This was actually only the second time in my life I
have ever attended a stadium game. My first took place when I was maybe 10
years old and my best friend’s dad took me along with their family to see a
game at the now-demolished Shea Stadium. That one time was enough to make me a
lifelong fan of the New York Mets.
But baseball fandom is a variant expression of love,
and love adopts many forms that embrace different people differently. And
thanks to the friend who gifted me the ticket to last week’s game in Taipei, I
am now a dedicated fan of yet another team. Well, two other teams. OK, maybe
three other teams in addition to the Mets. (I’m allowed to cheer for more than
one, right? Like any New Yorker, I’ll stand up for the Yankees when they’re
doing well. And now, as a longtime citizen of Taipei City, I see nothing wrong
with my favoring two Taiwanese teams.)
Guess which two.
Yeah, I’m entirely THAT obvious.
I am incredibly grateful to my friend who treated me
to the game, although as one of the Dragons’ marketing agents he wasn’t
actually able to sit with me because he had work to attend to. He’s been in
this job for some time already, and over the past few years I’ve enjoyed
following his social media posts about his job. Eventually my curiosity developed
to the point of me requesting an interview with him for my “other” blog, which
he graciously agreed to.
Our discussion developed, for me, into a yearlong occasional
writing project that resulted in a four-part look[i] at
the history of baseball in Taiwan. That writing project was eye-opening, and I
was amazed to discover that in many ways baseball carries itself forward as a
representative of the Taiwanese characteristics of stubborn survival, comradery
in the face of extreme challenge, and a spirit of relentless resistance.
When we met at the Taipei Dome, my friend handed me the
ticket and teased me by saying: “Go do your fieldwork!”
Well, here’s my report.
The
Home Team?
While I knew I would be seeing the Dragons play, I was unaware that they would
be facing off against the Brothers. The revelation came about only when I found
myself at the MRT station in the midst of so many others wearing golden-yellow Brothers
club jerseys. Realizing that I would be seeing these teams face off against
each other encouraged within me competing emotions of delight and guilt, for I
consider myself a fan of both clubs. My divided loyalty stems, in part, from
entirely irrational origins.
You see, I live within walking distance of the
Chinatrust headquarters in the Nankang District of Taipei City, where there is
actually a baseball-themed coffee shop that has been on my radar for quite some
time. This “locality” of the corporation that owns the Brothers baseball team
contributed to my private sense of the baseball club as representing my own
community. They were my hometown team.
Of course, the fact that the club’s home stadium is in
Taichung puts the lie to my identifying with the Brothers as “the neighborhood
bros.” But the beginnings of my identification go back more than 20 years when
the team was still owned by the Brother Hotel and called the Brother Elephants.
The driver of the team’s shuttle bus lived just a few houses from me, and on
most mornings I would find the minibus parked in front of my home. That’s when
the first sense of “community” identification with the team began.
Yeah, I know. I know. Anyway…
And then along came the Dragons, a relatively new
clubhouse that got its start as the baseball team of the university that towers
over the neighborhood from its mountaintop perch. The Dragons’ home stadium is
in Tianmu, a district of Taipei that pretty much every “white dude” who has lived
long-term in Taiwan is familiar with.
Tianmu used to be nicknamed “Little America.”
For that we can lay much of the blame on the Taipei
American School being located in Tianmu and drawing Western white collar (and
wealthy Taiwanese) families into the district. With so many “waiguoren” grouped
in one place, it didn’t take long for the neighborhood’s grocers and
restaurants to cater to “Western” preferences.
Tianmu no longer bears that identification as a
“foreign zone,” due largely to the arrival of the MRT (allowing for a cultural
dispersal) and Taiwan’s entry into the WTO (expanding availability of cultural
products) completely re-shaping the demographics of Taipei’s “international”
community realty decisions. But really, once upon a time Tianmu was the place
where you could close your eyes, throw a stone, and feel pretty sure that you’d
end up hitting “a foreigner.”[ii] Heck, I even lived in the district for a few
months.
Of course, it also helps that I think “dragons” are
way cooler than “elephants,” and the official team color — red — is a personal
favorite. And so, the Dragons are my new team.
The
Unexpected Experience
Here’s another important admission: I am not necessarily a sports spectator,
though I am a fan of baseball above all other games. I don’t “follow” baseball
stats, or even make an effort to stay up to date on the teams I like. I don’t
know who’s on first, and I don’t necessarily care.
If I am in a restaurant and see a game on a television
screen, I’ll watch. If it happens to be a team or a tournament that means
anything to me, I’ll quietly cheer or silently moan, depending on the place or
space. But I don’t go out of my way to watch a game, and I won’t pay for a
subscription to watch online. Don’t get me wrong: I would love to be able to
sit and watch a game on the screen, but somehow I cannot promise myself to any
sort of schedule or appointment that’s not crucial to my life.
Having tried to argue that I am not a devoted
spectator, I will confess to having a wildly Romantic idea about baseball.
Among all spectator sports, baseball is the only one that completely appeals to
me. Mine is a childhood inheritance, a memory of those rare moments when
friends and I would set up a game on the school playground on a summer
afternoon. More often we played “stickball” on the street, moving aside for
passing cars. Maybe there is more inside my unconscious, memories of older
brothers or friends watching baseball games on television, or talking baseball
all around us. Honestly, that feels right, but the actual memories are not
there.
Of course, there are entire swaths of childhood that I
seem to have forgotten or blotted out. I don’t question those blank spaces
anymore.
But for whatever reason, baseball remains for me an
almost magical game. It asks of the players no wild exertion, runs on its own
never-predictable timetable, and seems to express a carefully plotted strategy
that is alien to me only because in a big way I just don’t care. What I do
notice is that the game plays out slowly, and remains almost entirely
unpredictable. A team can start out strong, then Fortune can turn away and they
will end up losing. Most of a match can roll forward scoreless, only to end in
the final innings with unexpected excitement. A legendary batter of seemingly infinite
strength and talent can strike out, and a prized pitcher can end up giving away
the game.
I love that unpredictability.
Despite all this, I never went out of my way to
actually attend a game in Taiwan. For decades the only image I held of baseball
was that of my one adolescent memory. And across those years stories have
filtered into my awareness through the media, all of which suggested that the
stadium experience in Taiwan was in some ways very different from that
remembered from my adolescence.
What follows, then, is a quick rundown of some of the
observations I took note of during the game on Saturday. I’m betting that if a
Taiwanese baseball fan sees this, she will wonder at my own sense of wonder and
think I am probably an oddball for thinking these aspects of the stadium
experience are anything but mundane. But remember, pretty much everything about
the encounter was new to me: in the baseball stadium I am still just a tourist.
Preparing the Field of Dreams
Somehow or other it never occurred to me that before the game the field needed
to be so meticulously attended to. On television I’ve only ever seen
groundskeepers at work rolling a tarp over the turf during a heavy rain storm.
I was completely unaware that just prior to gameplay, the groundskeepers will
hose down the home plate, the pitcher’s mound, and the infield bases. They do
this to soften and compact the dirt, thereby reducing injury to the players and
providing a greater predictability to the way a ground ball will bounce. It
also reduces the chance of dust whipping up.
Most surprising to me was
the fastidious attention to re-drawing the infield lines. This isn’t the job of
some random schmo, but demands the attention of a whole crew of workers armed
with measures and chalk cords. They’re
out there, getting down on the ground to measure the level of the pitcher’s
mound and making sure the foul and base lines are perfectly straight while the
fellow pushing the line striping machine draws a fresh white line slowly and
carefully. Fascinating.
And while that’s going on,
the home team — in this case the red-uniformed Dragons — take to the side of
the outfield and begin their warmup exercises. They form two parallel lines,
the men closer to the audience stretching and practically dancing to limber
themselves up while their teammates closer to the field divide themselves
between pitchers and catchers.
It is then that a bad omen
occurs. One of the players fubs the catch, and the ball slams directly into one
of the teammates limbering up. The impact puts him down, and he lays there
trying to let the pain dissipate. I am floored by this, having never imagined
that such an accident could injure a player during warmup, a pure act of
clumsiness on the part of the practicing catcher.
It turns out to be something
of an omen, for one of the Dragon’s batters would be struck by the pitch and grimacing
in pain as he stumbles toward first base.
Later in the game, with the
Dragons on the field, the pitcher would come frighteningly close to hitting Hsu
Chi-hung (No. 74). Hsu dodged the ball, a movement that resembled something
like a dance step that he continued doing even after he was out of danger. It
was an unexpected display of dance, both celebratory and accusatory.
Making Connections
In pretty much every baseball game I’ve watched on television (and that’s not a
lot), I have never seen an interaction on the field between the players on
opposing teams. The runner would always have a backup coach at the plate, of
course, and they would be chatting away (I assume they are strategizing). It
always felt odd that in every televised game, the runners and basemen seemed to
barely acknowledge each other’s presence on the field. For a fool like me who
cannot resist a grin or a greeting in public spaces (you would hate me in an
elevator), maintaining that kind of professional distance would be impossible.
Imagine my delight in seeing
that these walls don’t have to exist between the opponents. In an accident, a
runner from first base collided with the second baseman who had just caught the
ball forwarded by the pitcher. It must have been a mighty impact, because both
men fell to the ground and neither seemed eager to get up too quickly.
But within a minute, after
being checked on by teammates and umpires, both men stood up. And to my
surprise, they grinned at each other with what seemed almost like embarrassment
and swiftly embraced before the play was called. (I cannot remember if the
runner was allowed to advance, sent back to first base, or called out.)
There was at least one other
swift moment of opponents acknowledging each other, as when a second base
defender offered a very swift nod to the runner waiting there. I assume these
guys knew each other personally, which seems very likely when you consider how
small Taiwan’s professional baseball league actually is, with just six teams
recruiting from pretty much the same school zones.
Of course, I can understand
how opposing players would be reluctant to seem too familiar on the field given
the relatively recent history of game-fixing that almost destroyed the sport.
But even so, I have to wonder at what seems to be the ability to socially
ignore the presence of another person, even if it is an opponent.
My mind flips back to a
scene from a Singaporean novel I read last year (the title is long forgotten)
set in the first year of Japan’s invasion of the island territory. From across
a river a fleeing Australian contingent faced the Japanese enemy, a first
visual encounter. One of the Australian soldiers waved hello to the Japanese,
and in an unguarded automatic response a Japanese soldier waved back. The
Australian was mortified to see how the Japanese squad leader proceeded to
mercilessly beat the Japanese soldier. The Australian felt guilty for having so
innocently inflicted such pain upon the young man across the river.
Another interesting moment
occurred when a runner tried to steal second base, but the defending base man
was swift in tagging him. It was one of those close calls, and for some reason
it amused me to see the runner and his coaching teammate standing at second
base, both of them with their eyes glued on the big television screen where
separate angles of the “instant replay” video was being broadcast for the
stadium to see. It just felt fun to see these players on the field engaging in
the same activity as the 20,000 people in the stands: focusing on the big
screen.
Also curious about that
incident was the crowd response to the taped replay. When from two angles it
seemed clear that the defender had tagged the runner before his slide into
second base was achieved, the home team supporters let out a small explosion of
celebration. In the other angles on screen, the result was less apparent and
the audience stayed quiet.
The
Hush and Huff
Fan response to gameplay was another interesting aspect of being in attendance
at a live event. When watching on television, the sport announcers are in a
constant state of banter so there is little opportunity to aurally focus on the
sound of the crowd.
In the game I witnessed two
interesting phenomena. The first was the absolute silence that goes with a fly
ball. (Incidentally, once the ball goes too high, it was lost from my sight
because of the stadium lighting. On television you can always see where that
little bit of rubber and cork is going. In the stadium you quickly learn to
just look down and watch the outfield for the ball’s descent.) If the visiting
team’s outfielder makes the catch, there is a subtle groan of disgruntled or
disappointed acceptance of the out for the home team. If it is the home team
making the catch, the audience momentarily lets out a single sound of relief.
I hear pretty much none of
this in televised games.
I wonder how much of his
vocal exhortations was heard by the fans in the seating reserved for the
Brothers fans? We could hear their own male cheerleader, but his amplification
system was not the massive stadium-delivery system of the Home team whose fans
occupied a majority of the seating.
Another element of the fan
experience that caught my interest was what seemed to be a sense of magic
possibility. This is probably common to every game in every nation, but it
seemed especially amplified in the Taipei Dome because of the cheerleader’s
steady engagement with the audience.
The magic wasn’t powerful
enough.
When that third strike
happened, the Dragon fans went almost silent and only the celebration from the
Brothers fan section could be heard.
No kidding, it seemed like
the attendees in the seating reserved for the Brothers possessed a more
powerful kind of wizardry: live percussion and horn. At least it sounded live
from across the field, and that somehow felt more authentic and even potent.
Watching them across the
field I wondered at their unamplified sound. It just felt right.
Somehow the extra
amplification of the Home team—including the prerecorded music — felt
overwhelming, quite possibly bordering on bullying. Nor did the jets of steam
contribute to the sense of the game as, well, a game. It seemed too
self-laudatory, and less natural.
But what the heck do I know?
Like John Snow, I know nothing.
Before I shut this down, let
me drop in one more observation concerning the Brothers fans seated at the far
end of the outfield. They were settled into what seemed like three distinct
sections, two of which were adjacent while the third was separated by an
expanse of black space (light and machinery controls, or a structural and
storage space, maybe?). That separated third section was far quieter and less
responsive than the two connected spaces, where the drum and horn were located.
All this leaves me wondering
about the power of the audience to actually give strong, empowering energies to
the players. (How much of the audience sound can the players hear? I noticed at
a couple of points the players with the Brothers team were actually staying
limber by almost dancing on the field in time with the music on the
loudspeakers.)
That’s a romantic notion,
but not one that the game organizers seem eager to dispel. I am actually drawn
to the belief that fans, by giving out good and supportive vibes to the players
on the field, are contributing to the development of comradery, of a community that
includes both players and fans. In the end, of course, that’s good for
business, and like every other professional spectator sport, baseball is a
business.
And it’s a business I would
gladly partake of again.
[i] (The first two posts in this
65,000-word blog post can be found here (Part 1) and here (Part 2), with the remaining segments being
rationed out at a slower pace in appreciation of the current season of Taiwan’s
favorite spectator sport.)
[ii] For that we can lay much of the
blame on the Taipei American School being located in Tianmu. The school drew
Western white collar (and wealthy Taiwanese) families into the district, and it
didn’t take long for the neighborhood grocers and restaurants to cater to
“Western” preferences. Tianmu is also the home of Taipei Japanese School, a
siting that added another community of “foreigners” into the district’s
identity as a zone of cultural interest.
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