The Boys of Summer: What Baseball Still Has to Teach Rocky Mount

If you grew up on the North Side of Chicago, chances are you grew up a Cubs fan, I certainly did.

There was beautiful Wrigley Field, without lights in those days, when baseball was still played beneath the afternoon sun. Riding the train north past the ballpark, people would look for the flag flying above Wrigley, the great blue W telling us that the Cubs had Won that day. 

I think of my parents, even into old age, sitting in their recliners watching the Cubs on television. My mother, Madeline, read Sports Illustrated from cover to cover. Baseball wasn’t something that had to be explained in our house, it was simply there, woven into family life, summer, and Chicago.

And then there was Harry Caray, leaning out of the announcer’s booth at the seventh inning stretch, leading Wrigley Field in Take Me Out to the Ball Game with such gusto that you sang along whether you were sitting in the bleachers or at home.

Baseball became part of the rhythm of growing up, three strikes, three outs, nine innings, spring training giving way to summer afternoons and, if fortune smiled, October. You learned early that sometimes you had to wait a long time for your team to win. If you were are a Cubs fan, you became particularly accomplished at waiting.

Perhaps that is why, with the Cubs giving us such a wonderful summer of baseball this year, I found myself thinking about an old phrase I have always loved, the boys of summer.

There is a story behind those words.

Roger Kahn used The Boys of Summer as the title of his wonderful 1972 book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, players he had covered as a young sportswriter and then sought out years later, when the cheers had quieted and the boys of summer had grown older. Kahn himself had borrowed the phrase from the poet Dylan Thomas and his poem, I See the Boys of Summer. 

Somewhere along the way, those four words came to mean more than ballplayers. They came to mean summer itself, youth remembered, seasons passing, and that peculiar habit we have of looking backward while believing there is something ahead.

Maybe that is one reason baseball has such a hold on us.

I really do believe it is the American game.

At the end of the wonderful baseball movie Bull Durham, Annie Savoy recalls words attributed to Walt Whitman, “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.”

The movie polished Whitman’s words, he apparently never said that sentence exactly as we hear it in the film, but the sentiment was his. In an 1888 conversation, Whitman called baseball “our game, the American game,” and spoke of sport repairing certain losses and therefore being a blessing.

I love knowing that.

When I read, I want a good story, but I am happiest when I close a book having learned something I didn’t know before. Perhaps that is another reason I like baseball, there is always another story behind the story.

I sometimes wonder, whether part of what ails Washington is that too many people in leadership never grew up loving a baseball team.

Because baseball teaches you things.

You don’t win every day, the other side gets its turn at bat, there are rules and both teams have to live by them, an error can cost you the game, but tomorrow you take the field again. You learn patience, you learn loyalty, you learn that sometimes you sacrifice yourself to move someone else ahead, and perhaps most importantly, you learn to lose without deciding that the game itself must be destroyed.

As far as I’m concerned, Washington could use more baseball.

Which brings me, rather unexpectedly, to Rocky Mount.

I’m writing about Baseball because I have been thinking about discouragement, about what happens to a town when enough people begin to wonder whether better days are ahead.

People in Rocky Mount are discouraged and I don’t think we do ourselves any favors by pretending otherwise. People have moved away, businesses have closed, buildings we should have saved are gone, neighborhoods have waited too long for attention, opportunities have been missed, and people have grown tired of waiting for things to get better. 

But I grew up a Cubs fan, and we know something about waiting.

For generations, Cubs fans returned to Wrigley Field without any reasonable assurance that this would be the year, not because losing didn’t matter, it mattered enormously, but because they still loved the team. The Cubs waited 108 years between World Series championships, think about that, 108 years of ‘next year,’ and yet every spring brought another season and another reason to believe again.

Perhaps there is something in that for those who still care about Rocky Mount.

Caring about a place doesn’t require us to pretend everything is going well, in fact, perhaps the opposite is true. We notice the empty storefront because we remember when something was there. We grieve a neglected house because we can still see what it could be. We become impatient with missed opportunities precisely because we believe the place deserves better.

Preservation itself is an act of faith, the conviction that something battered is not necessarily finished, that an empty building is not necessarily useless, that a neglected block is not necessarily lost, and that yesterday can still become part of tomorrow.

I think that is partly what Walt Whitman’s words try to tell us.

In Rocky Mount’s case we can repair our losses with new management and leadership, with a roster change, with new talent, and long lines at the voting booth in 2027.

A baseball scorecard records everything, the hits, the runs, the errors, the innings when nothing happened at all. You don’t tear it up because you don’t like what it says.

You may be behind in the score but as long as there are innings left to play, there is hope. As far as Rocky Mount’s future, I hear the bats clinking and the banter on the field, and the smell of fresh cut grass, and I see the boys of summer playing baseball.