Mined from the notebooks, Saturday, July 20, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, August 2, 2020.
New York Mets Jeff McNeil (wearing number 6 on his jersey) celebrates with first baseman Pete Alonso as Alonso crosses the plate after hitting his record-setting 33rd home run of the season in the Mets’ drubbing of the Giants, 11-4, in San Francisco, on Saturday, July 20, 2019. AP Photo by Tom Brenner.
Catching up on my July blogging means catching up on my blogging from July 2019 as well as July 2020. From the Sports Desk in the Department of In Search of Lost Time, Saturday, July 20, 2019: John Steinbeck joins Keith and Gary in the Mets broadcasting booth…
Gorgeous afternoon for baseball in San Francisco. Seventy-three degrees. Clear blue sky. Sun sparkling on the water in the bay. Mets beating up on the Giants.
Usual flotilla of kayaks, canoes, sunfish, and other small pleasure craft out in McCovey Cove waiting for someone to hit one out of the park, hoping it’ll splash down close enough that they can get to it before everyone else and reel it in, giving them a souvenir and bragging rights. A large cabin cruiser makes its way farther out, just off the entrance to the cove. A party boat. Passengers in swimsuits dancing on the rear deck. Mets color analyst and one-time Cardinal and Mets star first baseman Keith Hernandez observes two guys dancing with a group of young women in bikinis. “Neither of those guys stand a chance, I’ll tell you that,” he says with the same critical objectivity he’d use analyzing a player’s at bat.
Hernandez’s older brother Gary is in the booth with him and Mets play-by-play announcer Gary Cohen. Gary Hernandez sits quietly as talk turns to the lessons Keith learned about baseball from his father, a minor league star in his days in the Texas League. John Hernandez taught both his sons how to play ball. Of course Keith was the one with the superior talent and professional potential, but Gary Hernandez had a short minor league career of his own. There’s no note of sibling rivalry in his voice when Keith talks about his brother now and back then. And he chuckles with real fondness when he jumps happily on Cohen’s suggestion that they have Gary back in the booth often from here on out as he’s proving to be a good luck charm for the Mets.
The Hernandez brothers grew up in Pacifica, California just south of San Francisco. They learned to play baseball in sight of the ocean. Doesn't take much for Cohen to get Keith reminiscing about life around there in those days. All farmland and woodland back then, Keith remembers, a great place to be a kid. But instead of waxing nostalgic, Hernandez switches to talking about one of his favorite writers---John Steinbeck. San Francisco is only an hour and a forty or so minutes north of Monterey and the Salinas River Valley, the area where Steinbeck grew up and set many of his novels and stories. The landscape between Pacifica and Salinas was probably, geographically, economically, and culturally much of a piece when Hernandez was young and, I’m guessing, he took Steinbeck to heart because he recognized his own experience in the books. I’m also guessing he didn’t recognize his politics or what would become his politics fifty years later.
Hernandez is a Trump voter. Not one of the hideous men, as far as I can tell. One of those “He’s been great for the economy” otherwise intelligent business conservatives who don’t see Trump’s racism and lack of any skill or talent or brains. But, still, Steinbeck? Whose books include “The Grapes of Wrath” and “In Dubious Battle”? Keith even says “In Dubious Battle” is one of his favorites still, along with “Tortilla Flat”. I always wonder how smart conservatives like Hernandez reconcile their views with those of leftwing writers and artists whose work they love.
I shouldn’t.
I have no trouble reconciling my views with rightwing writers whose work I admire---like Dostoevsky, Saul Bellow, Edith Wharton, and, even, the ghosts of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy save me, Mark Helprin.
Anyway. I wish Hernandez had had time to expand upon his love of Steinbeck’s stuff. I’d like to know just what specific scenes and characters he thinks give the best sense of life in that part of California circa his high school days in the mid-1960s. My own personal guidebooks to the area are the short story collections “The Pastures of Heaven” and “The Long Valley”. I've never been out there, but it's one of the places I plan to visit as soon as I'm done exploring every inch of the small stretch of the Hudson Valley where we live in upstate New York. (Paris, Rome, Singapore, and Cairo are on my list too.) My favorite novels by Steinbeck are “Tortilla Flat” and “Cannery Row”.
Saying you like “The Grapes of Wrath” is close to saying you like “Huckleberry Finn”. Those are two of the books Americans are born to like.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The game continued without any more literary criticism but with more beating up on the Giants by the Mets. New York won it, 11-4. Here's the box score. The Mets hit four home runs total, including a three-run shot by Pete Alonso in the sixth. Didn’t make it out into McCovey Cove. Wasn't heading that direction. But it went 444 feet into the deepest recesses of the park in center field. It was Alonso’s 33rd HR of the season, and it gave him his 75th RBI, breaking Daryl Strawberry’s Mets rookie season record. It also came as something of a relief. Alonso has been in a slump since winning the Home Run Derby in this year’s All-Star Carnival weekend. Hope is this home run taken together with the one he hit in the 16th inning of Thursday night's loss to the Giants signal he's returning to form.
Filed under Mining the Notebooks.
Comments