"It's better to burn out than to fade away...." Neil Young
Baseball and I have a weird relationship. The first game I ever went to the team I rooted for, the Atlanta Braves, lost ten to five against the St. Louis Cardinals, and it was raining.
In 1991, I fell head over heels for her; all of Georgia did. I lived in Athens at the time, and the Braves were finally winning with players no one knew; but they were ours. From Sid Bream to Mark Lemke to Jeff Blauser to David Justice and Terry Pendleton, we loved them all. Ron Gant was my favorite. I grew up with his "30-30" poster plastered above my bed. He wasn't the best player in the league. He wasn't even the best player on the team, but he could run and hit for power; and his name sounded good over a loud speaker. I also remember the diagrams in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of his shattered leg.
In 1993, Gant wrecked on a motorcycle and his leg was mauled. Many feared he might not play baseball again, and that if he did, then he definitely wouldn't be the same player. I didn't understand it. I had seen disappointment in sports. The Braves reeled us in with their regular season magic in '91, '92, and '93, only to burn us like rejected lovers at the end of the year, but we always knew that could happen. Any kid who plays sports knows there's a chance to lose the game, the series, the championship, but what happened to Gant's leg was different.
I viewed him as a Tyrannosaurus Rex and that motorcycle accident was his meteor. When he came back in 1995 and played for the Reds, it seemed as strange as some scientist on the Discovery Channel explaining that parakeets had once been vellociraptors and T.Rexes. I couldn't follow the logic of him not wearing a Braves uniform, and it was strange to me that he and many of the other players from the '91 miracle team were not on the '95 team that finally won the World Series.
I know I'm being melodramatic, but when the Braves won the Series that year, the only thing I can compare it to is a couple who after years of trying finally becomes pregnant. My favorite player on that team was Chipper Jones.
His name just sounds like a baseball player, like he walked out of a cornfield. He takes hitting advice from his father. He switch hits like Mickey Mantle, and as Bobby Cox says, "It used to be fun watching him run the bases." He could field too.
Chipper fulfills every classic image of a ballplayer. He has all the hardware a ballplayer needs to earn a ticket into Cooperstown: an MVP, a Silver Slugger, a World Series ring, and a Rookie of the Year, and he's batting .402 as of last night.
I hope Chipper bats .400 for the year, not because of the significance of Ted Williams, the importance of numbers, or of where such a feat would place Chipper in terms of baseball lore, but because his chase of this number makes me rethink notions I made not only about baseball but life.
I'm not sure anymore if Neil Young was correct.
When I was twelve, I would pull on the faded red brim of my baseball cap and look towards the swingset, and if I squinted, the metal would twist into the railings of a dugout. Bobby Cox would signal from behind the teeter-totter that I was free to get on base however I wanted. I never bunted. I would toss the ball up into the air with my left hand, and then I raked for the driveway with a black, plastic bat. The ball would burn the grass on its way to the pavement and eventually the ivy. A ground ball straight up the middle meant that I was on first base and that Marquis Grissom moved to second. Then came Chipper, third in the lineup.
I would walk back from the oak tree that was first base and take my practice swings just like Chipper would. Toss the ball up in the air and swing for the ivy. I lost more balls in the ivy being Chipper Jones than I did being myself. I hit singles and put myself on base for him and Andruw Jones to drive me home. Chipper, Andruw, and I took the Braves to more championships than any Yankees dynasty.
I would even chart the season's statistics in spiral notebooks: RBIs, HRs, hits, BA, ERAs, saves, W-L, pennants, and championships. For a young kid from Georgia, my backyard was a cathedral of the imagination. It was what I wished out of the disappointment that was reality.
The Braves did not lose in my backyard to northern aggressors like the Phillies, the Twins, the Yankees, or the Blue Jays. In my backyard, the South won, and with each ball driven past the driveway into the ivy, feelings of inferiority fell by the wayside. It was like the difference in hearing the South in an Allman Brothers song as opposed to Lynryd Skynryd.
The problem is reality did not unfold in this way. I never played baseball. I got older, played other sports, went to college, and became a teacher. Andruw Jones became a Dodger. The Braves lost two World Series to the Yankees, and all the players from my childhood faded away. Watching individuals and teams in sports age is a lot like watching dreams die. How do Wendy, John, and Michael make it to a place of pirates, treehouses, crocodiles, and mermaids without Tinkerbell's pixie dust? The answer is they don't.
I said my love for baseball has been fickle. The strike in '94 showed me it wasn't just a game, but the '95 World Series and Chipper Jones reeled me back to the game. Steroids turned heroes into villains. If Batman ever pulled back his mask to reveal he is also the Joker, wouldn't we give up on the storyline out of sheer frustration and disbelief? The Braves slow fade from their '90s glory combined with the steroids scandal have put my love for this game to the test, and when I say "slow fade" what I'm really saying is that when I watch games now, sometimes I don't recognize my Braves anymore. Sometimes, I feel like a husband who rolls over one morning and wonders who his wife has become. When did her personality, her body, and her dreams all change? How did my wife become like Bob Dylan's singing voice? The answer is time.
Time changes us. Time ages us. Time reinvents us. Time forces us to survive, only to die, and quite frankly, I'm scared of all those things, but strangely, I find comfort in Chipper Jones' batting average.
.402, to my eyes, looks like hope and salvation from a fade into a stagnant, listless existence. Chipper's best years are supposed to be behind him, yet here he is chasing history, without asking to chase it. Here Chipper is hitting better than he ever has, and he didn't have to change his environment to rekindle the flame. He's still married to the same team, embracing all her wrinkles, added weight, and John Smoltz's baldness. He still loves her, and it seems so effortless, even though his body aches now more than any other time in his career.
In my mind, Ron Gant burned out. A motorcycle made a crater of his leg, he took a year rehabbing, and resurfaced in Cincinnati as a parakeet. Sudden changes force people to make sudden adaptations. Ron Gant left Atlanta, and I adopted Chipper Jones as my favorite player. The Braves were in the NLCS Gant's last year with them, and they won the World Series in Chipper's first, but the last decade as a Braves fan, combined with the steroids allegations, has been hard to watch with enthusiasm.
At times, watching the old regime of Smoltz, Glavine, and Chipper has been like watching Glaciers drift towards the equator, slowly melting into the oceans--their best years behind them. We watch them still caring about them, but something is missing. It's like we're laying in bed with them, and our backs are to them. We won't leave them to root for another team, but we don't get up excited every morning that they are ours. Birthdays used to be a big deal and so did anniversaries, but now we don't even buy playoff tickets. We watch from home, and we love them silently. The tomahawk chop rings hollow, that is until Chipper's .402....
It's like finding something that you thought was lost, and it shows me that maybe the fading away is not so awful if one learns patience and the art of appreciating that the melting of a glacier is as dangerously beautiful as the burning crash of a meteor.
Chipper, it's time someone proved Neil Young wrong.
Summer baseball, fall football, and church are pretty much the cliches that felt apart of my southern boyhood, and all those things taught me that most heroes are destined for tragedy: Moses couldn't reach the Promised Land. Jesus was crucified. Robert E. Lee surrendered. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Eric Zeier couldn't overcome Spurrier. Bill Clinton was impeached. And the Braves, well, the Braves pretty much lose (except for in '95) once autumn comes.