing that exemplifies its combination of parodic sense of grandiosity and tragicomedy, is the balloon disaster of 1986, which Cleveland-based poet Caryl Pagel wrote about Sebaldianly in her essay collection Out of Nowhere Into Nothing. And then, of course, there’s the New Yorker Flyover Country cover, which bluntly states that there is nowhere (meaningful) between New York and LA, except, like, Mt. Rushmore. I think that this is true on a felt level, even though it’s false and demeaning. The only indisputable capital “H” history happening in Cleveland is a product of its economy, contributing industrial infrastructure to manufacturing on a global scale that undergirds just about everything. There was also a sense of History occurring in Cleveland when LeBron James was here, with the concomitant media attention and barrage of marketing efforts directed toward our city by Nike. We seemed to matter.

Growing up, professional sports are what gave me a sense of History and the outside world. I’d do occasional trips to Chicago with my family, and go on vacations to Florida, but outside of that I had no idea. Sports team logos represented a different world of possibilities to me, and when, say, the Wizards came to town to play the Cavs, that was a real encounter with Washington, D.C. for me. I marveled at the New York Yankees when they took the field. Growing up in the suburbs of a relatively small city, I was able to participate in History, its march, through a particular kind of fantasy. 

Back when I listened to Chapo Trap House, I remember Matt Christman saying something about London feeling ahistorical, like history had left it behind. I understood what he meant. I’m not sure where History happens, if it’s a linear thing that can be mapped out temporally and geographically, or if it’s something that randomly emerges here or there seemingly out of nowhere. I think it’s a combination of both. 2022 isn’t “happening” here. Aspects of 2022 are integrated into the network of the city, but it’s running on code that was programmed many years ago. The demands of the economy haven’t necessitated its complete change. If anything, it attempts to keep up with the times, adapting to logics imposed on it from wherever History has set up its throne. Cleveland has its own history within History. But still, undoubtedly Historical moments can emerge in any histories, and I’d argue that the difference between a lower-case h and an upper-case H can be phenomenological rather than objective, specifically via a fantastical lens, a lens that you have to craft if you’re like me and have to feel like you’re a part of History. Professional sports have been one concrete arena in which I’ve used this lens. Whenever there is a professional sports game in Cleveland, it is without a doubt the largest gathering of people in the city. There is energy there to be harnessed into my historicizing machine (brain). I need to make things matter more than they do.

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The Guardians won game 1 because of a José Ramirez two-run home run. 2-1, the final score. A pitching duel. But I didn’t get an Underworld moment. I’ve always wanted to go to a baseball game where there was a walkoff hit. 

I sat through game 2 for 5 hours. 14½ innings tied at 0-0. Eventually, in the bottom of the 15th, Guardians’ rookie Oscar Gonzalez hit a towering home run off of former Cleveland Cy Young winner Corey Kluber to give us a walk-off win. That was History, and I don’t care what anyone else has to say about it. I’d imagine that a few rows away, a manufacturing CEO got word that a company in China was found to be replicating their product and they needed to figure out a gameplan for how to deal with that. Not exactly J. Edgar Hoover, but still. Donovan Mitchell was there, that counts for something.

To whoever got that home run ball: I hope you cherish it.