October Country

9.26.24

We’re heading into the MLB playoffs, so it’s a fair time to ask: why does a supernatural podcast talk about baseball in every episode?

I was shaping the first episode of AGENT STOKER, and I knew one character wasn’t going to make it alive out of the episode.  And she needed to have a life outside of the supernatural so that we’d see her dimensionally, and miss her when she was gone.

And there were plenty of interests that I could have given her outside of the paranormal, but it would help if it were something that I’m also interested in, so that I could write about it more authoritatively.

And so I leaned into the idea that Agent Caliban was a big baseball fan.  But not only because baseball is clear and has rules and feels the very opposite of baseball in many ways –

It’s also because due to Chris Conner’s great ability to play wistfulness and regret, baseball feels on point.  It’s a meditative game.  A game that keeps a tally of every mistake in the day, right there on the scoreboard in front of everybody.  The three things that count the most are Runs, Hits – and Errors. 

Bart Giamatti, a true Renaissance man in that he taught Renaissance poetry, became President of Yale University, President of the National League and then Commissioner of Major League Baseball, captured the rueful qualities of the sport in a famous passage from his book Take Time For Paradise: Americans and their Games:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

This autumnal quality is something I wanted in AGENT STOKER as often as possible – the sense of a man who has lived long enough to have regrets, and isn’t sure how he’s going to get past them. 

As much as the show lives in the universe of unpredictable mystery, this character – a wounded man who keeps going one way or another, making mistakes but still trying – felt resonant with a sport where every day’s errors must be put in the past because hell, you have another game tomorrow and 162 to get through this year.  Other sports are like weekend parties, but baseball has a Sisyphean quality like no other.

And did it hurt that Edgar Allan Poe is most deeply associated with Baltimore, the same city that hosts my childhood favorites, the Orioles?  It did not.  Hence a quick reference in Episode 101 to Birds shortstop Luis Aparicio – in keeping with the show, not the most famous Oriole or the most charismatic, but a guy who did the job reliably day after day, year after year.

Next week I’ll write about another aspect of the first episode – the introduction of our key nemesis.  In the meantime, get October Ready.