It’s apparently the end of baseball season: Even as I write, millions of Americans are gearing up to watch the World Series [Of America Only], during which rival cohorts of swollen, tights-clad men with cudgels will parade around sandy rhombi.

One last hurrah these quasi-gentle giants will have, before they all catch H1N1 and are reduced to ague-wracked skeletons. But what a hurrah t’will be. The winners will literally eat the losers alive, and, if we’re lucky, the Gods Of The Games will be pleased enough to let Susan Boyle sing our National Anthem, perhaps alongside T-Pain…

I lose myself in reverie. The point of this essaylette is that John “Touched The Sky” Updike was the only person whose words have ever made me truly give a dang about sports.

Now, I may have railed against Updike sometimes for focusing too intently on the more boring facets of life in America, such as sports and tedious divorces. But Mr. Updike was truly a wonderworker, all told, as his cornucopic corpus of soul-lifting fiction, nonfiction, sportswriting, and poetry attests. He even wrote a story about prehistoric mammals (and divorce).

What’s more, he even made me love baseball. For about five seconds.

So now, Gentle Reader, in honor of baseball’s icy death at the hands of November, in honor of its various color-coordinated, beer-sodden teams & players, and most of all in honor of Mr. Updike, who is (presumably still) dead, I present a snippet from King Kaufman’s lovely Salon.com encomium of John-Updike-The-Sportswriter:

Six-thousand words later he’d summed up Williams’ career and that final day at Fenway, capped, of course, by the Splendid Splinter hitting a home run in his final at-bat. That inspired Updike to write the most famous thing ever written about the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. It’s the last sentence of this passage describing the aftermath of Williams’ final swing:

Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

I was talking to my friend P. V. recently about biopics. We tossed around different names of historical and musical and political and otherwise-notable figures about whom movies have not, to our combined knowledge, been produced. We settled on a few top choices.

Mrs. Margaret Thompson was not one of the potential movie-protagonists. But, rereading a passage from The Gentle Art of Smoking, a short, bizarre book about tobacco (mostly pipe-making and the making of “flake,” the baklava-esque tobacco preferred by pipe-enthusiasts in the mid-1950s), I was struck by how odd a scene Thompson’s funerary march would make if filmed. It’s right out of Fellini, or maybe Kaufman. Or maybe Sophie Barthes, whose Cold Souls juggles just the right mix of wtf-is-this-really-the-real-Paul-Giamatti?, gallows humor, and monkey’s-paw super science.

Presently presents the author, the case of the snorting ridiculousness of Mrs. Thompson:

The most notable female snuff taker of this period, as Mr. H. V. Morton pointed out in The Ghosts of London, was Mrs. Margaret Thompson, who died in 1776 and whose devotion to snuff is made clear in her will. She directed that the bottom of her coffin be filled with unwashed handkerchiefs and a sufficient quantity of the best Scotch snuff to cover her body. The six greatest snuff takers in the parish were to act as bearers and, instead of black, they were to wear snuff-colored beaver hats. Snuff was to be strewn before the funeral procession and carried in boxes by her pallbearers for their refreshment as they went along.

—The Gentle Art of Smoking, Alfred H. Dunhill, 1954.

From “Taxing, a Ritual to Save the Species” in the New York Times:

The more closely knit an animal society is, and the more interdependent its members, the higher the rate of taxation. Among bell miner birds of Australia, for example, pairs of breeding adults are assisted at the nest by several youthful helpers, usually male. The helpers provision the couple’s fledglings with a steady supply of lerp, sugary casings secreted by plant-sucking insects.

Let me pause here to appreciate not only lerp itself—a most vivid and terrifying substance, “secreted by plant-sucking insects,” as opposed to, say, plant-tickling or plant-massaging insects—but also the men and women of Noblest Science who venture forth to learn of the lerp, to love the lerp.

Our article continues:

And though some scientists had wondered whether lerp wasn’t basically a junk food, offered up to the young bell miners as much for show as for substance, researchers report in the March issue of Animal Behaviour that lerp is, in fact, as important to the fledglings’ growth as is the meatier arthropod prey supplied by their parents. By all evidence, the helper birds are honestly “paying to stay,” trading a valuable currency for the right to remain within the aggressively guarded precincts of a bell miner breeding colony, with the hope of better times and personal propagation opportunities ahead.

The only response I have upon reading of colonies of lerpers is:

FUCK yeah, cilantro. You know how humans do.

We may or may not pay taxes because our ancestors shared the mammalian equivalent of lerp, but we definitely share salsa now (in part) because of you, cilantro. You and your leafy green cool refreshing mintacular steez.

From Judy Battista’s “For Cardinals and Steelers, Differing Pasts and Expectations,” New York Times, 21 January, 2009:

The Cardinals could be excused for letting their giddiness overwhelm them a little longer after earning their first trip to the Super Bowl. They have spent nearly their entire history being a team apart, peripatetic and sometimes even a little pathetic. Nobody wears vintage Cardinals jerseys, because, like wine turned to vinegar, the vintage was always pretty sour. That makes their unexpected arrival this year all the sweeter.

Now, I understand that sour wine is nasty, and that the Cardinals are nasty; ergo the analogical function of the metaphor is complete (nasty old Cardinal jersey : remembered-sense of Cardinal’s nastiness, in NFL :: old, cheap wine, turned to vinegar : felt-sense taste of vinegary sour nastiness, in mouth).

But the analogy I have just now reconstructed is not actually present in Battista’s insane simile. She says: (vintage Cardinal jersey : wine[?] :: vinegar : sourness, both as nasty prior experience and as felt-sense of sour taste in mouth), which makes no sense at all. You can’t wear a liquid, at least not for long, at least not so long as you want to be a pro baller.

And the Cardinals, according to her, never were “wine.” They never had a golden era or Namath or Joe Montana or Plaxico; ergo they never had “vintage” jerseys which could “sour.” So the thesis of her simile, that the Cardinals have a “sour vintage,” is broken, an example of overreaching not just in rhetoric (using a simile that doesn’t make sense in place of a sturdier species of description) but also in sports history—by her own account of it.

Further, to reconstruct any football franchise’s past failures as “sour” is a leap into culinary metaphor that I am not totally willing to make. We sometimes describe as “bitter” those past experiences that we regret; we certainly do describe positive remembered events and subsequent affect as “sweet.” I have even thought of some experiences as “hot” or as having left me “cold.”

But sour is tricky; I think of Chinese food, lemons, and lemon-scented cleaning fluids. I certainly don’t think “sour” is a bad way to describe failures and the feelings failures engender; it’s only that a fallen franchise or vintage or pedigree as “sour” is a specific extension of this (new) notion of failure as sour. Fallen, sour, once-gold, tarnished…

Again, we’d need our real clement, the franchise (or whatever it is) to have been positive, powerful, or successful at some point in the past. The souring describes a process. Wine is sweet; wine gone sour is vinegar, a new substance. This alchemy of liquid (wine —> vinegar [ —> mother-of-vinegar { —> mold}]) mirrors the alchemy of the franchise (Michael Jackson c. Thriller —> okaaay, so he likes monkeys, music kind of falling off 90s MJ —> crazy bankrupt toucher MJ) which mirrors the linguistic process by which we arrive at a description of that franchise ([{good —> } neutral —> ] failed —> gone bad —> gone bitter or been tarnished or bruised or rusted —> “soured”).

I would add that this process even mirrors my reading of Battista’s metaphor, which went something like: (bad simile —> wait, didn’t she just say the Cardinals were never any good? —> “peripatetic” makes me think of feet, sweaty feet, gross, sour —> what a wack sentence; I don’t really know what she intended to say —> let me try to sort this out).

Perhaps if we could wear wine (or vinegar), I would have less of an issue with Battista’s surely little reflected-upon choice. Perhaps I am missing something innate in wine or in the Cardinals (tannins? sulfites?) that would connect the various clements in the metaphor, creating a happy new association. But for now, I think of sweaty, sweat feet and bitter-sour vinegar, and I don’t for a moment wonder why I avoid football just exactly as I avoid the gout, because, like the gout, football is a painful medical condition. Or something like that.

Says an actual sports fan, friend and fellow writer Jake of Bread City:

That metaphor makes no sense whatsoever, and you’ve pretty much nailed down all the angles on its complete terribleness… Just more reason that this writer is a total moron: The Cardinals actually had some of the best jerseys in the 90s, and any true fan knows that nothing gets you more points than an old jersey that proves you’ve been on board since before your team was good. Sigh.

Jake also recommends that we would-be sports-deconstructors check out Straight Cash Homey Dot Net, a daily review of sports-jersey culture. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be looking at here; the site mostly consists of snapshots of men wearing jerseys, showing off their Local Sports Franchise Enthusiasm, or, as I plan to call it from now on, their “Lospofram.” Sounds like a heart drug.