aka: how i came to embrace my inner asshole.
Only about 23% related to actual baseball, and more actually, about my personal blather and the June 12th, This Week in Baseball segment on baseball brothers.
A while back, a friend wrote a piece about Bret Boone and his strange silence when little brother Arnie hit that ALCS home run. Boone had been sports-casting for Fox, and my friend wrote about how odd Bret Boone seemed standing there in the booth, arms crossed over his chest and sort of mumbling his way through what will probably be the biggest baseball moment of any Boone's life ever. You can hear the production crew in the booth going nuts, and the Fox crew cuts back and forth between Bret and the chaos going down on the field. I think they were trying to get some brotherly joy or what have you, but Boone just looked shocked and stunned more than anything.
Throw in how the Fox sportscaster who interviewed Aaron Boone on the field and who called him "Bret" by accident, and as this friend pointed out in her piece, but damn you have something interesting and fascinating right there.
As far as I can tell, the piece isn't available online any longer. Fox's This Week in Baseball makes some similar points in an under-handeded and more than 99.99999% unintentional sort of way in the June 12th "Brothers in Baseball" segment, though. They've got stuff about Joe and Dom Dimmagio and the Niekro brothers, and it's really a very well done piece and ties in nicely to the host of the week, Marcus Giles and his family connection.
I clicked on the link for the sole purpose of seeing how they treated the Boone thing, though, and I ended up kinda flabbergasted at the way the piece: right before the ALCS footage, they showed Billy Ripken calling his brother's All-Star home run. Ripken is sitting up in the booth, watching his brother approach the plate and talking about Cal is surely going to knock a bomb, and Billy starts screaming and maxing out the volume levels on the in-booth mike even before the ball leaves the yard. He's roaring and yelling and jumping around in his seat. He starts screaming about how this is wonderful, how he just knew his brother was going to do it, and what could be better television than this? And he does most of this with his index finger up in the air, pointing with it and waving it around.
Number one! Number one! My brother is number one!
And right soon, after that, they show Bret Boone, first not particularly talkative, then a little stumbling, and finally just totally speechless and silent and with his arms crossed over his chest, standing in the Fox booth.
...
I have a little baby sister that I love better than I love myself. We've got more years between us than either the Boone boys or the Ripken boys do, and we're utterly different people, but if you asked my parents, they've already determined that I'm probably going to be the one who is more successful in life. I've had conversations with my father where he more or less tells me that he has no idea what to do with my sister to make her a better student or smarter, which is ridiculous in and of itself because my sister is a fine student at a competitive school and is a happy, healthy, bright sixteen year old girl.
But yeah, recently, my sister got some standardized scores back that were perfectly fine in and of themselves but weeren't as good as the ones that I had gotten on the same set of tests. She hasn't told my parents yet because they're not as good as the ones that I got, and she didn't tell me until I prodded the information out of her. She told me over instant messenger a few days after she had gotten the scores, and she was, I think, still a little upset.
The point I'm trying to make is not that failure is solitary as opposed to success, which is social. In fact, in my frame of reference, success is a lonelier thing than failure: when my family and the people I know best excel, it tends to be at things like test-taking and laboratory work. We aren't present at the moment of each other's successes, and we only really talk about our work when we have to broach the subject of failure as in Sorry, I didn't get that promotion, so we're not going on vacation or Sorry, Mom, I didn't get into ______________. Success means you go off to higher and better things where the competition is fiercer and your life is lonelier. Failure means staying at home, consolation dinners and hugs. It means an absence of pressure that means you get to go to the beach for a weekend with your friends or catch a movie at the 'plex. We don't watch each other fail, but even more, we don't watch each other succeed.
Nor did I, at least, really want to watch each other succeed. When she was younger, my sister would ask my parents to buy those Who's Who in American Middle School Students or whatever, but now that she's older, she's stopped. I never asked my parents to buy them, nor did I ever ask them to come to any of my award ceremonies. I never wanted them to come and see me get on stage. I apparently was a big fan of crowds adoring me or whatever I was very, very, very young, but I stopped asking my parents to be present at my so-called soon as I had enough sense, and these days, I suspect that it was because, in my heart of hearts, I would have wanted to see me succeed only if I had also thought that their opinion of me needed improving -- if they had, for example, needed to be reminded of how brilliant their daughter was, how much her teachers loved her.
My issues with that sort of thing will, I think, someday make a psychotherapist very rich, but yeah, it basically boils down to the fact that my parents were not invited to the eleventh grade award ceremony or prom or anything like that. I told my mother that I would have been 100% happy if she didn't go to my high school graduation. I was kinda lukewarm about them being there for my college one, and so, yes, you have that approach to success, and then contrast that to how This Week in Baseball was singing about how special and wonderful it was that these brothers would get to watch each other win.
And then, there was Bret Boone standing there with his arms crossed.
The point that I'm trying to make, I think, is that the rituals of baseball are completely and utterly foreign to me. I watch baseball alone when I'm at home, and nobody in our family, I am reasonably certain, has ever touched a baseball. As a result, I watch baseball at least in part because I am fascinated by this enormously strange world. I sit there marveling at how public these triumphs are, at how much the families are enjoying seeing their sons succeed, and how I would have been absolutely mortified to be the center of so much positive attention in much the same way that I almost crawled underneath a table when people at my twenty-second birthday party started singing Happy Birthday to me in the restaurant or how I feel when my sister introduces me to her friends as my brilliant big sister.
And here are all of these people going absolutely nuts and wanting their families to see them win. Roger Clemens flies his family in to see his 300! Barry Bonds is doing this for his father and his god-father! Billy Ripken, exulting over the thing that will put the final shine on his older, golden-boy brother's Hall of Fame plaque!
I'm marvelling at all that, just kinda staring at the computer screen, and thinking about turning down the sound on the headphones so I'm not deafened. And then, after all the yelling and jubilation and Number one! Number One! My brother is Number One! and all that strangeness, they show Bret Boone and silence.
He's got his arms crossed over his chest. He's not talking, and instead, he is showing, to my eye at least, an emotion that I am profoundly familiar with in just about every-mother-fucking thing and with which my sister knows in reference to the way my parents treat me: envy.
...
Well, yeah, in the end, Bret Boone went home back to where-ever it is that he lives in the off-season, and in return for whatever heart-aching envy he felt up in the FOX booth, he got to watch Aaron Boone whiff on three straight pitches and make some profoundly painful errors and consequently quite possibly lose the World Series for the Yankees, which, fuck that, man.
I still love Aaron Boone best out of any baseball player or public figure, and I still get kinda irritated whenever I watch Mariners games for Bret Boone and that stupid retarded bat-flip of his and the arrogance and what have you. He's still not my World Series hero as he was for this friend of mine (before she replaced him, I suspect, with Josh Beckett and his complete-game sass), but I can feel B. Boone a little bit more now. I can understand his silence and his envy if that was, indeed, what it was -- I can understand that a little better now, and it's a new thing for me to find in baseball.
A while back, a friend wrote a piece about Bret Boone and his strange silence when little brother Arnie hit that ALCS home run. Boone had been sports-casting for Fox, and my friend wrote about how odd Bret Boone seemed standing there in the booth, arms crossed over his chest and sort of mumbling his way through what will probably be the biggest baseball moment of any Boone's life ever. You can hear the production crew in the booth going nuts, and the Fox crew cuts back and forth between Bret and the chaos going down on the field. I think they were trying to get some brotherly joy or what have you, but Boone just looked shocked and stunned more than anything.
Throw in how the Fox sportscaster who interviewed Aaron Boone on the field and who called him "Bret" by accident, and as this friend pointed out in her piece, but damn you have something interesting and fascinating right there.
As far as I can tell, the piece isn't available online any longer. Fox's This Week in Baseball makes some similar points in an under-handeded and more than 99.99999% unintentional sort of way in the June 12th "Brothers in Baseball" segment, though. They've got stuff about Joe and Dom Dimmagio and the Niekro brothers, and it's really a very well done piece and ties in nicely to the host of the week, Marcus Giles and his family connection.
I clicked on the link for the sole purpose of seeing how they treated the Boone thing, though, and I ended up kinda flabbergasted at the way the piece: right before the ALCS footage, they showed Billy Ripken calling his brother's All-Star home run. Ripken is sitting up in the booth, watching his brother approach the plate and talking about Cal is surely going to knock a bomb, and Billy starts screaming and maxing out the volume levels on the in-booth mike even before the ball leaves the yard. He's roaring and yelling and jumping around in his seat. He starts screaming about how this is wonderful, how he just knew his brother was going to do it, and what could be better television than this? And he does most of this with his index finger up in the air, pointing with it and waving it around.
Number one! Number one! My brother is number one!
And right soon, after that, they show Bret Boone, first not particularly talkative, then a little stumbling, and finally just totally speechless and silent and with his arms crossed over his chest, standing in the Fox booth.
...
I have a little baby sister that I love better than I love myself. We've got more years between us than either the Boone boys or the Ripken boys do, and we're utterly different people, but if you asked my parents, they've already determined that I'm probably going to be the one who is more successful in life. I've had conversations with my father where he more or less tells me that he has no idea what to do with my sister to make her a better student or smarter, which is ridiculous in and of itself because my sister is a fine student at a competitive school and is a happy, healthy, bright sixteen year old girl.
But yeah, recently, my sister got some standardized scores back that were perfectly fine in and of themselves but weeren't as good as the ones that I had gotten on the same set of tests. She hasn't told my parents yet because they're not as good as the ones that I got, and she didn't tell me until I prodded the information out of her. She told me over instant messenger a few days after she had gotten the scores, and she was, I think, still a little upset.
The point I'm trying to make is not that failure is solitary as opposed to success, which is social. In fact, in my frame of reference, success is a lonelier thing than failure: when my family and the people I know best excel, it tends to be at things like test-taking and laboratory work. We aren't present at the moment of each other's successes, and we only really talk about our work when we have to broach the subject of failure as in Sorry, I didn't get that promotion, so we're not going on vacation or Sorry, Mom, I didn't get into ______________. Success means you go off to higher and better things where the competition is fiercer and your life is lonelier. Failure means staying at home, consolation dinners and hugs. It means an absence of pressure that means you get to go to the beach for a weekend with your friends or catch a movie at the 'plex. We don't watch each other fail, but even more, we don't watch each other succeed.
Nor did I, at least, really want to watch each other succeed. When she was younger, my sister would ask my parents to buy those Who's Who in American Middle School Students or whatever, but now that she's older, she's stopped. I never asked my parents to buy them, nor did I ever ask them to come to any of my award ceremonies. I never wanted them to come and see me get on stage. I apparently was a big fan of crowds adoring me or whatever I was very, very, very young, but I stopped asking my parents to be present at my so-called soon as I had enough sense, and these days, I suspect that it was because, in my heart of hearts, I would have wanted to see me succeed only if I had also thought that their opinion of me needed improving -- if they had, for example, needed to be reminded of how brilliant their daughter was, how much her teachers loved her.
My issues with that sort of thing will, I think, someday make a psychotherapist very rich, but yeah, it basically boils down to the fact that my parents were not invited to the eleventh grade award ceremony or prom or anything like that. I told my mother that I would have been 100% happy if she didn't go to my high school graduation. I was kinda lukewarm about them being there for my college one, and so, yes, you have that approach to success, and then contrast that to how This Week in Baseball was singing about how special and wonderful it was that these brothers would get to watch each other win.
And then, there was Bret Boone standing there with his arms crossed.
The point that I'm trying to make, I think, is that the rituals of baseball are completely and utterly foreign to me. I watch baseball alone when I'm at home, and nobody in our family, I am reasonably certain, has ever touched a baseball. As a result, I watch baseball at least in part because I am fascinated by this enormously strange world. I sit there marveling at how public these triumphs are, at how much the families are enjoying seeing their sons succeed, and how I would have been absolutely mortified to be the center of so much positive attention in much the same way that I almost crawled underneath a table when people at my twenty-second birthday party started singing Happy Birthday to me in the restaurant or how I feel when my sister introduces me to her friends as my brilliant big sister.
And here are all of these people going absolutely nuts and wanting their families to see them win. Roger Clemens flies his family in to see his 300! Barry Bonds is doing this for his father and his god-father! Billy Ripken, exulting over the thing that will put the final shine on his older, golden-boy brother's Hall of Fame plaque!
I'm marvelling at all that, just kinda staring at the computer screen, and thinking about turning down the sound on the headphones so I'm not deafened. And then, after all the yelling and jubilation and Number one! Number One! My brother is Number One! and all that strangeness, they show Bret Boone and silence.
He's got his arms crossed over his chest. He's not talking, and instead, he is showing, to my eye at least, an emotion that I am profoundly familiar with in just about every-mother-fucking thing and with which my sister knows in reference to the way my parents treat me: envy.
...
Well, yeah, in the end, Bret Boone went home back to where-ever it is that he lives in the off-season, and in return for whatever heart-aching envy he felt up in the FOX booth, he got to watch Aaron Boone whiff on three straight pitches and make some profoundly painful errors and consequently quite possibly lose the World Series for the Yankees, which, fuck that, man.
I still love Aaron Boone best out of any baseball player or public figure, and I still get kinda irritated whenever I watch Mariners games for Bret Boone and that stupid retarded bat-flip of his and the arrogance and what have you. He's still not my World Series hero as he was for this friend of mine (before she replaced him, I suspect, with Josh Beckett and his complete-game sass), but I can feel B. Boone a little bit more now. I can understand his silence and his envy if that was, indeed, what it was -- I can understand that a little better now, and it's a new thing for me to find in baseball.