Tag: baseball

Spiritual False Cast

Savage River

You can make yourself crazy over casting. You can worry about it so much it ruins your fun. Fly fishing becomes some kind of angst ridden battle with your demons.  If you’re not careful you can go from trying to get more accuracy and distance to your cast to wondering why your high school gym teacher seemed to have it out for you.  And the more you try, the worse you get.  There’s an old baseball cliché that seems to apply to casting: don’t try harder, try easier.

In baseball, the epitome of trying easier has got to be the Nationals’ 3rd baseman Anthony Rendon. He just goes out there and hits and fields and runs the bases.  He looks like he’s having fun and he seems like he knows he’s got it good.  Playing baseball is a pretty good way to make a living, even if the season is 162 games long.  Everything about Rendon’s approach to the game seems to say that he knows there are people out there who have jobs that require them to work long hours and do sometimes dangerous work, or to sit in a beige box all day to feed their family and that he gets to play baseball.

Same with casting, you’re on a river, casting a fly. It’s pretty.  Even if your boss is a jerk, the odds are that he’s not going to be able to find you here in the middle of the stream and give you a hard time.  You are as far away from your problems as you can get.  Unless your problem is that you can’t seem to catch a fish.  Then, being in the middle of a stream with a fly rod and failing can begin to look like a big fat metaphor for every other problem in your life.

If you wanted fish so badly you could cast a spinner, or a worm, or you could just go buy a fish at the store. You want to catch a fish on a fly because it is so &*^% elegant! Why isn’t the fly going where I want it to go? Don’t’ break your wrist, keep the rod tip on a plane, keep all these actions together and cast.  No! Not into that tree! What is wrong with you?!  This is supposed to be fun, why isn’t this fun?

On July 29, 2014 during a game with the Marlins, Anthony Rendon yawned during an at bat. Seriously, between pitches he let out this big, lazy day yawn.  That is not a guy who is struggling to get out of his head.  That’s a guy at one with the universe; that is Buddha in a Nats uniform.  To be that good and to appear not to care? That’s a perfect loop heading out over the cosmic stream of consciousness to land along the log of enlightenment to drift drag free over the platonic ideal of a trout that may not really be there.  (Author’s Note: this metaphor has gotten away from me and is currently scuttling around the office baseboards; an exterminator has been called).

I struggle for that inner peace; I want it desperately and if I don’t get it, I demand to speak with the manager! You see my problem, I’m an American through and through and as such, I see journeys of self-discovery as transactional: “One inner peace, please.”

When you start out, there are so many variables. There are so many it’s impossible to figure out which ones matter and which ones don’t.  There are variables that you don’t even know about.  There are variables you accidentally change while trying to change other variables.  That’s true when you first start out life and when you first start out fly fishing. When you first start angling, catching a fish seems like an accident.  It’s like that moment in Bull Durham when Nuke Laloosh throws a perfect pitch and then asks himself, “God, that was beautiful. What’d I do?”

Try easier, that’s the key. Just put it out there and the cast is what it is.  Accept that you are trying to do an impossible thing: you want your fly to drift as if it is not attached to your fly line, but it is attached.  Every time you go out, you get a little better, but you are getting better at what is an unattainable ideal.  Put aside the ego, put aside the drunken monkey chattering in your head; be like the trout in the current, waiting for what the river brings him.  Take what the water gives you and be happy with it.

Who cares if I catch the trout? Not the trout and certainly not Antony Rendon. I hope someday that I won’t care either.

Fly Fishing and Baseball

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.

Nats