Why Time Didn't Begin On Opening Day 

Sunday, October 22, 2006

From 2001 through the end of 2005 this was a thriving website. This year we crashed and burned. Why? Well, there are more than a few reasons. I've been flying under the radar for a while now, but perhaps now is the time to write.

The most basic story here is limited resources. When this adventure first started I was a graduate student. While I was often asked to work long hours, there was downtime when I could put a lot of love into this site. Now I'm a professor with a toddler. The first means that I'm working much harder, the second means that I simply can't leave the house for four or five hours of sun and baseball. Until the little guy is old enough to enjoy a hotdog and a good ass-kicking of the Dodgers, well, baseball just isn't part of my agenda.

Then of course there is James. Or the fact that there is no more James. He died. I know I said I'd keep this going in his honor, heck, it says that at the top of this page. And I do feel bad about not doing a better job. But this was always his baby and I was at best a junior partner. Like the old saying goes, I'll never be able to replace him, just follow him. He was the only person with enough clout to say "Marasco, get off your ass and fix that website." Now that he's gone, if I can't do this, well, there isn't a gorilla that can make me. As I write this I realize that although this message is timed with the start of the World Series, it is also within a week of my seeing a student from last year. I thought he had died. The young man has spent most of the past year in chemo. I don't think it is coincidence that my work on the site dropped to nearly nothing right around the time he came into my office and we spent a long time talking about cancer and what he had in front of him. Most of my side of the discussion was based upon e-mails I had traded with James.

Finally, there's the reduced role that baseball plays in my life. It's more than just the fact that being a dad means that I don't have spare time. I come from a Japanese-American background. Baseball has always been an integral part of assimilation. My grandfather was responsible for the construction of the diamond at his internment camp. I saw forty or fifty games a year in high school. I was going to a private school that is part of the old-boys network. For most of that time I felt like an outsider, baseball helped. When I was in grad school I returned to a forty-to-fifty game attendance level. I was a man of color who had transplanted from California to the Midwest. Again, there was something about baseball that helped with the cultural challenges I was facing. Now I'm back in California, but more importantly I'm in a very different station in life. I've got a good job with decent pay and a lot of respect. I've got a mortgage. I've traded in my mohawk for a lawnmower. It's hard to explain, but it feels like I've received a letter in the mail from the Department of Assimilation stating "Your application for Whiteness has been approved." The needs that baseball used to fill in my life have become less important.

So where do we go from here? Well, baseball is a part of who I am, and when the little guy has an attention span of more than 20 seconds I'll start taking him to games. But my days of spending six hours at the park, taking pictures during BP and then tracking the game pitch-by-pitch, those are done. As for the website, I can't put the hours into it as I did in the past. But there is a strong stable of writers (and yes, I let them down this year). I'm simply going to hand them the keys to place and let them take care of business. Things will be good.

posted by David 6:28 AM