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  • The Rose Goes in the Front, Big Guy
  • Tim Wiles (bio)

“When you meet her, you will know,” they had always said, though at age forty-one, I was not positive that “they” were right. But in January of 2005, I met my future wife, and I knew. We immediately began spending a lot of time together. My father, who lived over a thousand miles away, first met her over the phone.

“Marie, are you a Cubs fan?” were the first words he said to her. Always a quick study, her reply was “I am now.”

My wife was not born into a baseball family, but she definitely married into one. My great-grandfather, Ben Caffyn, played nine seasons of professional ball, with an apex that included three months with the 1906 Cleveland Naps. My entire family was baseball-crazy, including me. I played sandlot and Little League baseball, and Wiffle ball. I collected cards, not just Topps but also Kellogg’s and Hostess and Crane Potato Chips discs and Fleer’s Pioneers of Baseball. I read baseball books and went to Peoria Pacers games in the Central Illinois Collegiate League. I had a classmate and teammate in grade school named Joe Girardi. After college, I left the family cradle to journey to the East, where it was my good fortune to become Director of Research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In nearby Oneonta, I met Marie.

By midsummer, we were spending all our free time together. So it was that one evening, we chanced upon “Bull Durham” on TV, and I was, as always, hooked. Marie enjoyed it as well. The next night, we were enjoying a lovely evening in the Hall’s box behind home plate at Oneonta’s Damaschke Field, the perfect follow up to the film. I was basking in the ragged beauty of the low minors, the setting sun, and the cool breeze, in a setting straight out of the past. Oneonta indulged in few of the modern minor league diversions, instead selling baseball itself as entertainment. It was a bit of a living history museum.

Another couple strolled by and joined us in the box, which had room for six. We chatted amiably, and, eventually, the movie came up. They had seen it the night before as well.

Wishing to elaborate and explain—in part due to the edited version shown on network TV, I saw an opportunity to deepen the indoctrination of my [End Page 85] future wife, and to declare my critical opinion to the other couple. Not such a quick study myself—I should have known that as an English teacher, Marie had not missed the deeper essence of the film—I flew into a passionate interpretation of the film, which I thought then, and still believe, is the single greatest piece of writing about baseball (though Robert Francis’s poem “Pitcher” is a close second.)

“You see, It’s not really about baseball-” I started, getting ready to launch into my theory that baseball is the emotional language of the American male, and that the movie is about the game’s inherent beauty, it’s internal justice and poetry, manhood, womanhood, romance—in both senses of the word, the road, the bus, the mental discipline of the game, the balance between team and individual, the power of belief, and all the things that Crash Davis and Annie Savoy invoke in their beautiful soliloquies, when Marie abruptly cut me off, cutting to the chase—to a place she’d arrived in just six months of baseball observation—summing up neatly my forty-one years of lived experience, with a blunt, brilliant, and unanswerable observation which left me on the floor—

“I don’t even think baseball is really about baseball . . .”

I was stunned; she’d uttered the line that would add, for me, a literary, intellectual, philosophical, American koan to the literature of the game. Not only does literature transcend the game, but the game transcends itself. Mind blown. She was a natural, and a keeper. “I think there’s really a lot going on in baseball,” she observed, then went back to sipping her water. When I met...

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