Smoke on the Water

On the plus side, it was harder to see how few people were here.

The trip we've been calling Canadian Fourth is upon us, beginning this evening with the Connecticut Tigers (masquerading for tonight's '90s Throwback Night as the long-gone Norwich Navigators) facing the Staten Island Yankees. Or at least nominally facing—a thick fog obscured much of the action, causing outfielders to literally throw up their hands (not throw up in their hands, mind you) when considering the prospect of catching a fly ball. The start of the game was delayed about an hour and half because of wet conditions on the field, and this gave Rob and me plenty of time to discuss things like patriotism. More after the jump.

This trip is called Canadian Fourth for an obvious reason: we'll be spending the Fourth of July in Toronto, watching the Blue Jays and the Mets. Apparently, there have been some jingoistic complaints in New York that it's unpatriotic of Major League Baseball to schedule any game in Canada on the Fourth—the Blue Jays should always be on the road then and consider themselves darned lucky to be visiting the land of the free. And how awful for the Mets to miss the holy day in the homeland!

Putting aside the sheer dumbness of this—Does Toronto get to play at home every July 1? That's Canada Day in Canada, for those of you unaware that other countries have holidays, too; and for that matter, how many Mets are not US citizens?—let's briefly consider the larger questions. Such as: What does baseball have to do with patriotism anyway? Why is America celebrated at the average baseball game with not only the singing of our awkward national anthem but often also the singing of the bombastic and fatuous "God Bless America" and a between-innings salute to a military veteran? (I will leave aside the utterly depressing question of whether today's America is anything worth celebrating.) 

I am sympathetic to the argument that baseball is uniquely Americans, and so its virtues and the country's identity are specially intertwined. Celebrating baseball and celebrating America go hand in hand. But why does this itself entail ostentatious and frequently coercive expressions of fealty? I know what I am and what I value. What does singing a bastardized British drinking song with a stadium full of strangers have to do with that? Nothing—unless, you know, you dig kicking it Nuremberg style, as so many Americans seem to these days.

If we really want to celebrate the American values that are integral to baseball and vice versa, I think we should sing "This Land Is Your Land," which Woody Guthrie famously wrote because he'd had enough of "God Bless America." We could maybe also include "America the Beautiful"—starting, as Ray Charles did but the Boy Scouts do not, with the lyrics, "Oh beautiful, for heroes proved /  In liberating strife, / Who more than self, our country loved, / And mercy more than life." I'll take that over bombs bursting in air any day. And between innings we should honor teachers, judges, labor organizers, and the occasional soldier alike. Do I stand alone?

An LGA landing light protected by barbed wire and some colorful cloth

So, anyway, this trip. We began immediately southwest of LaGuardia Airport—a place they can't tear down soon enough if you ask me and anyone else who's been there ever—at the aptly named Landing Lights Park, which is actually a series of green spaces that host a sequence of said landing lights. They're otherwise poorly developed, possibly deliberately. Should you go there, do not fuck with the lights.

This ain't no Mudd Club.

Following a peppy and plausible limewater-drenched lunch at Tortilleria Nixatamal, we headed northeast, into the rain. We didn't get caught in this mess, but the downpour was near biblical at times. Things cleared up enough for an actual baseball game to be played, one featuring plenty of defensive miscues, self-defeating hotdoggery on the basepaths, and a diminutive umpire. After the Yankees broke a 2–2 tie in the top of the ninth, Connecticut capitalized on subpar pitching and defensive ineptitude to pull out an improbable 4–3 victory, before the forty or so of us who were left. Tigers, I'm telling you, God done shed his grace on thee.