Dear Sarah,

I have a question, but first a little background.My parents are not sports fans, and seeing as how my home team, the Seattle Mariners, basically sucked for most of their, and my, existence, I never much paid attention to the game.Then, three years ago, my boyfriend convinced me to watch the World Series with him.He is a great teacher and I’ve learned quite a lot.I’m pretty sure I understand the infield fly rule. I started watching this season on a regular basis and have reluctantly come to love the Mariners even more than I love the Yankees.I’m a sucker for the historical loser makes good.

So as this season winds down, I have been looking into books I can read to help me get a better grasp of the game.My boyfriend has been invaluable, but I need to augment it with some reading.Do you have any recommendations or favorites?

Many thanks in advance,
Newish Fan

Dear Newish,

First off, sorry about the Mariners.No, really.That’s a tough way to end the season, especially for the fans.

But on the plus side, now you can get down to the important business of off-season reading.As a kid, reading about baseball got me through the cold months between the Series in October and the kick-off of spring training in February, and fortunately, my dad had stockpiled about a bazillion baseball books over the course of his life.

The best books I’ve read about baseball, in terms of giving me a sense of history and perspective:

The Fireside Book of Baseball.It’s an old set of three volumes, edited by Charles Einstein; you can usually find it on eBay, or in Amazon’s used-book section, and the set is an investment, but you won’t regret it.It took me months to get through all three, but it paid off, because I learned so much about the dead-ball era and the American Association and the Black Sox and all that good stuff.It’s got cartoons, essays, contemporary news articles, and a great piece on “dice baseball” (a great way to kill time in bad weather if you’re bored).If you don’t know much about baseball pre-1956, it goes slowly at first, but it’s worth it.You will own the baseball category on Jeopardy!.Plus, “Kenesaw Mountain Landis” is fun to say.

Next stop,

Bill James.Bill James is a statistician, but don’t let that stop you from reading his hilarious prose; he loves the game and knows more about it than almost anyone.The New Historical Baseball Abstract comes out…today, in fact, but if you can find his yearly abstracts from years past, you can read up on the teams in the introductory essay to each stats chapter.I used to laugh myself silly reading him make fun of the ’80s Pirates teams.Whatever Happened To The Hall Of Fame is a good analysis of the Cooperstown selection process, and somewhat friendlier to the casual reader.

Roger Angell has written reams on baseball, but the more recent stuff is kind of sappy — try Late Innings for the best pieces, or go to the New Yorker website and read his archives for more recent stuff.(The Cone book that just came out?Not good.Not worth reading unless you rooted for a team Cone played for.)

For reference, get a secondhand copy of

Total Baseball or

The Baseball Encyclopedia (I prefer the latter, but it’s often more expensive).And it’s not just a book — it’s a doorstop/ladder/aerobic step as well!Page through

Ken Burns’s Baseball: An Illustrated History too, or get the videos from the library.It’s not as thorough as the Civil War series but it’s lovely anyway (though I could do without the Shelby Foote).

Other stuff: Jim Bouton’s Ball Four; Robert Creamer’s biography of Babe Ruth; Rampersad’s biography of Jackie Robinson; Asinof’s history of the Black Sox scandal; and Baseball Babylon, by Dan Gutman.

But the best way to learn about the game is to immerse yourself in it.Watch it.Listen to it on the radio.Talk about it in bars.Read the box score; follow the league leaders.Love the game.

I don’t think there are any definite answers to the kind of questions I’m struggling with, but if anyone can get me objective thoughts, it’s a total stranger. So here it goes.

I have been living with my boyfriend for four years. He asked me, six months ago, to move away from a good job, friends, family, and a great apartment —
basically, a great life — to follow him half a continent away for work. I did, but I’m starting to regret it.

Our life now is pretty pathetic. His company is frantically struggling to stay afloat, and the future is very uncertain. We are living with a friend of his, who is also my boss (more on that later). We sold everything when we moved, so we have no furniture, nothing to make our new room feel like home. Living with a roommate is, to put it mildly, difficult, and is causing tension. We don’t own a car, so we have to rely on our roommate to drive us around. There are no alternatives until we get a car (we’re working on that), as we live too far from the city to walk or bike, and there is no public transportation.

Our roommate also owns the company I work for, so I spend most of my day with him. We more or less get along, but he’s not my favorite person in the world, and I wish I could spend a lot more time away from him. He offered me the job as a favor, and as grateful as I am, I can’t help but hate it. It’s a glorified secretary position, and I feel that my skills are wasted (I’m a technical writer and a translator), but I can’t change jobs without causing big problems in my status in the country and possibly facing deportation.

So we have several sources of stress. Homesickness, potential unemployment, dependency on other people, dissatisfaction, and way too much face time with the roomie. I constantly think back on my old life, and want to go back, but based on conversations we have had I don’t think my boyfriend would go for it.

So here’s my dilemma: do I ditch the boyfriend and go back where I came from and try to make a better life for myself, or do I chalk this dissatisfaction up to homesickness, tough it out, and hope it gets better? As I said, I’ve lived with my boyfriend for four years, and it has been mostly good — he’s a wonderful man and I have no major complaints. Our relationship has evolved into a comfortable, familiar mild passion, and it’s great despite the lack of fireworks and pukey Hallmark-moments. Is this as good as relationships get? Is saving it worth being unhappy for a while?

Heaps of thanks,
Cloudy In The Sunshine State

Dear Cloudy,

In the grand scheme of things, six months isn’t a long time.It takes at least a year to get truly settled in a new city and feel like it’s home.I’d lived near New York City my whole life and it still took two years before I felt like I actually inhabited it.

So, you need to give it more time, but you also need to realize that you can’t really judge the situation fairly at the moment, because you’ve got a bunch of major things on your nerves.You hate your job, you hate your housing situation, you hate your transportation issues, and you should try to remedy at least one of those problems before you throw up your hands in disgust and move back home.

Write out everything you just told me, in list form — everything that’s bothering you about your life right now.Sit down with your boyfriend and tell him, as nicely as possible, that the two of you have to address the list, because you can’t take it anymore.You have to get a car.You have to find a new place to live where it’s just the two of you.You yourself have to get a decent job that you don’t despise where you won’t have to see your roommate every day.You’ll give it another few months, but if the two of you don’t make some changes, and soon, you don’t know if you can stay.

Don’t threaten your boyfriend; just make it clear that this isn’t what you signed on for.And if another six months go by and it’s still the same shit, get out of there.That doesn’t mean breaking up with the boyfriend, necessarily, but if he’s the only thing in your life that you don’t dislike, that’s not good, for either of you, and you’ll have to make other plans.

Dear Sars,

First of all, you kick a lot of ass.

Second.My problem.I’m almost 19.I’ve been dating my boyfriend for almost two years.Tonight, he broke up with me.

Before I dated him, I had two mentally abusive relationships and A LOT of trust issues because of them.He basically taught me to trust again.I love him more than anything else in the world.

Is there anything I can do that will make this hurt less?

Thanks,
Katie

Dear Katie,

Thanks for the kind words.

But there really isn’t, sadly.You just have to get through each day.It hurts, and you feel bad, but every day will lessen the pain.Put one foot in front of the other.Get out of bed every day.Our lives have a way of putting us where we should be.Trust in that, and trust that you’ll feel better and happier soon.I know it’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got.

One more thing: if you’ve found yourself in emotionally abusive relationships before, it might help you to talk to a therapist and work through your feelings about those relationships, and about this one.

[10/23/01]

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