| There is a passage in Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, in which he describes the behavior of gazelle that are faced by a stalking predator. He says:
“A gazelle’s symbol to a lion that it sees approaching consists of a peculiar behavior called “stotting”. Instead of running away as fast as possible, the gazelle runs slowly while repeatedly jumping into the air with stiff-legged leaps. Why on earth should the gazelle indulge in this seemingly self-destructive display, which wastes time and energy and gives the lion a chance to catch up?”
The deer’s sense of its lurking, inevitable doom comes eerily to mind around October 1, when the days burn out, the leaves dry up, and the summer is flushed out into quickly cooling Lake Michigan by a the western wind.
I hold close the final days of summer, particularly the final days of baseball at Sox Park, where, as the team’s zealous hopes of success yet again fade, as the mob thins out and the stadium becomes again a cavern spattered with Southside laggards, concourses transformed into a stragglers’ cavalcade of jeans still stonewashed from 1987, hair bleached blonde for years, of baseball jerseys unbuttoned over twin flabby pectorals– so wretched, so out-of-place, so despised.
There’s a something so White Sox, so Southside, and so Chicago about October 1. The emotion tied to this time of year seems so apt for an area that throughout my life has been maligned for its rising crime and industrial decline. It’s that tragic emotion Tony Fitzpatrick hinted at on a 2005 collage in homage of former White Sox 3rd baseman Joe Crede, “As steady as rain in October,” a poem on the piece declares, “line drives find him like autumn bullets, bad back be damned… Joe is this city rounding third, going home.” There’s a sense, in all our city’s endeavors, of having missed our shot. Despite what Carl Sandburg called our ignorant fighter’s laugh, deep down we know our back won’t hold out, that soaking October rains relentlessly, and that we are rounding third and we can’t even remember why we are running the bases.
Billy Lombardo, for example, wrote a story called “The Wallace Playlot,” that describes a bet that a Bridgeport kid makes that he can catch a hundred 16-inch softball line drives with only one bare hand. The story describes the fury of the kid’s concentration, as the eyes from the neighborhood start to peer on him, as the cars line up on the street, the kids from St. David’s crowd the rooftops, and the parents squat on their stoops. From across Wallace Avenue, Joe Harris peers out from his Hardware store at the spectacle. Harris and his store are characters first described this way, “There was a great big clock above the entrance; the face of it was a cartoon of Mr. Harris chewing on the stub of a green cigar… when you looked at him up there, pointing a short paintbrush at the hour and a long one at the minute, it seemed like he was in charge of time, too.” And, even though the kid catches every damn ball from 1 to 100, even though the corner of 33rd and Wallace erupts in cheers, “as if,” Lombardo writes, they wanted the kid “to never drop a ball, not on that day, or the next, or any day in his life from that one forward,”, even though Lombardo tries to pin down that day in August 1972 for keeps, those of us who know that corner know that in a few short years the Wallace Playlot will be gone, a developer’s ranch homes built in its place, that the kids from St. David’s will be going somewhere else after the school closes in the early 80s.
And maybe we ought to cherish that day for what it is. Maybe, as Stuart Dybek says in his story, “Death of the Right Fielder,” that “It’s sad to admit it ends to soon, but everyone knows that these are the lucky ones. Most guys are washed up by 17.” Maybe it’s best to cherish that one White Sox World Series win. Maybe, Tony Fitzpatrick’s “autumn bullets” aren’t the steady rains of a dying summer, but instead the celebratory pistol shots that cracked every Southside neighborhood’s night in October 2005.
I recently came across an interview with Ron Kittle, who won the American League Rookie of the Year award in 1983. Kittle hit 35 homeruns in his rookie year, 3rd in the entire American League. He also lead the league in strikeouts. After a seven or eight increasingly mediocre seasons, he faded out of the game. But it truly remarkable that he made it to the League at all, even for his one outstanding summer. A natural hitter from Gary, Ind., Kittle signed with the Dodgers in 1978. After he doubled in his first minor league at bat, Kittle tried to score on a single and was involved in a vicious collision at the plate. He sat out for several weeks with numbness in his arm, and just wasn’t able to hit with the Dodgers when he returned from injury. Released after two seasons in the minors. Kittle then came home to Gary, and saw a neck specialist who told him that he had been playing baseball for two years with a cracked spinal cord and three crushed vertebrae. His doctors were amazed he was still walking, let alone playing minor league baseball. He went through a series of surgeries and began working in the Gary steel mills and playing a local beer league. He was spotted there by White Sox scout Billy Pierce, after hitting a ball more than 550 feet and onto Interstate 294. One version of the story told in the newspapers had it that he actually hit White Sox owner Bill Veeck’s car with his gargantuan homerun. And so, Ron Kittle got another shot to play in the major leagues.
In 2003, Kittle said of his time in baseball, “I knew that because of my back I only had a certain number of swings that I was going to be able to get. It seemed to get worse every year and it limited what I was going to be able to do. I’d have to take [painkillers] before every game just to be able to play.” And so, as he explains in the interview, every time Ron Kittle swung the bat, he swung for the fences. His approach would be comical if his homeruns weren’t so mammoth. He ended his ten-year, injury shortened career with more strikeouts (744) than hits (648), but more than one in every four of those hits landed in the outfield seats. And he will forever hold the unique record for the most homeruns hit onto the roof of old Comiskey Park, 7.
Because of his injury, Ron Kittle understood, that– as it says at the bottom of the Southside’s greatest sculpture— “Alas, time stays, we go,” that the leaves are always falling, the summer’s always fading, the season is forever ending. Which brings me back to that Jared Diamond story. Diamond’s point is that, pointless though it may appear, a deer’s act of bounding into the air in the face of a lurking predator may serve to bullshit the encircling wolves that they are hunting a deer too agile to chase, too powerful to be caught. The grand, superfluous act– the ridiculous uppercut swing, the foolish leaps over the grass– these may serve to temporarily forestall our terrible and always approaching end.
There is a line in (former) Chicago poet Dan Beachy-Quick‘s 2007 book Mulberry (which, coincidentally features a fallen leaf taped for preservation on its cover) that reads, “so a wounded deer leaps highest.” For all of us who feel we are rounding third, who feel the city’s summer ending, take as medicine that line and two quips from Ron Kittle’s playing days. First, speaking of a floundering team he found himself on at the end of his career Kittle said, “We led the league in card games and crossword puzzles. What the hell happened to the guys who drank all night, threw up all day, and went out and won ballgames?” I can’t think of a more ridiculously grand gesture than that. And, even more to the point, he was once quoted as saying of his approach to this game, “Fans appreciate home runs, I mean, they don’t stand up for singles…. Homerun hitters drive Cadillacs.”
For the side of the city so long left to die and now picked apart by TIF districts and Olympic get-rich-quicker schemes, Kittle’s mad uppercut swings sing hope. So wounded deer always leap highest.
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