Baseball, I Love You

Home.

The box score is clean, the standings tied. Each roster trimmed with the 25 best, thoroughly selected and bred, waiting for the gates to open, each city with millions waiting for the same. Empty houses where snow and rain gathered for months on end are once again pollinated with buzzing crowds. In the middle, the grass is creased with military precision, foul lines dropped straighter than a comebacker line drive off the black burn lines of Louisville. The diamond opens its arms, from foul line to foul line, welcoming the white hide and red stitches to land anywhere, just to know that it’s back.

Hope arrives, in the form of nine empty spaces on a scoreboard. Nine stanzas waiting to be filled with poetry. Suicide squeeze sonnets. Perfect meters of perfect games. Dimaggio’s fifty-six line epic. Pining again for titles like Tinker, Evers, and Chance, turning pages of double plays for years on end, until the final paragraph lands on a plaque in Cooperstown.

It’s a limitless game. In theory, it could go on forever. It has no overtimes, no stopwatches, no quarters comprising a whole. There’s no taking knees to run out the clock, no last-minute fouls in a futile attempt to catch up. There is only each inning, each empty square on the scoreboard still full of promise until the last one is filled.

There is room for legends that grow in only the way that hand-me-downs can. It’s been said that Rube Waddell once randomly ran to a fire in a visitor’s city and joined the local firefighters in the effort, showed up late to the game, walked through the crowd, pitched a complete game. Saved a girl from drowning before a game another time, caught pneumonia and died. Or something like that. Bo Jackson hit a ball further than scientifically possible, but not further than baseball legend possible. It’s a sport that doesn’t matter whether it happened or it didn’t, just that it’s remembered in a way that makes the game more wonderful.

It’s all of us and all of our stories.

It’s full of tales of Paul Bunyans and an ox named Babe. Guys named Oil Can and Catfish, Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, Satchel, Wee Willie, Pee Wee, Chief Bender, and Al Kaline. The cream of its crop has included midgets, deaf mutes, and a one-armed pitcher. Its foundations were laid by barnstormers akin to a travelling circus act, built by the hands of coal miners, farmers, Ivy League dropouts and alcoholics from the hills of Arkansas. It was borne into the grind of the things that made America great in a time when America was defining its greatness. That greatness has endured through world wars, depressions, and political upheaval. It’s survived its own cheaters and liars, steroids and Black Sox, and has thrived on grace and goodness, Jackies and Clementes.

As much as it is a team endeavor, the game is still a solo effort. Every outcome begins with one man against another, pure in the way that few sports are. It is a sport built on failure, where no man has ever come close to winning half his battles over the course of a season. Where the best that ever played are only successful a third of the time. But the successes are enough to fuel the desire to come back again and again, in the hopes of that moment that every ballplayer has lived in their backyards or school playgrounds or city streets.

When everything and everyone depends on the bottom of the ninth, from the hopes of a city to the friends down the block. When the ball comes in, just that ball against the batter’s eye, spinning closer and closer until the wooden barrel meets it with a sweeter sound than a composer could ever find, and sends it into the night. And with it, that pure joy that has been chased for so long is untapped and allowed to run, spilling the grandest dreams of youth across the wet grass and the faces of your friends and that moment—just the chance of that moment—is why we all believe.

It’s why we wait and grow restless for the spring. It’s why we endure the swell of summer and the low anticipation of winter. It’s the embodiment of our own seasons and our own successes and failures and the knowing that there is always hope, that our innings are never over because there’s one more Gibson swing we have to give. Even in the bottom of the ninth, with a nearly empty stadium on a September night in last place, there’s still more around the corner.

The end is the beginning is the better season awaiting us all.

A Band I Love Right Now

The first time I saw Nick Bays (far left in the picture) perform was when we were on tour about 6 or 7 years ago, playing at the New Brookland Tavern in Columbia, SC. The New Brook was always our favorite venue on tour, and for some reason we always knew that there was some good or bad or weird thing going to happen whenever we ended up there. Seeing Nick was one of those good things.

The Farewell Flight move du jour was that if a band sucked really bad (sometimes even if they didn't), we'd go out back and hang out or drink beers in the van. This kind of happened pretty often. Luckily, most of the bands we played with in Columbia were decent, so usually we didn't have to swelter behind the venue in the South Carolina summer heat to escape the endless double-kick beats and hardcore breakdowns of the opening acts.

No matter the quality or perceived quality of a band, I usually always checked out their first song and then played it by ear as to whether I needed to plan an escape route. At this time, Nick Bays was a 17-year old local high school kid playing by himself. I may have only stuck around because I happened to be inside grabbing another beer at the time. But I did. I didn't go back outside until after his set.

Nick commanded the guitar and the crowd and his voice in a way that when I first heard him sing, so low and so quiet, then so loud and so powerful, without breaking or pushing too hard, I knew it wasn't just another guy we'd cross paths with on the road then never see again. The thing about Nick is that he has his sound. And that's what makes a great musician. His songwriting style is his, not him sounding like someone else. I can't put an exact finger on it, but the Nick Bays sound is something that's minimal and slightly dirty, with a huge dynamic range that oscillates between loud and soft, but without doing it too much or too little. Of course there's plenty of other musicians that are like that, but his way is unique to the trinity of him, his voice, and his songwriting style.

So anyway, back when he was a junior (maybe senior) in high school, I got his EP and listened to it and made the band listen to it that tour. Although it wasn't the most polished record (give him a break, he was 17), it was pretty damn good. Nick ended up playing with us a few more times in South Carolina and Chicago and even came on the road with us just for the hell of it for a little while when we were in the midwest. Turns out he wasn't just a great musician, but a pretty sweet dude as well.

All that to say, Nick's all grown up now and making music under the name of Tall Walker. I don't know if this is a tweaked reference to the Fast and the Furious star, but I can only hope it is, and it's not because I saw the first Fast and the Furious six times in the movie theater (I was in a "finding myself" phase).

Tall Walker only has a self-titled four-song EP out right now, but it is solid, and it is something I have been listening to a lot recently. It has all the features of a great musician beginning to find himself and his songwriting in his early twenties and experimenting with some great sounds in the process. Nick definitely has a knack for taking some good pop melodies, adding a dark edge to them, sprinkling in some sultriness and then turning it into a song. The leadoff song on this EP, "Deadbeat," is no exception. It's the strongest song on the EP and one that I find listening to almost daily. It has a strong, driving drum beat over sparse verses that unfold into a dynamically full chorus with a little bit of 80's reverb on the end. A bonus is the excellent hi-hat accents throughout the song. All around, a lot of tasteful musicianship, particularly with the drums. "Clouds" is a great track as well, despite the fact that the chorus seems to detach itself a little too much from the verse. However, the overall melody is great and the bridge into the last chorus is absolute ear candy. Tall Walker definitely invokes some Leagues on this record- which isn't a bad thing- but it's also kind of a sound that Leagues has cornered (at least in terms of their guitar tones). Getting too close to it could elicit some cries of copy-catting, whether intentional or not. That's just a small misstep though.

Tall Walker seems to be a great step forward for Nick, and I have no doubt that he'll be doing some pretty great things with his art both in the near and far futures. There's about less than five bands out of the thousands I've ever played with who I knew immediately would be doing great things in their future, and Nick was certainly one of them. I can't wait to see where this album and his maturation as a musician will take him and Tall Walker. I'm certain it will be somewhere dark and beautiful.

Love you Nick, miss you. Keep still but keep going.

On Friends

The three-day hangover is the worst.

Everything seems great beforehand. The hanging out, the drinks, the morning sun cracking over the yard, looking at my watch and wow, it really is that time. I know it’s coming every time, and sometimes I can feel it right from the beginning and pretend it’s not going to happen. But then I get out of the car, grab my backpack and roller, give Luke a quick hug and head to the open arms of the TSA screeners. And while I’m waiting to board, it hits. There it sits, somewhere inside of my gut, the place where I’m trying not to cry because it’s just life, and I know that because I’m feeling this I’ve got a good one.

I calm myself and know that Baltimore is home and it is a place I love with a wife I love and it’s all right that I quit playing music and it’s all right that my friends are in Nashville. Everything is all right. It really is, which makes leaving even harder, and the hangover last longer.

           

Needless to say, I came back from Nashville recently after visiting some old friends. Some of the best, truly. The band guys in Farewell Flight and The Young International. Some new friends too. If you’re reading this, you probably know them or have an embarrassing story about the first or tenth time you met them.

Within a couple of hours arriving and a couple High Lifes later, I couldn’t put many of my thoughts into words, but two words that kept coming into my mind were ‘joy’ and ‘full.’ They seemed to be two of those words that describe themselves, tidy packages bursting between the letters. It may have been the impromptu karaoke and singing along with the stories written by Jason Isbell and David Ramirez, or maybe it was the way you meet an old friend at the airport and the hello is kind of off and static but within 10 minutes you’ve settled into the passenger seat of their car and your friendship settles into the driver’s seat of your lives and the road behind pushes and the road ahead is ready to build more, to stretch further.

Our friendships are the way you see someone every day for years and don’t realize they’re older until you look at a picture of them from college or high school. Whenever we’re together I feel the roots that drop down from the bottom of my soul and grab the collective foundation we’ve been building for all these years. That soil mixed with the American highways and the beds of strangers and cigarette smoke and jug wine and dreams turned and tilled with so much care.

I remember once when we were hanging out at a mildly successful musician’s house in Nashville several years ago, and it was a great house, and it had a pool, and drinks, and summertime was a week away in the north, but already steeped in the south. We really wanted him to help us out with our careers, so we thought we’d hang there with him for the night. But the whole time we were hanging out, I really just wanted to be with my actual friends. I wanted to throw knives and quote David Brent and drink Keystone Light on a back deck. That might’ve been the beginning of the end of the band for me. I realized that everything I wanted from music when I was younger was nothing that I wanted when I was older. We never picked the right numbers in the fame lottery, but I realized it wasn’t what I wanted anymore. Instead, I got everything I never knew I wanted—a literal lifetime of friendships that will only stop existing once we all stop existing.

We draw from such a deep well of experiences, from adventures on the road, to the changing of “careers” (i.e. fireworks tent operators and professional medical study subjects), to hiking the Appalachian Trail, to being the groomsmen in each others’ weddings.  We’ve read to each other passages from Sailing Alone Around the World and wished we were on a sailboat in the Pacific with only the loneliness and the stars strung above the stillness. We’ve lived out our worst fears and our weakest selves in front of each other, and have learned that when we give up the shitty parts of us and tame the darkness that will always be there, we become better men, friends, and husbands.

I think my favorite thing to think about is how this won’t ever end. How there will always be post-hangout hangovers.

Someday we will be old, and we will have memories falling out everywhere— out of old jean pockets and rattling in the bottom of backpacks and dropping from the insides of book covers. Some of the memories will be relived so many times that I know most of them will have turned to legend and are probably far from the original events. But I’m okay with being legendary. I know that in the flip of a calendar we’ll be grey and bald and not so cool. One morning we’ll be young men and in the afternoon fathers and in the evening widowers. We may have to go to bed earlier than 5 a.m. and maybe even push a wheelchair or two, and I’m pretty sure someone will have to tell me my own name, but I know that what I feel now will still be there then. And even when we’re flying out to each other’s funerals, when we’re meeting up again for more goodbyes and less hellos, I know it’ll draw us even closer.

We will have truly lived and died as brothers, and dammit that is a great way to spend a day on earth.