Turner's Turn

The fan is the most ruthless creature in professional sports, and I'm one, so yesterday morning when I read about Jim Rice I reacted as though someone had died. Jim Rice is not dead, ofcourse--he's just caked up in a cast for a month or two, through the remaining week of the regular season, through the possible American League Playoff, through the possible World Series and the possible apocalypse in Boston which would follow a victory there. That's all. He's not dead, but for me he might as well be.

There's something ruthless in that attitude: it treats Rice as something less than human, purely as an instrument, a part broken down and therefore worthless. But what can I say? I have to perceive Jim Rice off the field only as a shadowy and bland image. He says he likes to fish. He comes from Anderson, S.C. He is twenty-two years old, my age, though in some ways he is probably a lot younger than I am because he has had fewer experiences, or at least not as wide a variety of them. He has been to fewer cities more times, is less educated, and richer. He's been a professional baseball hitter since high school. This is his first year in the major leagues, and, not surprisingly, there's precious little he can say to reporters except things like "Well, I feel real good, and I've been working on my swing some, and, uh, I'm just looking forward to the game tonight..."

Even if Rice wanted to say something controversial he couldn't. Obviously he can't give frank opinions about the other members of his team, or the management, particularly when he is a rookie. And a "public" statement (suppose he wanted to say something about racism in Boston) would be adroitly buried by the press as extraneous. When Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee called Judge Garrity the only man in this town with any guts, the paper gave the statement virtually no play, and a columnist quickly huffed and puffed about how baseball and social criticism don't mix.

No, Rice doesn't exist except as a baseball player, save for his close friends and family. In the ballpark, though, loping out to the outfield, matching steps with Freddie Lynn like the first two mustangs out of the canyon to sniff the expanse, or kneeling in the on deck circle coiled like a spring, or straightening up, breathing hard at first base after cracking one to left center--in the ballpark he's a bubbling, vital being who radiates sheer, awesome promise. Now the fourth metacarpal bone in his left hand is fractured and he is dead. Any sane Red Sox junkie would shake his or her head, order up another stiff one, and forget about it--think about the Baltimore Orioles and other more immediate matters. Hell, the sportswriters, who treated Rice like nothing short of an apparition from heaven above all year have cursed and moved on. He'll be back next year, but no one would be able to begin to think that far ahead. He's finished.

Another reason that the whole thing is so like the death of a loved one is that there's nowhere to vent your frustration and rage, no one to ask why, no one to blame. If this were 1950, the pitcher who smashed his hand with a fastball might be blamed. After all, Vernon Ruhle looks like he'd be out castrating beef cattle for fun if he wasn't a relief pitcher for the Tigers. But the days of beanball wars are over: even the designated hitter rule, which theoretically lets pitchers zap people with impunity (they themselves don't have to bat), hasn't changed that. No, the ball must have slipped; Rice didn't duck back quick enough. He even went to first and came around to score later than inning, and batted two more times before they took him out of the game. There wasn't even the rush of sudden tragedy, then--one read about it the next morning, a nightmare you squelch, mind at rest, until quietly you're plunged back into it again. It's only a game, sure, but when in Boston and throughout New England there are more than one million people who spend three hours a day watching or listening to the Red Sox, or at least conscious of the game and what the score is and how many RBI's Jim Rice has today, and when those million people, and certainly another million or two, have conversations a minimum of once a day that begin, "How 'bout those Red Sox, huh?" then it means something. It's pretty hard to find something that so many people can agree on, not to say share as an enormous, and enormously vicarious, emotional experience.

Rice was priceless when he played. He didn't have the picture-perfect and fluid swing of Lynn, to whom he was always compared. Instead his powerful wrists carved the bat around, hard, and caught it for an instant before bringing it back, hard. He swung it like a scythe, and once I watched him connect full force and hit the ball up and over the flagpole in deep center, still going up at the 400-foot mark.

People noticed when he hit that ball, just as they noticed when he won game after game with his bat, and when he knocked in as many runs, finally, as Lynn did. But face it--Lynn got most of the glory. Not that Rice would care, or that he was ignored, or that any fan would be prepared to admit a visceral preference for Lynn. But it was demeaning simply that Rice and Lynn were always mentioned in the same breath. They complemented each other--the rightie, the leftie, the fielder, the slugger, the rookies, the meat of the order--and it was easy to pair them up. But it always comes down to one man in a situation like this. Rice would never have been MVP the way Lynn may be, and it was doubly hard to gouge out a niche when such a running comparison was going on. It was Lynn who made the fabulous catches that saved games, and catches are the images that stay frozen longest--the enduring moments of baseball lore. The mind can catch them better, better than any hit short of a Mazeroski or Thompson job. And Rice was expected to do well--he won the Triple Crown in the International League last year. It's only been one season, but there's always a Lou Gehrig, even when he's a different and incomparable star in the same sky that holds Babe Ruth.

Lynn is compared to DiMaggio and Williams; Rice to Henry Aaron if anybody, partly because Willie Mays wouldn't do (Rice has no connotations, yet, as a fielder), mostly because whites are always compared to whites and blacks to blacks. There really are similarities between Lynn and DiMaggio--you can feel it--but Rice and Aaron have only one similarity, and one which has little to do with baseball.

It's still a hopeless flailing to think on it: Rice is dead and gone. I try to look at the bright side. For one, now in a possible World Series Cecil Cooper can start with Dwight Evans preserved at right field. Cooper on first and Yaz at left--no more problem of dumping the designated hitter. But (sigh) manager Darrell Johnson will probably start Carbo or something... And, uh, Rice wasn't hitting so well in the past week anyway--chopping his swing and neutralizing his power. Hah. It's very depressing. And you have to feel most sorry, ruthless or not, for the handsome black man, perhaps in street clothes, perhaps in a number 14, sitting on a bench with his arm curving into an ugly hunk of plaster, watching while the Red Sox bask in the incredible, exhilarating core of an ocean of energy, the high of a pennant race and maybe more.