It makes very little sense that those who read a lot of baseball literature would love fan literature. Fan literature doesn’t give its readers anything groundbreaking. It doesn’t give you a media pass, put you into the dugout, onto the diamond, in the locker room, or the players’ personal lives. Fans don’t get those privileges because they just show up at the ballpark or watch and listen to the game on the radio or TV. Fan literature gives us information that is available to literally everyone. It is, by its very nature, incapable of giving us any new information about the teams we love or the players.
Yet, we get taken in by it probably more than we do most other forms of baseball literature. It could be just my own sentimentality taking effect here; my first baseball book was a fan memoir, Faithful by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan, which I didn’t quite like but which was interesting enough to pique my curiosity about more baseball books. I’ve already reviewed a handful of books written strictly by those who love baseball, who just share their fandom with the public, for this site. I think this may be because fandom is so unique to every individual fan. Every fan has his own different stories to tell about the game and the importance of it on their lives. Every fan also has a differing and unique meaning of just what it means to be a good fan, different fan superstitions, different ways of celebrating those big team moments that get witnessed by every other fan in the country, and different reactions to their team breaking their hearts. The meaning of what it is to be a good fan to their favorite team, in fact, also varies from person to person. Stephen Jay Gould, the late, great scientist, was also a man who reportedly pulled off the impossible contradiction of being a fan of both the Yankees and the Red Sox.
The one problem I find with a lot of fan literature, however, is that so much of the fan books that I find come from some sort of position of privilege. The aforementioned Faithful, by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan, was written by a pair of popular authors who make enough from their own work to get into and out of games pretty much any time they please. Richard Roeper’s book Sox and the City, Roeper’s love note to the Chicago White Sox, was written by a man in the same place as King and O’Nan – he writes a daily column for the Chicago Sun-Times and spent years debating movies against the legendary movie critic Roger Ebert on national TV. The least-known fan memoir author I’ve written about (at least before this review) is Emma Span, who came off a yearlong stint as a sportswriter for the Village Voice in New York City.
Bill Lewers is a baseball fan and has been for his whole life. The reason you haven’t heard of Lewers is because his fan memoir, Six Decades of Baseball, is not coming away from any positions of such privilege. He is not a well-known author who got a hefty advance with the expectation that his book would be a bestseller. He is not a former sportswriter who received a thousand media passes from which he could regale us with personal anecdotes about ballplayers. While he can claim the distinction of being a Harvard graduate, Harvard people aren’t especially hard to find – I am friends with five or six of them myself and can say without reservation that they’re not the rocket scientists and brain surgeons the movies always make them out to be; I’m a community college graduate and I’ve managed to out-argue my ivy friends on a number of occasions. Lewers is writing more the viewpoint of the common, everyday you-or-me fan, and that makes Six Decades of Baseball the purest fan memoir I’ve yet read.
Lewers didn’t personally know any ballplayers, didn’t own full season ticket packages, never had enough free time to watch every game he wanted to, and was never a professional sportswriter. His trips to the ballpark put him in the nosebleeds more often than anything, and he frequently was never able to get there at all to see some of his team’s biggest moments. He confesses in the introduction that his main purpose in writing Six Decades of Baseball was to present his sons with a memoir of the game chronicling his love affair with it. Lewers is, in other words, everyfan USA. While King, O’Nan, Roeper, and Span are able to give viewpoints exclusive to themselves as fans because of the unique positions they were in, Lewers is the fan you know from the office and can exchange ballpark war stories with. Yes, his view is as unique as any other fan, but under the right circumstances, you could easily see yourself being in the very same situation as him.
Being present at your favorite team’s biggest moments isn’t always going to be possible (in fact it’s very rarely going to be possible), so two of the unspoken essentials to being a fan are telling stories about where you were, what you were doing, and how you reacted when your team does something memorable, and knowing that during your own lifetime, being a fan is as much about the little moments others forget as much as it is about knowing the big moments. These are both qualities that Lewers possesses in spades. Lewers picked the Boston Red Sox as his team when he was a child and picked up the Baltimore Orioles for the ride when he moved to the Washington area, at least when they weren’t playing the Red Sox. (He moved there after the Senators departed and decades before the Nationals moved down from Montreal.) Being born and bred in the greater New York City area, this made him a little bit of an oddity, and so he has stories about the way people reacted to his primary loyalty. Notable are his explanation for choosing the Red Sox (he wanted a good team that wasn’t the Yankees) and his inability to understand at that age the concepts of “youth movement” and “good on paper.”
Lewers never actually got to see Fenway Park until he was close to 20 years old. Until then, he had to get his live Red Sox fix at Yankee Stadium while catching as many games as he could on the TV and radio. This certainly never dampened his enthusiasm for the BoSox, and to show his devotion he orders the yearbook of their farm team, the San Francisco Seals, one year and orders the APBA Baseball Game another year, for which ordering classic baseball teams and competing in tournaments becomes a hobby right up to the 1990s. (Baseball video games are something of my own version of the latter.) His fandom evolves as it accompanies him through career, marriage, and children. By the end, his greatest enjoyment of baseball comes from spending time watching baseball with his kids.
Six Decades of Baseball is a chronology of what happened to the team between 1951 and now through the eyes of one fan. Lewers argues that the real beginning of Red Sox Nation goes back to the 1967 team and talks about what it meant to him to have witnessed its birth firsthand. He also writes about many of the minor-leaguers he saw in their single moments up in the bigs, the youth movements, and the 2004 World Series title. He confesses to owning a DVD set featuring the 2004 ALCS and that his favorite part is watching the third game (a 19-8 bruising delivered by the Yankees), seeing all the Yankee players and fans celebrating, and thinking to himself “I know something you don’t know!”
The odd thing about the big moments – even the positive ones – is that Lewers plays them down. The 2007 Red Sox title is in fact never even mentioned at all. It’s almost as if Lewers is taking them as just a few more pieces of the bigger picture (which he may well be doing, now that I think of it). But this is okay, because Lewers does seem to know that baseball is about stories that are both little and big. While the big stories provide wonderful backdrops, it’s the little ones that truly give baseball its character because everyone will remember the big ones. The little ones will only be remembered by certain people and so, depending on the person and the loyalty, they will add the color, flair, and image carried by the teams. While other sports unfold mainly in their moments, baseball unfolds almost entirely in these stories, and so the little moments remembered by the fans are all the more important because they tend to explain the backdrop in ways which can’t be done by sportswriters. I will even go so far as to theorize this as the reason baseball is more of a generational hand-me-down than any other sport.
There comes a point in Six Decades of Baseball in which the Baltimore Orioles move to the center and become very prominent. Lewers confesses that he was eventually able to warm up the the Orioles and welcome them into his life as his team. But they don’t threaten to replace the Red Sox – the relationship between the two of them involves no conflict, and the two of them wind up existing harmoniously with each other. While Lewers takes temporary likings to other teams at certain points, they are merely there for spurs of moments, like his cheering for the Dodgers once while at Ebbets Field because he was thrilled at the prospect of seeing a rare no-hitter in person, or his cheering for the Mets because they’re in the National League in his hometown. I could actually relate to his fandom in this particular respect; I became a big White Sox fan upon moving to Chicago, except when they go up against my Yankees, and my National League loyalties aren’t quite as concrete as my American League loyalties.
While Six Decades of Baseball bears a very definite style resemblance to Nick Hornby’s book Fever Pitch, there is a huge and important difference between the two books. Hornby’s attitude toward Arsenal FC had a very bemused and absurdist tone. Hornby seemed to be almost angry with himself at times and was almost certainly writing to figure out just what it was he saw in his favorite team and sport. Lewers seems to know exactly what he saw in baseball and in the Boston Red Sox (and later the Baltimore Orioles), and so he writes with great passion and respect. Just think: If the Farrelly Brothers had waited a few years before making their movie about Red Sox fandom and Six Decades of Baseball was better known, we could have seen a much better movie revolving around Red Sox fandom rather than a certain lousy Drew Barrymore vehicle.
Tags: Fans
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