Pitchers and catchers reported today to spring training. Winter weather has lost it’s edge. Soon there will be streams to be fished and ballgames to watch.
In my mind, baseball and fly fishing are somehow linked. Part of it is probably because I came to them both late in life. I grew up in the DC area and we didn’t have a baseball team for 35 years. I didn’t even realize DC was getting a baseball team until after the fact. My wife and I had just bought a house in DC. I was unpacking and had the TV on. We didn’t have cable set up yet, so the only channel we got was Channel 4 (Jim Vance, RIP). They were doing a report from outside opening day at RFK where DC was getting its first team in over three decades, which was news to me.
I was off work that week for some reason so I decided to go down to the park. RFK had been a football stadium and an old one at that. Although the Senators had played here, it was never really a great place to watch baseball. I didn’t know that at the time, all I knew was that you could get a ticket for about $3 and sit anywhere in the park. I bought a bootleg Nats hat from a street vendor outside for $5 and went on in. It was kind of like the first time I fly fished, I didn’t really know what was going on, but it made sense somehow. This was going to be something I was going to follow for some undefined reason. In much the way I said to myself, “these fish seemed to like this bushy dry fly thingy in the slower water that’s right next to the fast water” I said to myself, “these guys don’t look too good, but that third baseman Ryan Zimmerman seems to be pretty good.” If you don’t follow the Nats, you might have forgotten that there was a time when they sucked, so bad, but Zim was always a highlight. Now they are always playing meaningful baseball in late summer and Nats fans are spoiled.
Both baseball and fly fishing reward paying close attention. They reward sitting and thinking and apparently not doing much of anything. Casual observers of both don’t know how to sit, think and observe fly fishing or baseball. They don’t get what’s going on so they assume nothing is. Baseball and fly fishing have taught me that just because I don’t understand the appeal of something doesn’t mean it’s not appealing and just because I don’t understand what’s going on, doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
The action in baseball and fly fishing is explosive, but each requires a great deal of set up. Where an uninformed observer sees a batter foul off pitch after pitch and it doesn’t occur to him to ask “what am I looking at here?” someone who follows the game might realize, “holy sh-t! Span and Werth have gotten this guy to throw 30 pitches and it’s still the top of the first with no outs. If we keep this up, we’ll knock him out by the 4th!,” plus the batter is taking in data, he’s seeing all the pitches the guy has and he’s making adjustments, so are hitters waiting for their at bat; infinite layers of subtleties.
Same with fly fishing, drift that nymph, step out of the box, adjust your depth, drift again, make a mend. Data, data, data. Too much data, too many adjustments to keep track of. So many variables that when you first start out, you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s impossible to figure out what you’re doing wrong because maybe you’re doing everything wrong, but maybe you’re not doing anything wrong and the fish just aren’t cooperating. Maybe the next drift was going to be the one, but you switch flies, or one of any of a thousand things. Next time you’ll remember, I fished this stream on a day like this and the only strikes I got were in the deep runs, or in the morning, or on a dry.
Layers and layers of understanding until some of it becomes instinctive. You don’t know why you know what you know, you just do. Then you have this moment when you’re conscious of this understanding and it all goes away.
First Fish 