Perfect Pitch, Wrong Tune

Image: A mural in the city of Jennings.

When People magazine asked President George W. Bush to reflect on the moments he revisits most often, he mentioned the first pitch that he threw during the World Series of 2001.

“I never felt that anxious at any other time during my presidency, curiously enough,” said Bush.

I watched that pitch from a special vantage point, and I have long believed it to be the only perfect moment of the Bush Administration’s reign.

Most people don’t start their journalistic careers in a war zone. I started mine in Cooperstown, New York, a town famous for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. As a child, I visited Cooperstown every summer with my family. We spent a week at Beaver Valley Campground. All year long, I hoarded quarters so I could lose myself in the Pac-Man arcade machine in the game shed next to the pool. I never had enough coins because the ghosts kept moving faster and faster until--game over. Cooperstown always smacked of vacation to me. Being a cub reporter at a local weekly, I thought, would be a fantastic way to catch a glimpse of the cycles of life in a place I’d always loved. It was April 2000, before the switch to digital cameras had been made in that small, local newsroom.

During my nearly two years on the job, I interviewed hundreds of fascinating individuals, many of whom had some tie to baseball. My very first article was about the groundskeeper at the famous Doubleday Field, which I could see from my third-floor kitchen windows. With binoculars, I could watch games. A League of their Own was partly filmed there. The groundskeeper had just won an award for his fastidious work keeping the park pristine.

“Joe Harris,” I wrote, “has the best grass in town.”

With those words, my career as a journalist launched. While I worked at a weekly, I also became a freelancer for various magazines and I wrote a cover story for the Village Voice, “Terms of Service: Sweaty Scenes from the Life of an AOL Censor.” I was put on assignment by The New York Times Travel Section to photograph Cooperstown for an article written by Elisabeth Bumiller. The image chosen for the piece was of the third base line being raked post-game while teammates huddled in the background. By then, the small weekly had switched to digital photography but The New York Times had not. I had to break out my old metal-bodied Minolta to do the assignment, and even in the few months since I’d grudgingly made the transition, I’d lost my ability to compensate for the broken light meter. My editor had taught me how to work with light and shadow, from which all great stories, and the images that illustrate them, are ultimately composed.

Cooperstown is a Republican enclave, full of old money and opera lovers who gather each summer within various pavilions along the shore of Lake Otsego, also known as Glimmerglass, thanks to the literary legacy of the town’s most illustrious historical resident, James Fenimore Cooper. In Cooperstown I interviewed countless baseball greats, including Cal Ripken Jr., and I once spent an afternoon with the famous dilettante George Plimpton, who asked me to submit a short story to the Paris Review.

I turned down an opportunity in Cooperstown to attend a kickoff fundraiser down the street from my new office for future President George W. Bush. I couldn’t accept the idea that he might become president, and I didn’t want to have to shake his hand. My reason for disliking him then seems almost downright trifling when juxtaposed against the evidence that my hunch was accurate. I found the environmental record in Texas, coupled with the record-breaking number of executions that took place during his tenure as governor, proof enough that it was unwise to choose him for president. Having grown up in a house with parents who placed special emphasis on Freud, Shakespeare, Lao Tzu and Machiavelli, I was also disturbed by the lingering implications of the first failed Desert Storm and the daddy issues stamped all over it. But we all know what happened. He became president, and then 9/11 changed everything.

NYC firefighters had been invited to the Baseball Hall of Fame to watch the World Series game at the Grandstand Theatre. In fact, many families across town hosted firefighters and their families, feeding them and trying to cheer them up. Along with everyone else in the theatre, I held my breath as President Bush, bundled in layers of protective kevlar and a bulky coat, took his place at the mound.

Throwing a perfect pitch isn’t easy, even for a professional player. My family had first discovered the Baseball Hall of Fame because my brother had his heart set on being a major league pitcher and he wanted to visit the sport’s high shrine. I have seen my brother throw perfect pitches, but he practiced for hours, weeks, months, years. He did not have to perform in layers of protective armor in case terrorists or assassins decided to kill him in front of a stunned global audience of millions. I couldn’t believe the president had been talked into attempting such a completely improbable stunt of physical prowess and zen-like meditative poise at a time of such chaotic misery, confusion and general pandemonium. Paper leaflets seeking the missing or dead were still fluttering all over downtown Manhattan, and that was the least of the mess.

President George W. Bush threw a perfect pitch and the moment was documented in a photograph that was blown up to poster size and propped up on a easel when White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer came to the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown to give an intimate talk about the president’s reaction in the minutes, hours and days after he was first informed of the attacks. I met Fleischer after the event, and I asked him if I could interview him again. He agreed. During the interview he told me that he was the catcher when Bush practiced pitching, and that the president called him Ari-Bob.

The town’s most famous attraction is the Baseball Hall of Fame, which was directed by Dale Petroskey while I lived there. Petroskey served as the assistant press secretary during the Reagan Administration. As young men, Fleischer and Petroskey were on the same baseball team. Dale Petroskey, whose ire was raised by anti-war comments made by Tim Robbins, made the news by publicly canceling a 15th anniversary screening of Bull Durham on April 7, 2003. Tim Robbins responded two days later, on my birthday. (I remember the date because it also happens to be the day when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Firdos Park.)

This exchange was documented by Tim Robbins in The Nation in a piece called “Tim Robbins vs. the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

“...We believe your very public criticism of President Bush at this important--and sensitive--time in our nation's history helps undermine the US position, which ultimately could put our troops in even more danger,” Petroskey wrote. “As an institution, we stand behind our President and our troops in this conflict. As a result, we have decided to cancel the programs in Cooperstown commemorating the 15th anniversary of Bull Durham.”

Robbins responded: “As an American who believes that vigorous debate is necessary for the survival of a democracy, I reject your suggestion that one must be silent in time of war. To suggest that my criticism of the President puts the troops in danger is absurd...You are using what power you have to infringe upon my rights to free speech and by taking this action hope to intimidate the millions of others that disagree with our president. In doing so, you expose yourself as a tool, blinded by partisanship and ambition. You invoke patriotism and use words like freedom in an attempt to intimidate and bully. In doing so, you dishonor the words patriotism and freedom and dishonor the men and women who have fought wars to keep this nation a place where one can freely express one's opinion without fear of reprisal or punishment.”

This battle became national front page news, but it was really a local story. I heard through the grapevine that the morning we published the story, Petroskey and his wife found themselves out in the early morning darkness, delivering those newspapers. One of their kids was a newspaper-deliverer and had woken up sick.

I listened to George W. Bush say goodbye to our country. He took the opportunity to school us one last time on his binary impressions of good and evil and to project an enduring image of himself as an unflappable good sport, following his own conscience.

“Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere,” he said.

I waited then, just as I waited for the World Series pitch. Surely, I thought, he must realize that in addition to the over 4,000 American and coalition soldiers who have been killed since he landed in his combat costume to announce that his “mission” had been “accomplished,” the United States is responsible for the documented deaths of over 90,000 Iraqi civilians.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I hoped that President Bush would say something to at least acknowledge the violent legacy of his administration, but he didn’t. He didn’t even mention Hurricane Katrina, another area in which I have particular journalistic expertise.

In eight years time, Bush’s ability to lead by example lasted exactly as long as it took for a baseball to leave his hand and cross home plate. Covering his administration in various capacities over the course of these last eight years was a black, exhausting task, and the work ahead means there’s not going to be much time to mourn before we start to organize.