Play Ball!

GUEST POST By BARBARA BENGELS

I have to make sure that the Mets aren’t playing whenever I call my dear friend Anna Lea. She’s 92 and a late comer to baseball, has only been obsessed for the past thirty years. Some of my college students are equally engrossed, even asking if they could miss an occasional class which “interfered” with a game. (Of course, I said yes.)

Anna Lea, the author’s 92-year-old-friend, who shares her passion for the Mets

Why? Because I am thrust back in time to my childhood in Queens in the early ‘50s when I was too young to understand the game but knew undisputedly that the Dodgers were “my” team. I knew how to play stickball as well as any kid growing up near an empty lot, and I knew it was a rare treat to listen to the World Series on the radio during class (!) on those lazy afternoons when everything seemed to stop as Jackie Robinson or Duke Snider mounted the plate and a hush fell over the world.

October 4, 1955, when the Dodgers won their first World Series

Eventually it came time to put away my baseball cards but that love of baseball came back when my daughters became obsessed with the game– the same Mets team that Anna Lea loves.

My oldest daughter would invite her friends to watch in our small TV room. My job was to supply the treats but how could I avoid getting excited too? However, it was when I took my youngest daughter to a Mets game a few years later that I truly began to understand what baseball can mean to a child.

Watching TV in the 1980’s, when the author’s children were growing up.

There’s the obvious pleasure of sharing the excitement with a parent who can seem to come from another world as well as another generation. But there are other reasons why the child in us falls under the spell of baseball magic. Despite the length of the game, despite the fact that it fell on a Friday night after a long week of torturous first grade work, despite the fact that she had only the foggiest notion of the rules of the game, my seven-year-old took to it like, well, like someone with Queens in her genes.

Two of the author’s daughters, Jess and Amy, c. 1986 cheering on the Mets

Unlike movies or the theater, here she was able to chatter throughout the game.  Even she could read the signs encouraging the crowd to scream and shout. To a feisty child what greater thrill than to observe adults making fools of themselves—making “waves,” throwing paper airplanes (and, in the case of her otherwise very serious father, throwing peanut shells in her cascading curls.) If this weren’t pleasure enough, there was the piece de resistance—the never-ending stream of vendors selling their forbidden fruit.

Before we’d even reached our seats, we already had purchased those wonderfully deceptive frankfurters which smell so good but taste—otherwise. Soda had already spilled on her roll and catsup was already smeared in her hair—but the goodies alone assured us that we’d won a convert to the game.

No, Melinda didn’t love watching the Mets lose that night—but she quickly learned that “Take me out to the ballgame” must, of necessity, be followed by “Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks”—and what that really signified was over-indulgence: going to a game as a child means having it all: the special treats, the special attention, the unusual loosening of ordinary adult restraints.

In fact, days after the game, she was still questioning me, “Were we really allowed to make all that noise there?” In the end, we are all still children in the healthiest sense of the word if we can allow ourselves the right to make happy noises, if we can let ourselves go at a baseball game—regardless of our age. It returns us to a time when we can eat like a child, act like a child again—and believe, at least for nine innings, that the only real trouble in the world is a losing score.

Barbara Bengels is a full professor at Hofstra University in NY. She has published academic articles on writers as diverse as Jonathan Swift, Henry James, and H.G. Wells, as well as newspaper articles about mothering her four ( wonderful!) daughters. A favorite project was interviewing over fifty science fiction authors about their childhood.  Her most prized award was granted by the NY State Teachers’ Union, shared with her husband, in recognition of their service to children and teachers in public schools.