The Last Slow Dance
By Charles Deemer
Originally
appeared in Northwest magazine
THE PORTLAND Urban Minor League Baseball Experience begins at the New Moon Tavern before the game. It begins in Fred Vranizan's long tunnel across the street from the stadium, Westside, the New Moon Tavern, where pennants hanging from the ceiling cite championship years for the Beavers, where the walls are papered with superstars from Ruth to Mays, where behind the bar autographed baseballs and Louisville sluggers are found instead of go-go girls. With luck the temperature is dropping below eighty outside, though still warm enough to draw brow-beads and to whet the thirst. And if you're thirsty the Baseball Experience begins an hour before batting lineups are exchanged at homeplate, begins with a beer and a not to Fred, the man with the gray handle-bar moustache. Slap down a quarter, get back a glass of beer, a dime and a pass good for half-rice admission to the game. What happens next is up to you, baseball fans. If you want to have a quiet beer, Fred obliges. If you want to talk, and especially talk baseball, Fred's ready. Perhaps you have a question: "Say, when did DiMaggio go up anyway?" Fred refers the question to the guy two barstools down and before the head on your beer drops, the whole place is talking baseball. At the stadium the players warm up with fungoes, and at the New Moon Tavern the fans do the same.
The New Moon is long and narrow, with entrances both on Burnside and opposite, a tavern barely wide enough to stick an aisle between the booths and the bar. Into this tunnel are stuffed relics of baseball's history. The décor is not without its recognition of the hometown Beavers but the general atmosphere emphasizes baseball as game and tradition. Sitting in the close quarters of the New Moon Tavern is rather like being bound in a bubblegum wrapper with all two hundred baseball cards you saved as a kid. Breathe too heavily and overhead a 1906 championship pennant may flutter and tickle your bald spot.
To move across the street to the stadium is to become aware of how baseball has changed. But also of how it hasn't changed, despite rumors which would have modern baseball without traditional elements. If you happened to get Fred started at the New Moon, no doubt you heard that baseball went downhill with the expansion of the majors. In the "old days" even a losing team had its national star, as the Pirates had Ralph Kiner. Each team, before Brooklyn became Los Angeles and Boston became Milwaukee became --- poof!--Atlanta, in the days of baseball stability each team had its regular lineup, a batting order of personalities who stayed around long enough to become known to the fans. Today a player must wear mod clothes or marry a Playmate of the Month to become a sports-page personality. In the "old days" every regular on the team, including reliefers and pinch hitters, was well-known to the hometown fans from prolonged exposure. What kind of exposure do the Beavers get when they lose their catcher by a long-distance phone call in the middle of a ballgame?
Moving to the ballpark, then, one is aware of a radical change. Out on the green carpet (not grass) you will find the hometown heroes, fans, but who can say how many will still be in town next season? A question to contemplate over a paper cup of beer. Don't think the atmosphere has changed because we've left the likes of DiMaggio and Musial on the walls of the New Moon to enter the minor leagues. It's not that. When I was a kid and an Angel fan, Chuck Conners and Steve Bilko were every bit as tall as Gil Hodges and Ted Williams. We speak now of the gods and had Aries changed his allegiance from War to Peace overnight, the Greeks would have become atheists.
But it's still too hot to compare superstars to gods. Beer and relaxation in the sun, a hot dog and peanuts for dinner ---this is the direction our Baseball Experience takes. At homeplate stands a man in blue, representing the Establishment, and baseball remains baseball because someone in the stands is booing.
A small crowd has turned out to welcome the Beavers home from a roadtrip --- an embarrassingly small crowd, it must be admitted, of under a thousand. Die-hard Beaver fans? Not entirely, although the rooters audibly are present. Others are simply baseball fans out to see a game, any game, because baseball is baseball. At this juncture, if the reporter may indulge in lofty speculation, baseball ceases to be religion (as in gods and superstars and the worship of personalities, the baseball of the "old days") and becomes psychotherapy. To throw the change-up pitch: The Portland Urban Minor League Baseball Experience is a game, indeed, but it's a game in which the fans do most of the playing.
The therapeutic value of baseball is that it is slow. SLOW! This is significant. Why, baseball may be the last slow dance left in America! Consider the pitcher's deliver: for three or four seconds the pitcher contemplates the signal from the catcher, for a few more seconds his arms slowly begin the windup, then one leg lifts, the upper body leans back for leverage and comes forward again, the pitching arm whipping the ball to the plate, a sequence which takes another several seconds to complete. It takes the pitcher some ten seconds to throw the ball, which more often than not is taken by the batter for a ball or strike. This, baseball fans, is the most action you'll see in the net half-minute or more.
Which is baseball's advantage! Where else can one daydream for minutes on end and very likely miss none of the action? The answer, of course, is when watching television, which has become baseball's greatest rival. But the television set is at home, garrison also of the telephone. And telephones ring! Baseball, in contrast, provides unique relief from speedy technologyland. Baseball is a vacation close to home, a trout stream in the city, an inexpensive psychotherapy.
Only adult fans are stretched out on the analyst's couch, however. Kids do at the ballpark what they do everywhere else - they progressively sit still, wiggle, make faces, laugh, shout, scream, play tag, and wrestle. Adults do exactly the same, in a manner of speaking, but such carryings-on for them are quite out of workaday character. The ballpark permits what the office does not - leisure and playful antics. While all spectator sports allow something of the latter, baseball is unique in being performed at such a relaxing - at such a painstakingly slow! - pace. Throw away your watches when you venture out to support the Beavers because the baseball therapist can't tell time.
Why therapy? Someone must be asking. The reply will be in cultural terms. Just as baseball is tranquilizing relief from the adult's busy world of making (to use a moot term) "a living," and is special relief in contemporary leagues where there are few known personalities to elicit the prolonged worshipping instincts, so also is baseball a game played BY THE FANS, a game which lets the fans relieve cultural frustrations in culturally harmless ways. The New Moon Tavern is a cathedral but the ballpark is something closer to a convention hall for New Politics. Baseball fans are the loudest radicals in Portland. They are notorious for being anti-Establishment, which is to say they prefer self-righteous anarchy to the lawful order of the umpire. There must be a strong rebellious trait in the American character, for by the fifth inning adult fans who gave earlier innings only listless attention - such fun to daydream! - suddenly get to their feet to yell, "Throw the bum out!" Oh, it's great fun! What is ironic is that the Baseball
Experience, being space-bound, is not translated into cultural terms outside the ballpark. In fact, a father who last night thumbed an umpire today will reprimand his son for delivering a similar salutation to a college president. And therein lies the therapeutic aspect of baseball: baseball as dream, as wish-ful-fillment. The umpire is everyman's boss and booing him wins a promotion. Of course, this gets acted out only within the space-bound ballpark, for beyond the bleachers very different games are played. Once outside the stadium the fan is back in…the Real World (it's been called).
But for a few hours we can watch baseball on a warm night in Portland. We wear masks, we dance, we relax and wait for the umpire to elicit our disfavor, at which time we cry out for justice; we play out the festival that has made baseball America's most traditional and popular sport. We wage fun and war together, and may the umpire help the Tucson fan who takes a seat behind the Beaver dugout. Through the evening we sip beer or pop, we chew peanuts and hotdogs, we rid our lungs of urban contamination, and between innings we send the kids racing off with their winning ticket stubs to collect prizes. It's baseball! And if that last curve dropped low and inside - we saw it ourselves from behind the third base - then let's let the umpire know it, fans, let him hear it! We shall overcome!
Yes, baseball fans, up on our feet to COMPLAIN! Why we're every bit as rebellious as Che Guevera and don't have to pay the social consequences. Baseball is our dance, the last slow dance in America. the Portland Urban Minor League Baseball Experience is a grand ol' game for warm nights in the grand ol' Pacific Northwest. LET'S HEAR IT, FANS! PLAY BALL!!
A good rhubarb deserves a relaxed last inning, agreed? The New Moon Tavern is the place to go before the game because it's a gallery of baseball and sets the mood. After the game, however, the baseball fan may prefer to go where many of the ballplayers themselves go, to The Bullpen Tavern, which is eastside across from the stadium. Behind the bar is John Hunt, a young man in Bermudas who might have belonged to a fraternity in school and played some ball himself. John's very cordial and knows enough baseball to have his own radio sports show.
We talk about the game for a moment and then decide it's time to come down. Beside the jukebox a pretty blonde in a miniskirt is fluttering with more appeal than a 1906 championship pennant. The New Moon's clientele is largely middle-aged and over, but here the crowd is collegiate and athletic. The Bullpen swings and the fact that players come here suggests a thesis: today a young first baseman would rather goggle at a pretty blonde than at an autographed picture of Lou Gehrig. So much for the "good old days."
Our Portland Beavers lost again, fans, but they'll be back tomorrow and will win, we keep the faith that they'll win. Some of us will be back to support them. A new game! But meanwhile, well, how about drawing another mug, John? The atmosphere is not exactly pure baseball at The Bullpen but the place swings, a pretty blonde is swaying by the jukebox, and there's nothing outside but - the Real World (its been called).