Yellow Mustard and the Happiness Machine

I’m writing this intro on Wednesday evening. The M’s have an excruciating need for a win, but King Felix and his immediate reliever gave the Rangers 8 runs.  Twice in successive innings — the bottoms of the 6th and 7th — Yonder Alonso came to the plate with the bases loaded.  He made three outs in two plate appearances, got zero RBI’s, and killed both rallies. So now, in the last inning of this game, the Mariners are in all likelihood taking their last gasps in this wild card race. Ben and I will be there Friday evening. The M’s won’t be mathematically eliminated, but it will be the Indians versus the M’s, current Pear Carlos Carrasco against former Wolverine and Kangaroo Erasmo Ramirez. It is not likely to be pretty for the M’s.

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Sigh.

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I think I’ve written here before an aphorism I made up thirty-five years ago and have recited to all four of my kids ad nauseum — which, translated into Adolescent, means “more than once.”

It is no great honor to be hard to please.

The point is to revel in the small, everyday pleasures. A sunset is as good as a symphony. A hamburger from the backyard grill is better than a $50 meal at the Painted Lady (trust me, I’ve had both). Fancy mustards have nothing on good old yellow. It’s a shame, a sin, almost a crime to so mistreat yourself that you sneer at simple pleasures. There is nothing to be proud of in being hard to please.

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(Except, of course, when it comes to sloppy work by one’s students. Then it’s no great honor to be a pushover.)

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Somehow the other day I stumbled into Joe Posnanski’s twitter feed.  Joe is a steady source of simple pleasures so I followed him. This one action constituted about 20% of my lifetime Twitter activity.  Then I had to unfollow him when I realized I was somehow using the  History/Politics department Twitter account. Now I can’t find my personal Twitter account — but then it’s been a couple of years since I looked for it. I remember it has a picture of Ben and Sam at Yellowstone… ages about 7, I think. When we stopped on the way at  the John Day fossil beds to look for fossils, Ben couldn’t quite get straight what kind of scientist a paleontologist was.  He told Melanie we were pretending to be “scientologists.”

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We were talking about Joe Posnanski. His Twitter page has a link to a story he wrote in August about his daughter watching Ichiro get three hits in Nationals stadium. It’s a simple story — not likely to be hailed as the finest of literature by connoisseurs, but it is still finely crafted, rich with detail, evocative, poignant. For one thing, he captured perfectly the guarded expectations the Mariners had during spring training in 2001, Ichiro’s rookie year, and how sensationally Ichiro exceeded even the highest hopes that year.  And Posnanski included  a detail I had never heard before: Ichiro sent a giant wreath the Negro Leagues Museum when Buck O’Neil died. Later he (Ichiro, not Buck) visited the museum when he was in Kansas City, told the museum’s president he had met Buck and admired him as a man of honor, and then wrote the biggest check to the museum any ballplayer had ever written up to that time.

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Ichiro is still playing… for now. He is still capable of a three-hit game: a “beautiful” line-drive single to left, a single “rifled” into right, and an infield bouncer beaten out before the throw, as Joe P described his hits that evening. Nothing fancy, but still an artist at work, doing it his own unique way.  A simple pleasure to watch.

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One more chance to see Ichiro on a good day: that would be nice — a rather fancy dijon pleasure, admittedly.  But Ichiro won’t be in Safeco Field Friday evening.

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I’ll be with one of my sons, which is good. There’ll be a fireworks show after the game — also nice. Perhaps I’ll have a hot dog with yellow mustard and sauerkraut. We’ll go to Melissa’s to sack out in the living room until Enzo and Mateo come jumping down the stairs. That will be worth the trip all by itself.  But from where will come the small pleasures in the game itself, now that the M’s are realistically out of the wild card race?

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Ben and I will have to find pleasant consolation in the craftsmanship of some honest hard-working yellow-mustard player(s). Let’s practice looking for such simple treasures in Wednesday’s games.

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I don’t expect to see any Wolverines. (Dan Vogelbach got sent in to pinch hit in tonight’s game — but only to get the Rangers to bring in a lefty from the pen, at which point Danny Valencia replaced Vogelbach before he could even get settled in the batter’s box. The story of Vogelbach’s season in a nutshell.) Emilio Pagan might appear, late in his one-month career as a Wolverine. I have no Indians anymore. Santana, Kluber, Salazar, Bauer, Gomes: all gone.