Fall 2025 | Volume 8, Issue 1

There is nothing so pristine as the mound at Fenway Park, prior to the first pitch of a
game. Immaculata. The melding of nature and unique human hands that value it. It is destroyed the moment the Red Sox starting pitcher arrives to take his first warm up pitch.

Invariably, all Major League pitchers will dig a foothold into the area right in front of the
rubber. I’ve never fully understood it. I pitched as a kid, and I was good too, and I always felt more control, more leverage, more power, when I descended from an untouched mound. We have enough pitfalls without digging our own holes. But maybe that’s too cute to be true. And these pitchers made the show and I didn’t.

Similarly to how the pitcher will defile the mound, the first hitter will erode the crisp white
lines of the batter’s box to widen his own range of foothold, blurring the boundary between
acceptable and illegal, employing both guile and tradition. By the third inning, the outfield will have divots left by racing cleats, and the baselines will be clouded with the dirt of exertion and desire. The transformation is deeply beautiful, sensory, and physical. It is baseball. In motion. But immaculata vanishes the moment the game begins. The grounds crew works fruitlessly at restoration between innings, spades in hand like the most earnest Seamus Heaney subject, but by then immaculata isn’t even desired, having been replaced by something more virile, more circumstantial, and more unique to that day’s events. It will, however, reappear the very next day, briefly as it is.

Baseball is a perfect game where the work is hard but not impossible, where the mound
is exactly as far away from the batter as it must be, where the distance between home and first is perfect in its’ fairness. Where the earth is destroyed and still they find a way to play the next day. Well, other than when it rains. It’s tough to sell $11 beers and eight-dollar hot dogs to half empty ballparks frightened away by the rain. Neither immaculata nor the .242 hitting left fielder come free. After all.

There are distractions. There are poor uses of time. There is a pathological kind of
avoidance. There is a more basic kind of rank laziness. There are misplaced values and
delusional errands and absent-minded acts of ignorance and uncontainable fits of fury and
unearned periods of indulgent self-satisfaction and pride in efforts that don’t deserve pride, and self-loathing in actions that do not deserve self-loathing and enough decent shows on television to not think much about any of it. But there are no non-sequiturs. By rule of nature. Grow weary of my decisions, but I am never off topic.

I get this way in the summer. Apologies. I don’t enjoy warm weather. It forces a kind of
retreat, a kind of waiting for comfort rather than an active seeking of comfort. It is a diaphanous and shapeless block of time rather than a distinct set of days. The penetrating sun melts us into a kind of comatose submission. It is a less serious time where holiday prices skyrocket and people gleefully empty their wallets to escape to places more bizarre and depressing than the places they do their living and yearning in, during the real seasons. It is a time lacking a present tense. It is a respite. It is a stolen pocket of dreams. It all seems to count or matter less than the doings of the rest of the year. So I remind myself as I dig out the frozen slush of this New England January.

—JR.