I turned on the Mets game yesterday—Mother’s Day—and for a moment, when the picture came in, I thought something was wrong with my TV. The umpire, I noticed, was wearing a pink terrycloth armband. The way it contrasted with his black mask and solid black chest protector made me question the standard umpire uniform as I never have before. The wiry dark bars of the mask, the dense black shield fastened to the anonymous man’s chest like an enormous rotten heart—what is Major League Baseball thinking? The umpire as executioner—the ultimate authority. Again, what made all this darkness stand out was the light pink sweatband on the ump’s left forearm. Which led me to notice that the catcher, too, was wearing a pink armband on his wrist. Most surprising of all, I saw that the batter held in his hands a baseball bat, the pine barrel of which had been dipped in pink paint, so the wood looked like it had just been used to apply frosting to a little girl’s birthday cake.
The pink armbands and bats were related to Mother’s Day and, as it turns out, related to a Major League Baseball initiative to raise funds for breast cancer awareness and research. I was doubly pleased that the game was on Channel 11 yesterday; if I’d listened to the radio broadcast instead, I would never have seen that startling pink all over the place, and that would’ve been a shame. (Yes, you can still listen to baseball on the radio, a lifesaver if you don’t have cable.) I’ve become so accustomed to listening to ball games that I lose track of what the players look like; for example, I almost didn’t recognize the Mets’ center fielder Carlos Beltran because of the scowling goatee he’s grown.
My mother’s family has a history of breast cancer—Mom’s mother and sister both died from the disease, bookends pulled from the shelf of our family. As I watched the Mets play the Pirates on Mother’s Day, I kept wondering what my mother would think about all the pink accessorizing. I for one found it hard to be cynical: there was sweetness in the procession of imposing ball players striding to home plate holding sugary bats in their powerful hands. The gigantic scoreboard at Citi Field flashed messages revealing each batter’s mom’s name (in case you’re wondering, pitcher Livan Hernandez’s mother is named Maryann).
I’d spoken to my mother earlier in the day, before the game started, and actually she gave me a pretty good sports tip. She told me that the aging pop star Jimmy Buffet was buying a stake in my favorite football team, the Miami Dolphins. My brother and I are both huge Dolphins fans, so my mother assumed I’d already heard—but no, I hadn’t. Mom also mentioned to me that the Dolphins will be renaming their stadium after some sort of Jimmy Buffet product or song. Which one? She couldn’t remember at first.
Sweet Jesus, I thought. The horrendous possibilities…
The Margarita Dome.
The Onion Slice.
The Buffet Bowl.
This could be a disaster. There might be booths in the renamed stadium selling Jimmy Buffet t-shirts, roving men hawking copies of Buffet’s book of stories (remember the bestselling short-fiction sensation that was Tales from Margaritaville?), maybe even loudspeakers blaring out Buffet’s tawdry oeuvre of regurgitated calypso tunes. It’s hard enough being a Dolfan sometimes.
Then my mother remembered that the stadium was going to be named after the Jimmy Buffet beer brand. You know, Landshark Lager?
The thing that charmed me about the pink bats and armbands in MLB over the weekend was that they defied the male-centric idea of pro sports ownership and management—rich men buy teams, work out shady political deals to build huge stadiums, pay younger men to go out in front of the crowd and flex their muscles, fire older men who have lost their abilities. The main purpose of the sports uniform, at least in our time, is to help build a tough, fighting brand. But the pink baseball bats around the league yesterday were a reminder that baseball is not just a man’s game. This was a decision by the owners and the league to be inclusive, to honor women and to raise money for a good cause.
What Landshark Stadium suggests about sports ownership I’m not prepared to say. I suppose Jimmy Buffet is more feminine than, say, Jerry Jones. At any rate, I’ll always remember my source for this breaking story. Thanks, Mom.
