The Gal of Summer

How could an otherwise sane adult be brought nearly to tears because 'his' team -- really a group of millionaire mercenaries -- happened to lose an interminable, bewildering ballgame? She was determined to find out.

WE ARRIVE AT OUR HOTEL IN MELBOURNE, FLA., ON A BALMY WEEKDAY EVENING. The Radisson Suite Hotel is still undergoing renovation after a hurricane the previous summer, and it's hardly swank digs, with work crews buzzing about and patches of water damage pocking the walls and ceilings. But perhaps because the hotel is largely vacant, we've been lucky enough to get the honeymoon suite with a panoramic view of the Atlantic. The minute we set our bags down, Bruce pulls open the sliding glass doors to the balcony overlooking the water, and the smell of humid salt air fills my nostrils. I lean over the railing to watch the surf foam and slap the shore, and the ocean's dull roar seems to replace the blood in my veins, slowing my heart and obsessive thoughts of work and children up north and easing the ever-present tension between my shoulder blades. The paradisiacal atmosphere continues the next morning as we walk, sockless and in khakis, into the nearly empty dining room for breakfast. The room is almost yellow with sunshine as I pore over the Washington Nationals team profile in Street & Smith's 2006 baseball preview issue. This is homework for me, the dutiful student, hoping to prime the pump of my interest in a sport I know almost nothing about.

But the fact of the matter is, my pump is already primed. It's spring training in South Florida, and even before I set foot in the ballpark, the seductive subtropical atmosphere is enough to make even the most stubborn baseball agnostic want very much to believe.

I notice something else as we park our rental car at Space Coast Stadium, a full hour before the 12:05 game time. Bruce is wearing his worn red Phillies cap with the white P, like the one he had when we started dating nearly 20 years ago, and, somehow, even with the gray hair and the soft lines around his eyes, he looks almost as boyishly relaxed as he did then. We are talking about the thumbs-down that Sports Illustrated has given the team for the season. "Even if they do poorly," he counsels me, "there's the appeal of being an underdog."

Multimillion-dollar ballplayers, underdogs? I am thinking.

"Plus, baseball is a sport for optimists," he says. "It's a very long season with a lot of games, and there is always a reason for hope." That's the kind of baseball-as-metaphor talk that has always made me skeptical, but I have to admit, since our arrival in Florida, my husband has, indeed, been looking hopeful -- light of spirit, even -- for the first time in much too long.

IT'S THIS TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF BASEBALL THAT WILL BE MY COURSE OF STUDY THIS SEASON. I have been married for 15 years to an otherwise extremely even-tempered man who is capable of plunging into an unremitting funk for hours when his beloved Phillies lose a close game. And I watched, distantly bemused, during the Nationals' first season as colleagues and friends threw themselves into the grip of their winning home team, undeterred by the potential despair that awaited them should the high not last (and, of course, it didn't).

I consider myself empathetic, and yet I have never understood how rational adults can become so distraught over a sporting event. Oh, and spare me the overwrought parallels between life and baseball. Cooking and home decorating are equivalent traditionally feminine passions of mine, and nobody has promoted them to great symbols of Success and Failure and the Challenges of Human Existence. Failure and success in life -- as well as war, poverty, inequality and death -- can be worth our tears, but the Nats losing to the Phillies or the Phillies losing to the Nats -- I really don't think so.

I was making a version of this speech to my friend Tom during the Nats' inaugural season in 2005 when he blurted out, "That would be a great story!"

Huh?

He explained that I should spend one season trying to attain the level of fandom that would leave me feeling emotionally distraught when "my team" loses, and elation when it wins. Just for fun, I engaged him in what I viewed at the time as a hypothetical exchange. Okay. Which sport? No way with football -- too brutish. Basketball might be the best match. I'm African American. Plus, the pace fits my flitting attention span. But Tom argued for the Nats: They're a new team trying to build a fan base, and my experience could hold an interesting mirror up to that effort.

I agreed, theoretically, that baseball might make the most sense for other reasons, too. I've never felt that being a good wife required that I become a baseball fan, but now my 8-year-old daughter, Alex, is playing on a team coached by my husband, and I think it might be nice to actually understand what they're talking about. And, as I will later note at spring training, the atmosphere at the ballpark is awfully pleasant. Twenty years of flipping through magazines and gabbing with girlfriends while Bruce and his buddies watched the game has shown me this. So it could be useful and fun.

But for me, becoming a fan, especially that kind of getting-upset-over-trivia fan, seemed like a long shot. Until trying soccer at age 40, I had never played a team sport. I grew up before Title IX, the federal law ensuring gender parity in school athletics, really took hold. I was raised in a matriarchal household that emphasized being smart and opinionated and reading anything in sight, but also entertaining Southern-style and wearing lipstick on all occasions. Sports was not on the conversational table.