I met up with Jay Goldberg, the current artist-in-residence at The Factory on Willow, at Chelby’s Pizza[1] last week for an interview. However, in a refreshing reversal of roles, Jay was there to interview me.
As part of his residency, Jay is working on a multi-media project titled “The Memory of America: Remember Your First Baseball Game.” As part of the project, Jay is interviewing people across the country—people of multitudinous backgrounds, ages and professions—about their memories of their first baseball game in order to “inspire empathy, connection and understanding” in a nation that is “polarized and frayed.”
As it turned out, Jay read a column I wrote for Manchester Ink Link about baseball[2] and contacted me about participating in the project and sharing a memory.
Clearly, Jay is looking to have the project optioned for Hollywood, and the quickest way to get that done is to include a rising movie star like myself—a stud with a face made for radio—into the multimedia project[3].
But before I sat down to discuss my memory of the first baseball game I attended at Fenway Park—which I will leave for Jay to present—Jay and I grabbed a table in the lounge at Chelby’s and chatted over lunch[4].
As it turned out, Jay is from New York City, which stopped my beating heart for a second. “Don’t worry,” Jay told me, seeing the unease in my countenance. “I’m a Mets fan.”
I sighed with relief. “Thank God. So you hate the Yankees almost as much as I do,” I said.
“Maybe more,” he said.
“I’m not sure that is humanly possible,” I said.
Once we broke the ice, Jay and I talked freely about the game that—we both agreed—is the most beautiful and perfect game ever conceived.
But Jay and I—who are also both older men—might be part of a dying breed of baseball fans who will never regenerate, and that breaks my heart.
There’s a lot I love about the game of baseball. I love the fact that it’s not timed[5], and the game ends when the last out is made. The game dictates time, and not the other way around.
I also love baseball for its pastoral feel, its history and the way the game has always seemed to turn the reflection of our society back on itself.
I love the rhythm of watching baseball and the sensory details—the smell of linseed oil on a new glove, the sound a wooden bat makes after solid contact, the sight of the verdant grass when you walk off a concourse into a professional ballpark.
Those sensory details also speak to the point of Jay’s project: They speak to how we make and savor our memories. Not wanting to navel-gaze, I will say that there’s a certain truth to the idea that our memories are our most precious possessions.
As the lunch crowd filled the lounge on a balmy Wednesday afternoon, before we ventured to a picnic table across the street to record an interview of my first memory of the baseball game that I attended with my father when I was a young boy, Jay and I extemporaneously shared our mutual memories of baseball, including the 1986 World Series, which left very different tastes in our mouths, respectively.
As I finish this column, while watching the Red Sox play the Cubs—two of the oldest franchises in the game—on a day of Biblical flooding in the Queen City, I feel grateful for the game of baseball.
And look for me in Hollywood, folks. I’m going places.
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[1] I’ve been known to hang out at Chelby’s Pizza every now and then.
[2] I used to write a Red Sox column for Dirty Water Media in Boston.
[3] I have mastered the bloated and half-drunk Alec Baldwin swagger.
[4] Actually, Jay had lunch while I drank my body weight in Bud Light drafts as a means of escaping the heat. Or that’s story I told myself.
[5] I’ll save the pitch clock discussion for another day.
