Playing On
Under Threat of Disappointment
Trustmark Park
Pearl, Miss.
Greens fee: $25
Date: October 15, 2020
Joy and disappointment are twin travelers, never far from one another. Between the two of them, though, lies hope.
The first television that I can remember in our home stopped at Channel 13. There was no remote control; we changed the channel by hand, turning a knob that clicked around a dial with a jarring thunk, thunk sound. We didn’t call them “NBC” or “CBS” — it was “Channel 2” or “Channel 6.” The last click on the dial was Channel 13. And Channel 13 was SuperStation TBS.
Most of the SuperStation’s programming was put together without me in mind. It was a smattering of black-and-white reruns and old western movies, all starting (for reasons that still don’t make sense to me) five minutes after the top and bottom of the hour. But between April and September each year, there was also Atlanta Braves baseball.
I was probably five years old when I started taking my hand off the dial and lingering for a few minutes with the Braves. Neither of my parents were baseball fans, so I’d only watch when they weren’t in the room. I didn’t know the rules, or even the teams. I remember the powder blue jerseys. I remember a lot of empty seats at Fulton County Stadium. And I remember that the Braves usually lost.
In 1991, though, I turned 10 years old. And the Braves came of age, too.
That first pennant race was agony and euphoria on a daily basis. I watched every minute that my mother allowed, and I can still name the entire starting nine. Since the Braves still played in the National League’s West Division at the time, their road games started late, and I couldn’t stay up to watch. So I’d crawl out of bed each morning, curl up in a chair in our house’s dining room, and ask my mother what had happened the night before. “They won” or “they lost” was all she had to say to send my emotions to one end or another of the emotional spectrum. It went on like this daily, for months.
After an improbable, breakneck summer and fall, the Braves edged out the Los Angeles Dodgers (the first sports team I ever hated) by the slimmest possible margin for their first division title of my conscious life. It was my first taste of the elation that sports can deliver. A few weeks later, when the Braves lost Game 7 of the World Series, came my first brush with the ruin that sports also bring.
The inevitability of both joy and pain is not unique to baseball, of course — nor to golf, which risks both on every shot. They are the wagers of life itself, avoidable only by avoiding the very things that make life worth living. Disappointments are bound to outnumber delights: far fewer putts fall into the hole than not. But on the road that leads ultimately either to happiness or sorrow, there is hope. I felt it every morning, curled up in that chair. I feel it on a golf course over every putt. But I learned it from baseball.
. . .
Jackson, Mississippi, might not seem like a hotbed of minor league baseball, but its history would surprise you. For 16 seasons beginning in 1975, the Jackson Mets produced future stalwarts like Darryl Strawberry, Lenny Dykstra, and Kevin Mitchell; one year, Mookie Wilson got married at home plate. The Mets left town in 1990 and were replaced by an Astros affiliate, the Jackson Generals; Lance Berkman is an alumnus, and Jeff Bagwell played a rehab stint in 1995, the year after winning the National League’s MVP award. But new owners bought the Generals and moved the club to Texas in 1999. And for the first time in a quarter-century, Jackson lost affiliated minor league baseball.
By this point, a lot had changed in Jackson since the Mets had come to town. In 1980, nearly 203,000 people lived in Jackson; by 2000, that number had fallen to 184,000. White flight was mostly to blame, as middle-class white families scurried for suburbs in neighboring Madison County and Rankin County. The city had lost a lot more than just baseball, but the Generals’ departure felt like a metaphor for everything else.
Then in 2005, the Braves came calling with their Double-A farm team. They didn’t want Smith-Wills Stadium, which the Mets and Generals had called home; they didn’t want Jackson at all, actually, and settled into a cushy new venue in neighboring Pearl: Trustmark Park, with the naming rights courtesy of a bank headquartered in Jackson. It wasn’t perfect. The marriage lacked the neighborhood feeling of Smith-Wills and the character of the Mets and Generals. But it was baseball, and it was nearby. And it was the Braves. It was, and is, better than nothing.
But nothing is all Trustmark Park has seen in 2020. Like the rest of minor league baseball, the Mississippi Braves’ season was canceled earlier this year. In that void, Trustmark Park has hosted an eclectic assortment of events, just to sell tickets to something: in June, there was a Father’s Day batting practice event, and there were a few movie nights over the summer. But it seems wrong for a minor league baseball stadium to go all year without a few competitive games with balls flying through the air.
For 2020, target golf will have to do.
. . .
The San Diego Padres might not have invented the concept when they introduced the Links at Petco Park in 2015, but that’s the first time it came across my radar. The Petco design is much more elaborate: players meander to different teeing grounds throughout the stadium, playing to elaborate green complexes scattered across the field. At Trustmark Park’s more rudimentary presentation, players spend a half-hour hitting wedges from beneath the center-field Jumbotron to nine spray-painted “greens” scattered across the field; an ace is worth one stroke, inside a tight radius of the hole is two strokes, anything on the green is three (a generous estimation of my putting skill), and anything inside the fence is four. Shots vary in length from a 39-yard pitch in left-center field to a 130-yard full send at the pitcher’s mound, so the test is more touch than club selection — which is to say I fared poorly.
My partner and I snagged one of the night’s last tee times, at 9:15. I walked in the gates around 45 minutes early, partly to take in the scene but mostly to watch Game 4 of the Braves’ National League Championship Series against the Dodgers (them again?) on the Jumbotron. Future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw, twice the architect of Braves postseason headaches, held the Braves off for five innings. But in the sixth, just before our tee time, the Braves shook him off and began erupting. When our tee time arrived, we alternated between golf shots and sticking our heads out from underneath the Jumbotron to look up and watch the rally. I finished 5-over par, I think. Like all the best rounds of golf, the score was secondary. The Braves finished the sixth up 7-1.
With the Dodgers threatening in the seventh, our 30-minute window ended. We packed up and slow-walked to the gates, with our heads turned back toward the Jumbotron, where the Dodgers had already scored one and looked likely to add more. Aching to see the inning’s finish, but also clearly not welcome to stay, I speed-walked to the parking lot, threw my clubs in the trunk, and drove through the parking lot to the other side of the stadium — where I jumped out, ran to the gate, and watched the Braves dodge disaster and close out the inning still up 7-2. Los Angeles never got any closer, and the Braves took a commanding 3-games-to-1 lead, just one win away from the World Series.
That is, of course, as close as they got. Over the next three nights, the Dodgers stormed back and snuck past Atlanta in seven games, proving — as baseball and golf have done my entire life — that disappointment never stops lurking. There is no such thing as a gimme putt; nothing is promised. But whether asking for a ball to check in the right-field grass or praying for a ninth-inning miracle, there is always hope — even when the ball doesn’t check, or the rally falls short. It is hope, not joy, that sustains. I don’t know whether the next baseball season or the next round of golf will bring joy. But both bring with them hope. That’s good enough.
. . .
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