Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
—Bart Giamatti

When I think about it consciously, I try not to get too sentimental about baseball. I like baseball, and I think it’s fun, and it brings a lot of joy to my life (both from cheering for the Yankees, and passionately loathing the teams I hate, which is pretty much every team that isn’t the Yankees). At the end of the day, though, baseball is just a game, and its consequences for our daily lives really are minimal.

And yet we all know what I just wrote is bullshit when the rubber hits the road. Baseball fans can’t help but get sentimental about the game. It draws us in, it incites us to irrational devotion, and, as former commissioner Bart Giamatti says above, it always breaks our hearts.

That heartbreak takes different forms, and I hope you’ll indulge a Yankees fan mustering the audacity to describe his personal experience. There’s heartbreak caused by moments, like watching an improbable Luis Gonzalez bloop touch the grass in 2001. There’s heartbreak caused by a series of moments, like watching the Yankees blow a three-game lead in the ALCS against the hated Red Socks in 2004. There’s heartbreak that only manifests itself in retrospect, like looking back on the career of a Yankee great like Don Mattingly and shaking your head at his conspicuous lack of a World Series title.

If you’re like me, you’re feeling something entirely different, and maybe entirely unfamiliar, today, as you forget all your impotent rage over Armando Galarraga’s almost but not quite perfect game, and it starts to sink in that Ken Griffey, Jr., just retired.

You can go elsewhere to read about the Kid’s signature smile or signature stroke, which turned “the sweetest swing in baseball” from a banal observation to a Homeric epitaph. Nor will I spend much time addressing Griffey’s pundit-bestowed role as a beacon of goodness and fair play in an era tainted by the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs. Nor will I lament what could have been, had Griffey not spend so many games during the prime of his career on the disabled list. His career is what it is: excellent, irregardless of our dashed hopes and expectations. Instead, I’ll just tell you why the day that Ken Griffey, Jr., retired, even though we all knew it would come at some point, was so sad: because when I came to love the game of baseball, he was there.

Like a lot of young boys, my dad taught me how to throw and catch, and I spent my summer weekends on a Little League field. But my archetypal, Sandlot-esque pastoral experiences with the game happened in the Lincoln School parking lot in Cranford, New Jersey, playing with tennis balls and metal bats with my brother and cousins. Everybody got to pick the player they wanted to be. I was a second baseman when I played organized ball, so I would be Ryne Sandberg. My cousin Chris called Mike Piazza, and his brother Matt called Frank Thomas. And my older brother, who always let me tag along when he and his friends would play wiffle ball in front of the warehouse across the street, or hit cherry pits over the fence in his buddy’s yard around the corner, and who I looked up to since I was first able to look up, would be Ken Griffey, Jr. Every time.

Sandberg is gone. Piazza is gone. Thomas is gone. And now Griffey, the greatest of them all, the guy that history will redeem as the best player of a generation, is gone. It’s enough to break your heart.

This is the way the game was played in our youth, and in our fathers’ youth, and even back then—back in the country days—there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped. Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.
—Roger Angell

Straylight Run

8 ) Straylight Run, Straylight Run (2004)

Now we’re getting into the nitty gritty. Straylight Run is a band formed by former members of Taking Back Sunday, frontman John Nolan and bassist Shaun Cooper. If you’re familiar with TBS, you’ll realize that these two bands couldn’t sound more dissimilar, and that’s a huge part of Straylight’s allure. Here, you’ve got a guy in John Nolan capable of screaming his larynx out on Taking Back Sunday’s Tell All Your Friends, but then weaving soft, soulful melodies on Straylight Run’s opening track, “The Perfect Ending.” Nolan isn’t the greatest technical vocalist, but the range that he can bring to a track more than makes up for it.

But then again, the fact that he isn’t the smoothest vocalist is another part of the allure. Nolan’s presentation, as a singer and a lyricist, reeks of earnestness. Take the album’s single, “Existentialism on Prom Night.” In a typical pop punk band, you’d hear lyrics like “Sing like you think no one’s listening” and you’d roll your eyes. But in Nolan’s hands, delivered with passion in front of pianos and violins instead of screeching guitars, the words have a sincerity that would have been unavailable to him in a band like TBS. Then there’s my favorite track on the album, “The Tension and the Terror.” From the sensuous lyrics that start the track (All the boys, voices cracking. / Oh, the moaning half tones. / Come summertime, we’re all the same age here. / All the tension and the terror, / Thin-limbed gorgeous green eyes smiling, / And I’m going straight to hell) to the confession that ends it (A look, a laugh, a smile, a second / Passes by and I regret it. / Words just aren’t right. / Sometimes I just can’t explain / All the ways you devastate me. / Always on my mind), the words aren’t sung as much as it would have been impossible for them to not burst forth out of the song. Maybe you don’t hear it that way, but I do.

And let’s not forget the beautiful Michelle DeRosa nee Nolan on background vocals (not to mention the lead on “Toolsheds and Hot Tubs” and “Now It’s Done”). Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun understand how I feel about girls who can rock. For the uninitiated, I’ll put it simply: they’re the best! There’s really not a ton of ways to eff up a song with the addition of female accompaniment, and Michelle really smooths out her brother’s rough edges.

Signature track: “Your Name Here (Sunrise Highway)”

I admitted up above that “The Tension and the Terror” is my favorite track on this album, but that’s inconsequential at this point. This album is important because of “Your Name Here.” The song is a follow-up to this Taking Back Sunday song, which in turn is a response to this Brand New song. I won’t go into the details of the East Coast/West Coast style feud that marked those bands’ early days, suffice it to say that at a time in my life when I actually WAS emo instead of just being an emo fan, “Your Name Here” helped me to realize that no matter what the conflict is, it’s important to reconcile with the people closest to you if you’ve been driven apart. You just can’t take grudges to the grave.

And then there’s the matter of the chorus: “Go east on Sunrise Highway. / Turn left on Carmans Avenue. / Go right at the first stoplight / And I’ll be outside, waiting for you.” The lyrics are meant to be directions, from John to his estranged pal Jesse, to John’s house on Long Island, ostensibly so they can peace things up. Of course, you can’t put driving directions in a song without diehard fans actually following them, which is what myself, my pal Caitlin, and my buddy Joe, Official Bandmate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, did one July afternoon. Here’s a picture of me, driving east on Sunrise Highway.

My other hand is at 10. What form!

Now, of course, unless you’re crazy, you wouldn’t put the EXACT directions to your house in a song that, who knows, could become a number 1 hit. So there’s really no such thing as “Carmans Avenue,” but there is a Carmans Road in Massapequa. And you can’t actually turn left onto it; rather, you’ve got to make a U-turn and then turn right. And at that point, if you go right at the first stop light, you’re really only hooking back up with Sunrise Highway. Here’s a photograph of your hero, this blog’s protagonist, me, at the final destination of the chorus to “Your Name Here.”

Womp womp

So, you know, did we learn anything? Is there some sort of didactic moral to this sad tale of a wasted afternoon? Absolutely not. Except, every time I go to a Straylight Run show and this song gets played, I get to nudge the dude next to me and say “Hey, I did that!” Ah, memories.

This brings me back to those lazy summer days when I’d put a GI Joe in the middle of the street, sit in the driveway with a tall, cold glass of lemonade, and watch cars driving by smash them to pieces. Hours of good fun.

H/t to Gorillamask