The Last Game of 1997

Hayes Bowman

Baseball will set you free. Believe it, my friends, my neighbors, my fellow screaming fans. I will explain. I wore my best 1940s businessman suit into Seattle City Court, looking for all the world like a patriotic young man out to help the war effort, which was since relocated to the Mideast for cleaner television shots, and not a man that in a drunken rage would topple a metermaid's golf cart and scream at a terrified, trapped, scraping at the plastic flaps like a mouse in a sandwitch bag cop. There are formalities that need to be observed in court, because the law is old and long, and just as the cops will pull you over for failing to signal within 75 feet of a marked intersection, so in court can you be jailed without a thought for contempt or any of a thousand like egregious violations of a city code so complex no one knows it all, city lawyers like bees in a hive exchanging bits of information through dances around late-night takeout food in cold offices.

It's important to know your judge. If you're involved in a baseball-related crime, and if you're like me, all of your crime is baseball related in some way, you have to know if your judge is someone who can tell you the difference between Orlando Mercado and Orlando Merced, or if they like the local team (in Seattle, we're lucky in that baseball is on the rise), or if they think sports fans are all drunken slobs who pick fights with cops, like me. Because you don't ever want to go to trial. It's a bad thing.

I've taken to looking the judge right in the eye and saying "It started with a baseball game" and I watch their eyes. Watch their eyes, because they're hardened, tired of listening to an endless queue of people who don't think they have to drive on the roads if they're only getting their mail, the sheepish wifebeaters alleging they've been driven to it by wifes who nag and poke, Communists, vagrants, career alcoholoics, shoplifters, petty, stupid criminals, and they're tired of it. If their eyes light up at all at the mention of baseball, even a little, you've got them. If they're dead, if their eyes narrow, the proper tact is to abandon baseball, act the innocent dragged along by hooligans, a country bumpkin, easily duped into whatever it is you did that time.

"It started with a baseball-" I started, shifting in my suit, and I didn't even have to go any further. The judge smiled, just at the corners of his mouth, and I knew it was over. I went on "-game. It was the third game of the playoffs, and I'd begged time off work, and at the game I met up with my friends and we started eating cheap dogs and drinking terrible beer at five dollars a Dixie cup. Great game, Moyer baffled 'em, and then he got injured and I couldn't watch. The bullpen got shelled, just shelled, gave up run after run, and I started to boo and people were throwing shit at me, pegging me in the head with wax cups, peanuts, loose change, anything they could throw, because we're always supposed to root for our team, even if they're giving up run after run, and when the game was over I sat on my bench and wailed, and a King County cop told me to get up and get out, now.

Next Page