The Cathartic Remove of a Baseball Game: The Private Worlds of Faces in the Crowd

“Baseball’s clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration … it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own.”

— Roger Angell

By Gregory N. Joseph

It seemed like the darkest, bleakest of nightmares, the kind of living hell that happens to someone else. But now it was happening to me. I was desperate to wake up.

When I attended Game 5 of the 1984 National League Championship Series between the Chicago Cubs and the San Diego Padres at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium on Sunday, Oct. 7, 1984, for me it turned out to be much more than a great and historic sporting event, although it certainly qualified as that.

My mother, Marcella Joseph, had died after a long illness on Sept. 25, and 36 hours later, on Sept. 27, quite by coincidence, her father, my beloved Grandpa, Allen Nelson, passed away overnight at the age of 96. He never knew, or at least no one had ever told him, that my mother, his only child, had died. I will never forget getting the phone call.

Now I was just back from their back-to-back funerals.

As if that weren’t enough, upon returning home to San Diego I was immediately informed that I would need serious back surgery — soon.

I was broken, emotionally as well as physically. But as a husband and the father of three, and as a reporter for one of the country’s largest newspapers, The San Diego Tribune, I had responsibilities.

I had no idea what to do. There is no preparation for a moment like this. Life, as someone once said, is what happens when you’re making other plans.

My father, Ted Joseph, was shattered himself. Still, he, along with my wife, Mary, and her family, as well as my colleagues on the newspaper, were enormously supportive. The Tribune’s editor, Neil Morgan, told me to take all the time I needed.

This baseball game seemed like a possible start. I worried that it was wrong to be there, too trivial. But I hoped against hope that it would be a first step. In the back of my mind was a quote by Robert Frost: “In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.’” Life was going on whether I liked it or not. I needed to somehow keep up.

I had won two tickets to this game, as well as to the World Series if the Padres made it that far, in a lottery. I donated a ticket to each game to the Boy Scouts, in which our son John was a member. (To this day, I regret not taking John, then 10 years old, to both games. What was I thinking?)

For Game 5 of the League Championship Series, I sat alone in the upper deck of right field, above the Padres future Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, taking it all in, realizing the importance of it all, to the team, to the fans, to the city — and to me. I was using it as a road back. And what a road it turned out to be.

The Cubs were baseball’s beloved losers, the team that everyone seemed to root for, no matter where they lived or what their own hometown team was. And the Cubs always seemed to find a way to lose, despite having some great players. They were doomed, according to popular baseball mythology, victims of what was called “the curse of the Billy Goat.” The story goes that tavern owner William Sianis and his goat were denied entry to the 1945 World Series at Wrigley Field to see the Cubs play the Detroit Tigers because of the goat’s odor, and that as a result, an angry Sianis placed a curse on the team. Indeed, the Cubs lost to the Tigers, 4 games to 3. (His spell was evidently broken when, finally, the Cubs took the major league title in 2016, as they defeated the Cleveland Guardians, fittingly enough, 4 games to 3; it was as if fate winked at the Cubs and said, enough is enough, already.)

The 1984 National League Championship Series was the Cubs’ first postseason appearance since that infamous ’45 World Series. This was a best-of-five playoff, and the Cubs had taken a commanding 2–0 lead, throttling the Padres, for whom this was the first postseason appearance ever since the franchise was founded in 1969. In many ways, truth be told, they were just happy to be there.

What could possibly go wrong?

For starters, because of a strike by major league umpires, the first four games had been played with replacement umpires. Veteran umpires returned for this, the fifth and deciding game.

The Cubs jumped out to a 3–0 lead. Then all kinds of crazy things happened. You could sense something was amiss when Cubs first baseman Leon Durham (who had hit a two-run homer in the first inning to put the Cubs on top) was bedeviled by a sharp grounder that went under his glove. Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg, a future Hall of Famer, the team’s golden boy, saw a ball bounce over his head into right-center field for a double.

These seemed like scenes from “Angels in the Outfield.”

Then there was Cubs pitcher Rick Sutcliffe. He had gone 17–1 since joining Chicago in a mid-June trade, and had beaten the Padres twice during the regular season. But not today.

By the time Game 5 was all over, the Padres had prevailed by a final score of 6 to 3, giving them the League Championship and a World Series berth against … the Tigers. Alas, they would be overwhelmed by a dominant Detroit team that had pushed through the American League like a steamroller. They beat the Pads in the Series 4 games to 1.

I attended one of those World Series games, one of the San Diego losses. It was the only World Series game I have ever attended. But for the life of me, I can’t remember which Series game it was. I can recall flashes of plays here and there, but otherwise, it’s all a blur.

Now it can be told: I’ve always felt responsible for the Padres’ winning that Game 5, and making it to the World Series in the first place.

Seated way up there in the right-field nosebleed seats, I started a “wave.”

I have never done anything like that, before or since. But then, I didn’t give it a second thought. I took things into my own hands. The Padres couldn’t lose, I told myself. Not today.

My awkward wave, a kind of apologetic getting up then quickly sitting down as if I were being watched, caught on like wildfire, spreading throughout the entire stadium. I couldn’t believe it.

It seemed to completely undo the bearded, imposing, usually unflappable Sutcliffe, who carried himself with an assured dignity that undid even the most confident of hitters.

I’m as sure as I am sitting here that it was because of me. Years later, I empathized with the star-crossed Cubs fan Steve Bartman, who reflexively deflected a foul ball from Moises Allou in the 2003 National League Championship Series, which many think contributed to the Cubs collapse in that game. It all but ruined poor Bartman’s life. (Cubs fans are a tough lot.)

For me, though, that game really wasn’t about baseball at all.

It was about discovering, through my own pain, something about people: How it is possible to feel alone, very alone, in a crowd.

Whenever I see a replay of Game 5 , with the great Tony Gwynn making a sensational catch in right field, the sun refracting brilliantly off his sunglasses, I look for myself up in the crowd, wanting to see what I looked like. How did I appear to strangers? Could they see how I really felt?

Even if I could spot myself, I’m sure I couldn’t tell. You never really can, can you, about what’s going on inside people?

And that’s just the point — why this game remains an important benchmark in my life.

Now, when I’m in a large crowd, any kind of large crowd anywhere, I think about the lost souls there who feel really alone despite all the humanity surrounding them.

And when someone who is sitting there alone turns to me and wants to talk, I listen.

There’s a famous quote by the French-American historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun in his book, “God’s Country and Mine”: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

If you want to know about me, learn baseball.

Baseball, this time, helped me on the road back.