“They just came back and beat us. That happens sometimes.” – Joe Maddon
I.
Hank Aaron was born in 1934, grew up in the Depression, lived through World War II, started his professional baseball career in the Negro Leagues, lived through the Korean War, lived through the Civil Rights movement, lived through the Vietnam War, broke the long-standing major league record for lifetime home runs while receiving racist death threats (and while also setting the record shown here, which has withstood all assaults, chemically-aided and otherwise), lived through the entirety of the Cold War, lived to see his major league record for lifetime home runs broken amidst an aura of cynicism and disbelief, and is currently living through the Iraq War and the possible collapse of the worldwide economy into the kind of economic crisis that hasn’t been seen since his earliest years. He has lived though the most tumultuous three-quarters of a century in human history, yet until last night he had never lived to see (or to sleep through, depending on how late he’s staying up these days and his level of interest in the American League) the thing that prompted Joe Maddon to say “That happens sometimes.” In the phenomenal lifetime of Hank Aaron, a playoff team had never rallied to win after falling behind by seven or more runs.
II.
I do not have cable television, but I subscribe to XM radio, so my connection to my favorite team in their playoff run has been an oddly old-fashioned one. I can either go out to a saloon (OK, a bar) and watch, which I have done a couple times, both to ill effect, or I can stay at home and listen to Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione tell me what’s happening. For most of their playoff games I have enhanced my vision of the game by keeping score in my writing journal, trying not to think about the crushing line from the Vin Scully-esque announcer for the Springfield Isotopes, who ends a description of a play by saying “. . . if you’re scoring at home. And if you are, you’re loneliness saddens me.” So last night I wrote out all the names and within minutes of the opening pitch I was again darkening in rectangles for the Rays, my way of signifying that the batter in question had rounded the bases and scored. By the middle of the game I had flung my notebook across the room, leaving my scoring of the game unfinished. I still listened, but found myself nodding off a couple times on the couch. Joe Castiglione’s voice had turned sour. There was no crowd sound behind him.
“This is a fucking funeral,” I said to my wife.
“It is completely 100% over, done,” my old friend Matt, from Greenfield, MA, said at about the same time, in an email.
III.
The Depression began with the stock market crash in 1929, the same month we’re in now as the stock market again careens and plummets. October. A couple weeks before the crash in 1929, the Cubs forged a seemingly insurmountable 8–0 lead over the Philadelphia A’s by the seventh inning of game 4 of the World Series, virtual locks to knot the series at two games apiece.
But a lot can happen in an inning. It was a sunny day. The man in the above card, to Hank Aaron’s left, a man who would go on to become a member of the Hall of Fame, lost two fly balls in the sun in the bottom of the seventh, nurturing an A’s comeback so improbable and unusual in its magnitude that it would not need to be referenced for 79 years.
IV.
My wife has been very busy lately with graduate school, an internship, and a demanding job. There hasn’t been much time for . . . relations. Even on the rare occasion when she hasn’t been at or traveling to or from one of her many responsibilities she’s either been exhausted or stressed out or, most often, both. But last night, as the awful top of the seventh inning was drawing to a close and I was throwing dirt on the moribund Red Sox and wondering how the Celtics were going to do this year, my wife let me know that there was an unusual lull in her schedule.
“Do you want to sit here and listen to them lose or . . . , ” she said.
There are very few things that I would choose over the “or . . . ” option, but one of those things, most of the time, would be to follow the Red Sox in the playoffs. But a loophole in that system of prioritization occurred to me. I am, in general, a short pitch-count kind of guy.
“What the hell,” I thought. “The most I’ll miss is an inning.”
As I rose off the couch, Pedroia knocked in the first run of the game for the Red Sox. We have a small apartment, so I could still sort of hear the radio call while “or . . . ” was happening in the bedroom. I could not hear words, but I could hear Joe Castiglione’s voice rising again and again. Either the Red Sox were rallying or Joe Castiglione had abandoned the call of the game to pay tribute, for my benefit, to fellow broadcaster Phil Rizzuto’s work midway through “Paradise By the Dashboard Light.”
I got back to the actual words, and not merely the music, of the radio call by the ninth inning, the score knotted, and heard Masterson get out of a jam by inducing a double-play. I heard Youkilis reach on a two-out two-base error. I heard Bay get intentionally walked, just like the left-fielder who he replaced would have been. I heard Drew send one over the head of Gross, Joe Castiglione’s voice cracking orgasmically, as if he’d never seen such a thing in all his years.
Cardboard Gods 
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