non-threatening boys magazine
on The Simpsons, lisa is sometimes seen reading a teen rag called NON-THREATENING BOYS MAGAZINE. often, when some of the baseball men have done something i find especially endearing, or sweet, or gentle, or funny, i will post a screenshot from the game (absolutely without the express written consent of major league baseball—come at me, bro) along with that image from the show. i don’t only love baseball because it is a space where grown ups put on pajama sets and perform a fantasy of masculine camaraderie and tenderness that i can watch on tv. but i do love that. that’s always been part of it. all the way back to little league, all the way back to stickball in the parking lot of the catholic school by the funeral home with brennan the bully and jonny who lived in the other half of our same yellow house. i was the kind of little girl once who didn’t want to be around the other girls, didn’t like to talk to them. i’ve long outgrown that. i’m just saying; for me, this is all bone deep.
baseball is old and strange and was the first thing that ever mattered to me as far as i can tell. first i was a kid begging my dad to buy me batting gloves so i could copy nomar garciaparra’s long and fussy plate routine, and then later i was taller and far away keeping score by myself under the palm trees with a modelo between my knees, a being entirely new and the same as ever. the lure did not subside. there is a joy in an adult man paid to play a child’s game. i find ecstasy in the impossible autonomy. i don’t begrudge them this freedom, exactly. i’m skin prickling, slobbering jealous somewhere at the pit of me, jealous of their liberated bodies, agile, powerful, safe. but that’s all right. it’s the only way i’ve ever been. i celebrate it. i luxuriate in its golden forever summer glow, its safety. i breathe it in til the freedom feels almost as if it is my own. it isn’t though. it will never be. i know this, really. i know this, always, each day, when i watch hours of baseball, i know i am embracing a phantom, and i go ahead and press against it because i am happy when i am making believe. some women cope with the specter of intimate violence, dim its presence in the corner of their eye, by letting goofy true crime podcasts convince them they’re in danger in every Uber. i do it by letting baseball make me feel safe. i know that freedom which intoxicates me is not mine to keep, know it naturally, constantly. dodgers pitcher, reigning nl cy young winner, and very online guy trevor bauer being accused of violent sexual assault is a reminder i did not need. i am not surprised to receive it.
i moved to california and betrayed my family by letting the dodgers steal my heart. i have freckles and seventy cousins and a massachusetts area code on my phone number. of course i am a treacherous monster for giving to another any of what belongs to the boston red sox by right of birth. it’s not that they don’t have a point, albeit a characteristically histrionic new england sports fan one. it’s that i can’t help it. it’s that it’s much too late. i moved to california alone in a small blue car. moved three thousand miles to my left and three hours back to a new ocean and when i didn’t have any friends yet i watched the dodgers and got drunk in cheap seats. the air matress on the floor in the white sun of my sublet was where i slept and begged for work and ate cottage cheese with hot sauce and cheerios over my computer was where i kept my body, but high in the baby blue bleacher seats drinking green grass i lived. basted in sunscreen like a holiday turkey i’d bake and grow and i learned all the boys, make a list of their astrological signs in my phone. i have friends in los angeles now, good ones, real. i have favorite bars and preferred running routes and a lot of nitpicky grocery store opinions. i’ve lived in the same apartment for nearly three years and now i have sock tan lines all the time. los angeles in my home now, but when it wasn’t, when i was brand new and had nothing else to hold onto, i had the dodgers. they are my very own, a loyalty uninherited, chosen by freewill and carefully tended. it is a peculiar and humiliating kind of heartbreak to have your feelings hurt by a 3.5 billion dollar money laundering system and t-shirt factory. i’d like to be beyond it. i want to pick and choose the good and be above getting disappointed. i’m not. i have this stupid heart and it won’t allow me to kill the hopeful sucker in my head.
yes, i love the non-threatening boys. there are other things that i love about baseball which have nothing to do with the nameless, ageless gendered lust for fraternity, earthy and elusive. i love crisp infield defense. i love gross haircuts and gorgeous swings. i love the starting pitcher as the protagonist of the epic that is each nine inning game. i love joe davis and orel hershiser flirting a little on the broadcast. i love home run robberies and eating peanuts in public like a fucking slob. i tend not to think that mlbTM has much at all do with any of the above. i tend not to think that mlb, or any corporation, is obligated to or, more importantly, capable of, having concern for my feelings or behaving in such a manner which would indicate that they do. this is not to suggest i disagree with those who said, yesterday—before the, frankly, grossly delayed announcement that he has been placed on administrative leave by the league made it a moot point—that the dodgers must not start bauer on sunday because of the real pain it would cause for the many fans who are survivors of sexual violence. it should go without saying that this sentiment is unimpeachable. i meant only that my brain doesn’t work like that. i do want more. i just have no expectation that i’ll get it.
i have no expectation that Baseball, big B, could ever live up to what baseball, small b, is to me. no ethical consumption under capitalism is basically a cross-stitched pillow catchphrase at this point, but it’s true. i never trusted MLB to protect me. bauer shouldn’t pitch another professional baseball game in his life, but it’s not because his being allowed to do so is psychically harmful to so many of the people whose hard earned money is the grease that keeps this incredibly lucrative wheel spinning. it’s not because i have been hit and i have been held down and carry that fear, which has a taste, and that the pain is in all my cells, even the fingernails i bite off, and i love baseball, and in a just world i should count for something. no. it’s because he’s accused of a violent crime, and being white and rich and famous should not protect him from the consequences attendant to such a circumstance. it will. i mean. we know that. but the dodgers and major league baseball backing bauer isn’t wrong because it hurts me. it’s wrong because it’s wrong. i don’t need anything from them, and i expect less. but i will say when they’ve fucked up, and they did so here. i love baseball. always have. to say i love Baseball, Major League Baseball, a company, product, proverbial garage in which billionaire failsons may safely park some of their fortune, would be like saying i love Target. actually, it would be even more banal and empty than that, because i do actually love to dissociate in a Target, at least. i don’t need Major League Baseball to be honorable for my sake. i don’t know what i want to happen now. it’s not as if we can trust that this matter will be handled properly by the police. it’s not as if the police, even at their best, a low bar rarely met, are capable of meting out meaningful justice. i want this not to have happened. really, selfishly, i want trevor bauer to have never been a dodger, though, of course, that alone would not have protected the woman he harmed. i want the myth-making that was done over the last several years by many members of the national baseball media, inexplicably framing bauer, an insufferable, vlogging twerp, who also happened to publicly harass women online, as some sort of pulled-up-by-the-boot-straps, innovative baseball desperado, instead of what he is, which is a six foot tall white third overall pick who went to UCLA and has no claim to the chip he dug into his own shoulder. i want mlb to behave with a shred of decency one of these days. i want to be a body moving through a world of bodies and when we bump glancingly off one another it is in good spirits and no one is harmed. i want a seventy five and sunny saturday game that goes on forever and no one is tired and the sky never turns dark. i can’t have that. all i’ve got is the fifteen games to choose from today starting at three pm pacific and the non-threatening boys in my brain.
the dream of the non-threatening boys is a joke i make to soothe my own stings, a precious papery lie i tell, a figment of my own creation, and no human man, nor corporation run by yet more human men, can take it from me. even so, it would be chill if they’d stop trying.