October, Track 2: My Oh My

A quick explanation:

The idea here is to make a compilation album charting the course of a particular month—October, in this case. Part of the idea is having a good arc to it—this is why it’s an album and not a playlist; there’s a Side A and a Side B—and part of it is trying to capture the different emotions of a month in music. The biggest part, though, is that songs are a good jumping off place for writing about things that aren’t songs, at least for me. Consider this the on-site creative writing gym for The Barking Crow.

This month’s tracklist is as follows, and if you use Spotify, you can listen to it in playlist form here.

Side A

1. “Highwayman” – The Highwaymen
2. “My Oh My” – Macklemore, Ryan Lewis
3. “Human” – The Killers
4. “Spaceman” – The Killers
5. “Cover Me Up” – Jason Isbell

Side B

6. “Don’t Change Your Plans” – Ben Folds Five
7. “All My Days” – Alexi Murdoch
8. “A Dustland Fairytale” – The Killers
9. “Friday I’m in Love” – Phoebe Bridgers
10. “I Can’t Stay” – The Killers

Track 2:

***

I started crying last week, listening to this. I was driving down I-35, working on the tracklist for October, and when this got to “grand salami time,” I choked up. Something primitive about the chords at that point. Something primitive about me, too, I guess.

It’s Division Series time, eight of the thirty Major League Baseball teams left, that stage in the playoffs where the powers haven’t taken over and any Cinderellas are just theoretical Cinderellas, aspirational Cinderellas, potential Cinderellas. Tropicana Field will fill up tonight for a team that, by law of money and market, should not be there. Miller Park will fill up tomorrow for a team that, by law of money and market, should not be there. Comiskey will fill up on Sunday for a team that, by law of money and market, should not be there.

There’s a paradigm where that’s all this song is about—small-market baseball, early-stage playoff hopefulness, frosty October days. That’s the root of it. That’s the stuff where Dave Niehaus became such a figure in the life of one Benjamin Haggerty. But it’s more than that, of course. It’s a love letter to Seattle, it’s a love letter to childhood, it’s a tribute to Haggerty’s father, and it’s a tribute to Niehaus, the guy who tied all those things together: the voice of October exhilaration; the voice of childhood promise. For Macklemore, that guy was Niehaus. For me, in Illinois, that guy was Pat Hughes. There’s something about playoff baseball. There’s something about the Division Series.

I used to listen to this on the way to games my junior season in high school. This and a couple other songs on my orange iPod nano. I loved this song the second I heard it, and every time I hear it again, it flushes me full of that romanticism for baseball, and for some reason cold baseball, specifically: cleats cutting into clay and turtlenecks beneath one’s uniform and puffing a hot breath into one’s throwing hand to get a grip on that freezing, rock-hard ball. When we talk about the timelessness of baseball, we usually splice it up with clips from the Babe Ruth era, and now the Willie Mays era, and more and more the Pete Rose era, but we haven’t gotten yet to the Ken Griffey Jr. era in those clips. When we talk about the universality of baseball, we usually splice it up with clips of summer evenings next to pickup trucks, and hot days in Caribbean sandlots, and even beer-league softball late at night in the city, but we haven’t gotten yet to those 42-degree twilight April high school games in the north.

Baseball, for me, was in large part a cold-weather sport, pushed through in the spring, celebrated in the fall on the TV and Dad’s workbench radio. This is a northern baseball song. This celebrates that—the winter thaw, the grime and the grit, the light rain gleaming in that night game. When we talk about baseball as a metaphor for life, we talk about its poeticism, but there’s that element too where it’s just hard. Where it’s just cold. Where it’s Sisyphean and not in the “Ted Williams failed six times out of ten” way but instead the “the Mariners have never won a World Series in all their 35 years” way, the real Sisyphean way, the one where the victory is not the victory but just a victory, just the Division Series, and yet it means so much.

I got the yips that junior year. Couldn’t field a ground ball, couldn’t transfer the ball out of my mitt, and the deterioration of my hitting accelerated. But during a spring break morning game in the sun, with two strikes on me and the bases loaded in an early inning, I roped a ball through the right side of the infield to score two, and I got myself in the lineup for a few more weeks: a few weeks of cold games entered off a yellow school bus under gray skies, breathing in the exhaust while batbags clanked into the air from cracked brown seats, always a few windows open that just wouldn’t close so always a few guys getting sprayed on the ride home if it decided to mist (and it often decided to mist). I’d listen to “My Oh My” as we got close to the field. I’d think about how much I loved baseball. I’d think about how happy I was to be there. The anxiety wouldn’t have taken hold yet. There was still hope to be hoped.

There was something primitive about that.