The Ledger Itself

Date, opponent, result, and then a column I labelled NOTES in 2017 with no idea what I would put in it.

The results columns are worthless. Every result is available in nine places, faster, forever. I could burn those columns and lose nothing.

The notes column is where I wrote who I watched it with, and where, and one line about the day. Nine years of one line. It is the only record I have of a decade of Tuesdays and it exists because I ruled a fourth column out of a vague sense that three looked wrong.

There is an entry from 2019 that says only: rain delay, ate chips on the concourse with Dad, he explained the infield fly rule again. I have no independent memory of that evening. It is the best thing I own.

No news, nothing decided, and the sort of stretch where a paper about following a sport has, on the face of it, nothing to file.

This is where most people's records stop, and it is why most people's records are useless. A ledger kept only when something happens is a highlight reel, and a highlight reel tells you nothing about what a season was actually like to live through.

Nine years in, the quiet entries are the ones I read. They have the weather in them and who was there and what we talked about instead, because there was nothing to talk about, and that is a much better description of following anything than the four or five entries where something enormous happened.

So: nothing happened this week. Warm, watched two innings with the sound off while cooking, fell asleep before the end. Entered, in ink, same as the big ones.

The ledger is also a record of me, which was not the intention and is the funniest thing about it.

Every September the notes column changes character. The entries get longer. They acquire adverbs. In 2021 there is an entry of two hundred words on a Tuesday in the second week of September that I would describe, reading it now, as the writing of somebody who needs to go outside.

Then, every year, in the first week of October, the entries collapse back to six words regardless of outcome. Won. Lost. Watched at Kath's. Rain.

I have four weeks. On the evidence I will spend them badly and write about it at length, and I have decided not to fight it, because a person who has read nine years of their own Septembers and learned nothing is at least a consistent person.

There was no principle. There was a pen on the table in 2017 and I used it, and by the time I had a view about any of this there were two seasons in ink and it was decided.

What ink does is make an entry final at the moment you write it, which sounds trivial and is not. I write the notes column that night or I do not write it. There is no version where I come back on Sunday and improve Tuesday.

There is one entry I have tried to remove. September 2020, four words, about a day that was not about baseball at all and which I did not want in a book I would open every week for the rest of my life. I scratched at it for a while and made it worse and then stopped.

It is still there, half destroyed, and it is the only page I can find without looking at the index. Which is presumably what happens when you try to take something out of a record instead of just letting it sit in it.