Pennant-Race Memories: Handle with Care

                It’s likely that the New York Yankees won’t make the playoffs this year, giving them two straight seasons without a playoff berth since 1992 and ‘93. If the Yankees are your favorite team, as they are for the residents of the Hynes household, this is disappointing. But if you’re paying attention to the full baseball season, you know that several groups of long-suffering fans are getting the chance to see their teams in a pennant race this summer. That is the story of baseball in 2014, and it’s a great one.

You’ve got the Kansas City Royals, absent from the playoffs for 29 years, standing in first place in their division. The Baltimore Orioles, out of the playoffs for 28 of the last 31 years, also in first place. The Milwaukee Brewers, who have made the playoffs just four times in their 45-year existence, holding onto first place. The Pittsburgh Pirates, who last year made the playoffs for the first time in 20 years, in the Wild Card chase. And the Toronto Blue Jays, absent from the playoffs for 21 years, also in the Wild Card hunt. Even the Washington Nationals, trying to bring playoff baseball to the nation’s capital for just the second time in 81 years, in first place.

When you look at this season from the vantage point of long-awaited hope, it gives you reason to worry little about whether usual playoff suspects such as the Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies, Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals, Atlanta Braves and Boston Red Sox will make the postseason this year. These teams and their fans certainly will survive. But the Royals! How can you not root for the kids in Kansas City? Even baseball’s two most consistent teams this year, the first-place Oakland Athletics and Los Angeles Dodgers, have not won a World Series since Rick Astley, Richard Marx and Gloria Estefan were ruling Billboard’s Top 40.

A few weeks ago, I took a weekend trip with my brother and our friend Neil, to spend some time together and celebrate Eric and Neil both turning 40 this year. When we go away together, the three of us usually travel to baseball stadiums. This time, it was an Orioles game one night, followed by a Nationals game the next. We watched the home teams win their games, and the stadiums were loud and full. We were impressed by how many fans dressed in the colors of their teams – Orioles orange and Nationals red. It also was impressive to see the teams enjoying their own traditions – Orioles fans belting out John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” during the seventh-inning stretch, and Nationals fans cheering wildly for Teddy Roosevelt as he won the nightly race of mascot presidents, beating out Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Taft.

There was a lot of late-summer hope in the voices and eyes of these Mid-Atlantic baseball fans. The same can be heard and seen in Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and other mid-size cities around the country, where the local teams are giving their fans reason to avoid thinking about football quite yet. In the end, though, these pennant-race ballgames always mean more than wins and losses. If you’re traveling to a game with your friends or family, you’re going to have time to sit together in the stands and talk, perhaps even about stuff more important than balls and strikes.

I can tell you about a lot of the Yankee games I’ve seen with Eric and Neil, but I also can tell you about many good talks and laughs we’ve had at the ballpark in the Bronx. During our Maryland weekend, we talked a lot of baseball but also caught up on one another’s lives, sharing stories of recent trips, photos of kids, and songs we’ve been enjoying. We took in the games, but also searched for tasty ballpark food together, with Eric raving over the jerk chicken in Nationals Park and Neil savoring his chili dog. I’m sure I can dig up some details of the games from my memory, but none of them come to mind as clearly as the three of us munching on late-night nachos in a pub in Alexandria, Va., or discovering the historic Maine Avenue Fish Market on our walk to the Nationals game, or singing the Traveling Wilburys’ Handle with Care together as Neil drove north on I-295, heading home.

So in this late summer of 2014, those of us in New York will never be Royals. We’re Yankees fans, so we’ll take what we can get. But as the people in Kansas City and Pittsburgh and Baltimore and D.C. get together for an energizing pennant race, we know that their fans will love the baseball. But Eric, Neil and I can tell you that in the end, a great game is really just an invitation to deepen a friendship. Put on those orange or red T-shirts, grab some jerk chicken, and create some memories together.

Everybody’s got somebody to lean on.

Back to Basics

              The world of pop music has undergone more sea changes than any of us can count over the past 60 years, but the newest trend is surprising even to hardy top-40 fans such as myself. In case you haven’t noticed, foot-stompin’ pop is all the rage now. A grizzled voice, a few banjos, a “hey” and a “ho,” finished off with the sound of boots hitting hardwood – it’s Billboard gold right now.

              I’ve got no problem with it, and most of the bands in this genre – Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers, Of Monsters and Men, to name a few – are a nice complement to the other genres in the pop music galaxy, from rap to hip hop to R&B to country pop. Throw in a little more standard rock, and you’ve got the most diverse array of pop music this side of 1985. Neat as it is, though, it’s still shocking to turn on a mainstream, top-40 radio station and hear banjos. Just a year after Earl Scruggs died, the instrument he mastered is holding its own alongside Auto-Tune and boy bands.

Cool as it sounds, though, I think this foot-stompin’ pop is about more than just the whimsical tastes of music fans. Something this different has to carry some symbolic weight. Twenty years ago, we saw a similar trend when MTV introduced the widely popular “Unplugged” series, where famous musicians strapped on acoustic guitars and crooned their hits in stripped-down fashion. Twenty years before that, singer-songwriters such as Jim Croce, James Taylor and John Denver ensured that the quiet, thoughtful, acoustic song would remain a part of our pop-music canon for individuals not named Dylan. I found the “Unplugged” fad to be a necessary reaction to what had become an overload of synthesizers and heavy metal in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. The early-‘70s quiet guys were a natural foil to the blossoming of hard rock in the late ‘60s.

This time around, Mumford and all his sons and cousins are here for a couple of reasons: First of all, they’re not really quiet songs, so much as anthems – and in a time of so much uncertainty, the anthem does a lot of people an awful lot of good; it always has. Secondly, I think the stripped-down approach of banjos and boots is also a harkening back to our past – to a recognition that there are some things we did better in previous generations, and it’s at least worth reflecting on that.

When Bill Monroe and Woody Guthrie were playing bluegrass and folk music back in the 1930s, America was undergoing an economic crisis even worse than the one we’ve had in the past half-decade. But during those years, the country took some courageous risks in fighting its way out of the misery it faced. Today, as we watch our government leaders play a dangerous game of chicken with our economy, we might long for the days of banjos and fiddles, as they were accompanied by bold action.

Also, as we watch severe storms ravage our country, we might find ourselves reflecting back on the last time a man-made natural disaster struck our country. The shock and debris of Hurricane Sandy remains with us still, and maybe we’re ready to revisit the days of the Dust Bowl to think seriously about what happens when we alter our climate – and what we can do to fix it. Woody Guthrie sang about that, too.

Or if we’re into sports, maybe the Lumineers’ “Ho Hey” reminds us a little of Willie Mays’ “Say Hey” days. Perhaps the stripped-down pop of now connects with the stripped-down baseball game being played once more, at long last. With performance-enhancing drugs on their way out of the game, baseball has become what it was before the juicers took over – a game in which pitchers dominate. Many of us were told as children that the hardest thing to do in sports is to hit a baseball coming at you at a rapid speed. The laws of physics support this theory completely, and without those drugs we’re seeing the game become what it was meant to be. Getting a hit three out of 10 times at-bat is once again a Hall of Fame-worthy accomplishment. Striking 40 home runs in a season is once more enough to win a home run crown. And pitching a shutout is once again commonplace.

So when we read about Willie Mays dominating the game in the 1950s, we read about a man who did this through his own natural abilities. As baseball prepares for a new season, we feel more confident than ever that the fakers have either been caught or are about to get caught. And that’s something  to say “hey” about. It’s also reason to appreciate the beauty of the 2-1 game, instead of the 12-9 slugfest.

There are a lot of amazing things that happen in a 2-1 game. Players think carefully about their decisions. They work together a lot. They take courageous risks. They appreciate a well-played game, in which the playing field is level.

They do the things that make the game great, and they don’t need any performance enhancements to do that. It’s the same way with economies, global weather patterns and even pop songs – just keep it honest, dare to be different, and try a little collaboration. Make some music together. Banjos allowed.