Here we are in the dog days of summer. Or, perhaps, the death throes. It’s hard to tell because the Northeast Ohio nights, typically swamp-like right about now, have been unseasonably cool. You can feel fall coming in the air, and it doesn’t help that we’re already underway with another school year. The tail-end of summer never fails to accelerate, never fails to be left unresolved, and with school starting for Magnolia this year on the heinously early date of August 17, we’re all feeling a bit shortchanged. The alarm clocks have been reset for the next nine months, and more than anything else, that tells us summer is over and it’s time to ready the flannels. On the other hand, the calendar tells us summer is still here for another month, and I’m determined to stay in that mindset despite the alarm and the return of scholastic routine and the whisper of autumnal death in the August wind.

For baseball fans – and I consider myself a passive one at this point, but a fan nonetheless – August is typically a turning point. Two-thirds of the season is over, the trading deadline has passed, and by now your team is either chasing a pennant or chasing the ditch. It’s hard to believe we’re nearly five months into the regular season after a not-so-brief delay, one that hovered over the bruised Major League Baseball brand like late-inning storm clouds over a playoff pitcher’s mound. There were moments during the lockout – the longest in the league’s 146-year history – when it felt like there might not even be a 2022 season, and I wondered if the average sports fan would even care. I wondered if I would care. But I’ve been here before, and this year at least, I cared enough to tune in on Opening Day and I’m still checking scores. Which is to say, I’m in it for the long haul, especially with the newly-minted Guardians punching above their weight. Cleveland baseball hasn’t been this fun since the wild World Series ride of 2016, when the team then known as the Indians went up three games to one over the Cubs before their carriage turned back into a pumpkin after that fateful 17-minute rain delay. But here we are talking playoff baseball in Cleveland again, and what do you know, dispensing with Chief Wahoo might have been the deposit in the karma bank this franchise needed.

Speaking of the Cubs, there was a brief period of my life, in seventh grade, when I wanted to be a sportswriter in Chicago. The Bears. The Bulls. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Beat City now now. One of the best sports towns in the world, and I wanted to be right there in the middle of it. I had it all figured out: I would go to Northwestern, then begin my career as the next great Chicago sportswriter. That was it. That was the plan. Then, a year later, Nirvana. I stopped buying baseball cards and started buying CDs. Subscriptions to Baseball Digest and Sports Illustrated gave way to Rolling Stone and Spin. Beat City, as it were, was a rainy port in the Pacific Northwest.

Starting in ninth grade, every Christmas I’d put 10 to 20 CDs on my list, and without failing, my parents would buy me one and only one of them. And that year, the lone CD I received – the one at the top of the list – was the Singles soundtrack. This also was the year my sister, Joelle, and I each got a Sony Discman – the big-ticket item on both of our lists – and the afternoon of Christmas ’92 I devoured the soundtrack on the Discman as we rode south through the snowless Ohio winterscape to my aunt and uncle’s house in North Canton. Nirvana and Pearl Jam were the twin titans of my modest CD collection, and I wasn’t stopping there; everything I read in the wake of Nevermind told of a vast alternative universe left to explore, and the Singles soundtrack was something like those little ice cream sample spoons for bands I wanted to try, one of which was Screaming Trees. Soon enough, “Nearly Lost You” was a fixture on mixtapes I made for girls or while thinking about girls, a four-minute slice of radio-ready grunge rock that was perfect for the times and has not lost any of its ragged, yearning glory.

Mark Lanegan, Screaming Trees’ enchanting and terrifying frontman, died on February 22 at the age of 57. Sober for 10 years at the time of his death, he waltzed with drugs and alcohol for most of his troubled life, a perpetual dance that fueled the dark blues at the core of his songwriting, best showcased on the desolate solo albums he made during and after his tumultuous tenure with the Trees. Most of the music I consumed in the alt-rock ’90s was a shared experience, feverishly traded and discussed at school, frequently witnessed from the cheap seats and mosh pits. Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, Mudhoney … these were communal events, and to this day I continue to connect with people (and some of the same people) through live music. But Mark Lanegan was, and remains, reserved for private quarters and solitary excesses. In his eulogy for Lanegan in The Atlantic the day after his death, staff writer James Parker perfectly captured the headspace that calls for Lanegan and his raspy, world-weary croon: “There’s a Lanegan mood, a Lanegan state, and when you’re in it, only he will do. His doldrums will embrace and absorb your own.”

I didn’t find Lanegan – the real Lanegan of his solo work – until four years after Singles when Dust, Screaming Trees’ final proper album, was released in June 1996. After gushing about Dust to Todd, the same friend from church who introduced me to Morphine in a Sunday school classroom two years prior, he recommended Lanegan’s second album, Whiskey For the Holy Ghost. It was fall by then, my first year at Ohio University, and within a week I found a cheap used copy of Whiskey and was listening to little else. It came into my life at the right time. A strange time, but the right time. I didn’t leave for college looking to quote-unquote find myself or undergo a complete reinvention or anything like that, but I did leave home intending to search and stretch my boundaries, which was part of the reason why I chose a school three hours away and why I hastily broke up with my girlfriend before departing for Athens. Once on campus, free from scrutiny and relieved of the biographical baggage from my life in Cuyahoga Falls, I eagerly sampled the temptations of my new environment. There was nowhere else I wanted to be, but occasionally, and quite secretly, I felt homesick for everything I had discarded or left behind. Lanegan was a sympathetic companion in these lovelorn and lonesome moments.

Four years later, when I moved sight-unseen to a mountain mill town for my first newspaper job, Lanegan rode shotgun. It wasn’t Alaska – though I almost took a job there until my would-be boss talked me out of it – but Northern New Hampshire was barren enough for my peculiar post-graduate mindset, and part of the allure was emotionally punishing myself to see what I might uncover. By then, Scraps at Midnight had joined The Winding Sheet and Whiskey For the Holy Ghost on my CD rack, and depending on your viewpoint, my study in self-reliance (or self-abuse?) was a smashing success or an abject failure, and Lanegan was the woeful soundtrack to this period of self-inflicted desperation. I still can’t hear a song like “Wheels” without tasting the bottom of a bottle of winter wine for one, or seeing visions of candlelight shadows on the 2am ceiling before succumbing to sleep on a secondhand burgundy couch. Reading Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan’s genuinely depraved and heartbreaking memoir, it’s evident that his songs were no fiction. He was a talented creep and a tortured soul, and the book is too bonkers not to believe. It is mind-boggling the amount of damage he did to himself, and that he lived to tell the tale. He stumbled, again and again, over his addictive, obsessive, destructive impulses, and though he managed to alchemize immortal art from the wreckage of his life, those impulses were often his undoing, beginning with the end of his promising baseball career. 

Long before music, baseball was Lanegan’s first love. Growing up in Ellensburg, Washington, Lanegan did what most 20th century American boys did: he played pickup games until it was too dark to see the ball. One of my favorite touches in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused is that the film opens with a Little League game, and the long-haired kids in uniform are on the cusp of that awkward, exciting, anxious transition from middle to high school. Knowing now what I know of Lanegan, it’s not hard to picture him as one of those kids on the Dazed and Confused diamond. Baseball, he writes in the opening chapter of Sing Backwards and Weep, was “the only thing I cared about,” and his lifelong dream was to play professionally. He got as far as varsity ball at Ellensburg High, where he also played quarterback for the football team. Lanegan was a classic scorched-earth closer. He threw hard, angry and erratic, and he “either struck out batter after batter or wildly beaned them in the body or the head” – as Lanegan tells it, there wasn’t much in-between. My knowledge of this fascinating period of his life – the hard-drinking, pot-smoking, gutter-punk sports star, like some tragic S.E. Hinton protagonist – eluded me for decades; I was well into my 40s when I first learned from my friend John O, the biggest Lanegan fan I know, that Lanegan thought he’d pitch his way out of his suffocating small-town life in Central Washington. Scouts, he claimed, took notice of his talents, but Lanegan, by his own admission, was a terrible student, ill-equipped for success in a traditional school setting, and a failing grade in home economics pulled him off the mound forever. His boyhood dream dead, Lanegan dived deeper into his vices and his second love, music, and the rest is history.

For certain music fans, it’s difficult to reconcile the counterculture lineage of an artist like Lanegan with said artist’s passion for popular sports. Billy Joel throwing out the first pitch at Shea Stadium? Sure, whatever, who the hell cares? But Mark Lanegan, the dark prince of grunge, a high school hurler with professional aspirations? It’s not very punk to pick up a baseball, and when music and sports collide, especially with an artist who operates outside the mainstream, whose music threads into the identities of his outsider fans, it can feel like a breach of terms. But these terms are one-sided, set by listeners who bring their own baggage and biases to the plate, along with ludicrous expectations for how their idols should live their lives in accordance with their art. I call them Code of Conduct People, and they litter the ostensibly openminded underground music scene. They construct rigid ideals for living that govern their actions, interests, viewpoints and appearance, then demand the same of everyone else. They are comically self-righteous, inherently frustrating and reliably contradictory with their moving-target value systems. They may, at times, use the term “sportsball.”

While they’re still holding strong here in the everything-is-awesome new millennium, Code of Conduct People were far more prevalent in the tribal pop-culture circles of the ’90s where I first encountered them. Nirvana broke when I was in eighth grade, and for Middle American kids like us who weren’t hip to “Love Buzz” and the Sub Pop Singles Club when we were 10, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the natural entry point. No one, and I mean no one, at Bolich Middle School knew about Nirvana before the MTV Buzz Bin. But the pivot to fandom, for nerds, jocks and burnouts alike, was quick. For some, that meant an immediate aesthetic overhaul, ditching the acid wash and Hypercolor for torn jeans and flannels and pretending you never owned a Poison tape. By the time the In Utero tour rolled into Akron two years later, grunge fashion had permeated our teenage world, and though I still wore rayon button-downs, K-Swiss sneakers and other prep staples, I was buying thrift store flannels and stupid T-shirts, too. And, despite all the time and money I was spending in record stores, I was still into sports – baseball, in particular – and I thought nothing of poring over liner notes and box scores. 

Given this context, my seemingly innocuous outfit for Nirvana’s sold-out show at James A. Rhodes Arena on Halloween 1993 was an accurate reflection of where I was at 16: vintage tee under an unbuttoned flannel, relaxed-fit blue jeans and low-top Chuck Taylors, and the cherry on top, a 1993 MLB All-Star Game hat. In retrospect, the ball cap was an odd choice – not only for the concert but as a cheap, impulse addition to a wardrobe increasingly at odds with itself. It was part of a prepackaged T-shirt/hat set I found at Gabe’s, an off-price department store where failed shampoo scents and irregular slacks go to die. I got rid of the shirt after realizing the underside of the embroidered patch would sandpaper my left nipple every time I put it on, but I kept the hat and wore it, because that’s what I did at 16 – I wore baseball caps. I still do.

My all-star accessory for the Nirvana show did not sit well with Kris. Known as Christa with a C-H before Nevermind, Kris with a K-R was one of several nondescript schoolmates who suddenly stood out after grunge killed glam. We had some classes together freshman year, but I never really noticed her until she started showing up at school in purple tights and T-shirts of bands I liked. I always thought she was cute in her own mousy way, and her Riot Grrrl-lite rebrand captured my passive interest. I rarely saw Kris without Amanda, another overnight convert, and together, with their newfound sass and cribbed affectations, they were something like Falls High’s version of Enid and Rebecca from Ghost World. They were the kind of girls I wanted to hang out with but pretended to ignore lest I suffer the scorn of my friends, who were under the spell of the rich girls at the center of our stuffy social caste. Besides, the rare attempts I made to connect with Kris were met with indifference, or perhaps (and rightfully so) suspicion. So when my friends and I ran into Kris and Amanda and their cool-nerd boyfriends at Nirvana and tried to engage, their shoulders, to say the least, were cold. We moved on with a shrug, burrowed our way closer to the pit and settled into the show. But soon after the lights went down and the opener Boredoms hit the stage, Kris buzzed by in front of us, yanked the ball cap off my head, Frisbee-tossed it into the crowd and promptly disappeared before I could register what had happened, let alone react. I was more perplexed than pissed off, and I didn’t bother wading through the mass of bodies to look for the stupid hat (and trust me, it was a stupid hat). In the end, I came out better than the guy who drilled Kurt Cobain with his shoe and had it tossed back to him full of warm piss. But still, what the fuck?

The next day at school, proudly wearing our bootleg Nirvana shirts we bought in the parking lot, my friends and I got an earful from Kris and Amanda. They berated us for even going to the show, declaring that we weren’t “grunge” and didn’t belong there. When I called Kris out on chucking my cap, she said she was teaching me a lesson that you don’t wear a hat to a concert – clearly, I had skipped that page in the handbook. I was amused then and I’m amused now by how irked they were by our presence, that alleged poseurs like us had the nerve to infiltrate “their” turf with 7,000 other baby Nirvana fans, and the steps they took to put us in our place were hilarious and highly entertaining – not looking the part was even more fun when I realized it aggravated the try-hards. But Kris and Amanda aren’t here to defend themselves, and anyway, poking holes in the flawed idealism of 16-year-olds, especially three decades later, is borderline cruel. I don’t know what their home lives were like or what the weight of the world felt like in their Mary Janes. We were all just trying to figure out our shit. I still am.

Regardless, this notion of liking music or sports exclusively, and discounting anyone who dares dabble in both, is fundamentally absurd. Especially with someone like Lanegan. We’re not talking Hootie and the Blowfish playing pro-am golf and horsing around with Dan Marino in the “Only Wanna Be With You” video; we’re talking the man who wrote “Ugly Sunday” and hurled teenage hellfire from the mound like his life depended on it. I don’t have much in common with Lanegan, but we both had baseball taken away from us at a time in our lives when it meant everything, and knowing how much the game still haunts me after getting cut from JV, how often it shows up in my dreams, I wonder how much it haunted Lanegan as an adult. Making music helped him bust out of Ellensburg, but you could argue that rock ’n’ roll put him right back in a cage. What would the pitcher’s mound have done for him in place of the microphone stand? Imagine Lanegan on the 1988 Oakland A’s, getting the call between Dave Stewart and Dennis Eckersley to terrorize tough guys like Wade Boggs and Don Mattingly. Imagine him hobnobbing in the dugout with a certified character like Jose Canseco. Imagine him in the Fall Classic, storming out of the bullpen to the sounds of “Pretty Vacant,” juiced up on adrenaline, methamphetamines and a family bloodline forever fighting upstream through waist-high volcanic rage. Would you want to be in the batter’s box with that staring you down from 60 feet, 6 inches away? Thoughts and prayers, Kirk Gibson.

Humans are multi-faceted creatures, full of contradictions real or perceived, and the minute you start boxing people in you only build walls around yourself. There are great stories about Mark Lanegan the grunge rocker, many of which he tells firsthand in Sing Backwards and Weep, and there are stories about Lanegan the drug addict that aren’t so great. Near the end of the book, he details a harrowing account of scoring heroin in Amsterdam while on tour with the Trees. It’s the saddest story in a book of sad stories, a brutal play-by-play of his internal hell at the height of his addiction, and it’s a minor miracle he survived that night (and many others). Musicians are often larger than life, and titillating books like Sing Backwards and Weep and The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones serve to perpetuate the aura and the intrigue. I can’t get enough of them, but I like a little humanity, too, and reading Lanegan’s memoir and the breadth of tributes penned after his death, it was comforting, amid all the myth-making, to learn about Mark Lanegan the sports nut and season-ticket holder, and how once sober, the man who “breathed mystical air into the songs,” as his former collaborator Isobel Campbell eulogized, got his fix from Clippers scores.

There’s a smug satisfaction in being miscast or outright disliked; discovering that someone finds you objectionable just for being you (or who they think you are) is far more intriguing than being the object of their affection. On the flip side, I’ve done my share of misreading the room. I don’t recall interacting with Kris after the Nirvana incident, or even seeing her at school. She was there, of course, often in the same classroom, but no sooner than she emerged she once again receded – she never gave me any more shit, I never tried to talk to her again. She’s nowhere to be found in our yearbooks after ninth grade – maybe she protested picture day after going grunge – and I have no idea if she even graduated from Falls. It’s possible she moved away. Occasionally I’ve wondered what happened to her, and in my mind, she evolved into a walking hipster cliché, an anti-everything adult armed with an amorphous code of conduct and a cupboard full of artisanal jams and jellies or whatever. Would she be into urban beekeeping? Definitely maybe. But wouldn’t you know it, after snooping around on Facebook and finding her through a friend of a friend of a friend, I learned that Krysta with a K-R-Y is, at the least, a passive sportsball fan – she signed off on a recent post with, “Gonna go lay on my porch and maybe listen to a baseball game on the radio.”

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