Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, the son of Boomer parents, I collected baseball cards. It was a hobby my father and I enjoyed together. Like many of his generation, my father amassed a collection of cards that, today, would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, like many of his generation, they were all thrown away when he joined the military and moved away from home. Trying to rekindle that magic, as many parents do, he started buying them again when he had children of his own. We, in turn, amassed our own collection of cards that, today, is probably worth about $4.50.
That’s something people didn’t really consider in 1988. Those cards from 1958 were worth so much because everyone threw them away. Everyone saving the cards in 1988 meant that they would never be valuable. So all those Boomer parents spent small fortunes that only served to make corporations wealthy and did nothing to pass on a financial legacy among the middle class. Thank you, capitalism.
Anyway. Today, in 2024, I don’t really care anything about that. I look back fondly on these kinds of memories, because it’s something I could share with my father. As a father now, myself, I briefly attempted to do something similar with my son – but he’s never exhibited any interest in baseball. And I’m not the kind of person to push his interests on his children, so I quickly dropped it.
Years later, I was still a fan of the sport – but I came at it from a more mathematical angle. I would check the newspaper daily in the summer to read box scores and follow the leaderboards. With the development of the internet in the late-90s, I would delve into the history of the game via statistical records. As sabermetrics arose, my interest was piqued and I became obsessed with the numerical side of the sport. For a time, baseball was my passion. I vividly remember the night baseball stopped being a shared passion between father and son, and instead became a mathematical hobby for me, personally.
September 2, 2001 was the day baseball as I knew it died.
We were Yankees fans in my house. Throughout my childhood, the Yankees were a perpetual disappointment. Growing up in Oklahoma, we would go to games in Arlington, Texas, and the Yankees lost every time. One time, Nolan Ryan struck out something like 13 batters. We even made it to Yankee Stadium once – but the Yankees still lost. That all changed in 1996, when the Yankees had a marvelous run and kind of a miracle World Series win against the Atlanta Braves. They lost in 1997 (it was stolen from them, to my mind), but came back in 1998 with one of the best seasons in baseball history. They went on a tear, winning it all again in 1999 and 2000. 2001 seemed like more of the same.
On the 2nd of September, Mike Mussina, the best pitcher on the Yankees, took the mound against their hated rival and arch nemesis: the Boston Red Sox. Like most Yankees-Red Sox games of the era, the game was broadcast on ESPN, so I sat down to watch the game. What followed was one of the most mesmerizing and memorable sporting events of my life: Mike Mussina retired the first 26 consecutive batters, coming within one strike of pitching a perfect game – one of the rarest feats in baseball. It was a marvelous game that ended up being heart-rending. Not because the Yankees lost (they won), but because Mike Mussina, that stalwart workhorse that quietly went out there and performed brilliantly, missed history by the closest of margins. It was close to midnight when the game ended – but I immediately called my father to commiserate.
He didn’t answer. My mom did. My father didn’t even watch the game because he went to bed early. I went through the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows as a baseball fan – and I had no one to share the moment with (though, my mom listened politely). I was a freshman in college, 400 miles from home, and baseball was no longer something I could share with my dad. It was a small thing, but life is built on small things.
Over the next few years, my interest in baseball waned, but my life of baseball statistics lived on. Today, I barely follow the sport at all, and my sporting interests have shifted to boxing. But I appreciate that sport in much the same way – I’ve written an algorithm that attempts to measure how good boxers are relative to one another. This is something I’ve done purely for my own enjoyment, but it gives me a deeper appreciation of the sport than I get from just watching fights on television (which, to be honest, I rarely do).
All of this is to say that The Housekeeper and the Professor is a deeply personal novel with a great deal of emotional resonance for me.
I’ve been in a mood for Japanese stuff lately. I downloaded a bunch of books on Audible, have watched a few movies, and my wife and I went to our favorite sushi restaurant last weekend. After reading Revenge by Yoko Ogawa, I looked on Audible for anything else available to Audible Plus members – and this was the only other book on there. I think I even downloaded it before I finished Revenge.
The narrator, unnamed, is a housekeeper assigned to take care of an elderly man. He was a mathematics professor until the 1970s, when he got in a car accident. The brain damage he received made it so that his memory only lasts 80 minutes. He now spends his time in his home, cared for by his sister-in-law, solving math problems for prize money. He wears the same suit every day, with notes attached to himself. The narrator has a 10 year old son who loves baseball.
The narrator and the professor form a bond over his love of math. Every day, he asks her when her birthday was (February 20th), or how much she weighed when she was born, and he uses the numbers he gets from these questions to connect to the outside world. 220, for instance, is the first amicable number. It’s pair being 284, which is inscribed on a watch he wears. The Professor also formed an interest in baseball at some point in his life because of his love of math. He’s never watched a game, and didn’t even know that he could listen to broadcasts on the radio – but he knows the game because he knows the statistics. Baseball is what allows him to connect with the narrator’s son, nicknamed Root because his flat head reminded the Professor of the square root symbol.
This is a quiet novel. It’s just the story of three people learning to understand one another. But the way in which they do so was intensely enjoyable for me.