“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.”
- Bart Giamantti
I’ve been staring at my computer screen for what feels like an eternity now. The little cursor keeps flashing but I just don’t know what to do with it. I mean how I can I possibly begin? There’s too much to say, the topic is too vast, too all encompassing. Too personal, yet too universal. It’s the article I swore Id never write. I mean there has been too much already written, too much said already. Voices as disparate as Whitman, Shaw, Carlin, Hemmingway, Allen, Miller, Frost, Steven King, and of course, Anonymous, just to name a very few, have all had their say, expressed their love and devotion to it. Poetry, films, novels, short stories, songs, and all manner of art have been devoted to it since the day it began. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? What truth hasn’t yet become cliché? There is nothing I can add so why should I bother? Well now you’ve gone and made me do it.
It’s all your fault.
I’ve actually already done it once before. In high school, sophomore year, we had to write a descriptive essay about a family member or loved one. I wrote mine about the Astrodome, the old baseball stadium in Houston. The paper was, taking my age into account, one of the things I’m most proud of in my life. Because while nothing is more important than family or loved ones, to write a description of one of them seems to me cliché, whereas writing about the steel and concrete home to a children’s game comes about as close to profundity as I could at the time imagine.
You don’t get it yet do you?
See.
You made me do it.
For those who may not know, its that time of year again. This time last year you didn’t know what to make of it. I was a semi-grown human being and I was shouting at people on TV to “die motherfuckers!” and instructing them to “kiss my ass you sorry losers!” I was yelling from the depths of my soul. I was slapping hands with complete strangers in the C-Store. You didn’t know what to make of it, but you grew to accept it with bemused curiosity. As time wore on, you even began to embrace it, checking the scores yourselves, coming out to watch the games, learning the names of players, and understanding why the Cubs are the spawn of all things evil. This year though it’s on a whole new level. I say I’m missing class to watch TV and you look confused. You hear yelling coming from my “cell” they call a room and you are scared more than anything else. You slip notes under the door asking, “are you okay?” You give me puzzled looks when I cant sit still backstage because waiting to hear how the game turned out makes me so nervous I can’t stop moving. Like a shark almost. You don’t seem to get it. And I’m tired of answering everyone’s question. The puzzles looks, the furrowed brows. So now I have to write this to clear it all up.
I had no choice.
You drove me to it.
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I don’t really wish to wax poetic about how “ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection” or the deeper meanings of baseball and truths it can illuminate or any of that stuff. I personally don’t like making it all that heady. Really it’s a game that’s best when experienced on a gut level. But then all great things should be.
True story: My earliest memory is of a baseball game. The Astros versus either the Expos or the Mets, I can’t recall that well, at the Astrodome. My memory is this - standing on the concourse headed to the bathroom with my Mom, someone hitting a homerun and the scoreboard lighting up with the old electric fireworks display it used to do. My very first memory. And since then, a good majority of the best memories of my life have involved baseball. I never really played it, although I did try umpiring one summer. Mostly though I’ve just watched. And watch I sure have.
It’s the only sport that runs almost year round, and most importantly, is the only game around in summer when you’re out of school and looking for something to do and to invest yourself in. And so partially for lack of anything else, and partially for pure love of the game, I invested myself in it at an early age. Any sport that can make stars out of people with one arm, three fingers, a clubbed foot, or have its greatest icon be an uneducated, drunk, fat man is a sport I can get behind. It’s emotional on the most basic levels possible and intellectual on a level that causes growing numbers of Harvard business school graduates and professors to quit their chosen career path and obsess themselves fully with baseball strategy and statistics. It is often overlooked that Bill James’ Annual Baseball Abstract, a book filled with solely statistical analysis used to top the New York Times best seller list upon its yearly release back in the 80s.
More than just being a unifier of the heart and mind, baseball also unifies whole populations. Sports in general are perhaps the greatest unifying force we have. They are one of the rare things that can be experienced by entire groups of people in all the same way. Movies, theater, art, and even music are more singular, personal experiences, influenced and shaped by what each individual brings to them. The closest anything else comes is The Beatles, and is it any coincidence that some of their biggest moments came in sports arenas, and even more specifically, in baseball stadiums? Maybe, but maybe not…The Olympics are perhaps the most obvious universal example of the unifying power of sports, with high school football perhaps the most familiar. But sports’ undeniable power and necessity to a healthy society is evident all over. There’s a reason every society since the beginning of recorded time has had sports as an integral part. It’s often the only thing we have. It’s a common language with complete strangers, a link between the generations and a tie between the classes. But no sport fills this role more fully than baseball. After 9/11 what sport was credited with restoring our spirits? Baseball. What sport has inspired more movies more words and more art than any other? Baseball. It permeates our society in little, almost unconscious ways. Without baseball there is no Sandlot, no “reaching third base” and no name recognition for Abbott and Costello. This is all because no other sport is as concerned with and linked to its past as baseball. Other sports are passing, ephemeral pleasures - fun while they happen, some good memories for those who experienced them, and not much more. But only baseball inspires people to feel passionately about players they never even saw play, link generations together, and through its history, in cases like the Red Sox, provided an identity for an entire region of the country. If you don’t think that there is an inexorable and undeniable link between the Red Sox and the identity of any person born and/or raised in the Northeast then you obviously don’t have any friends from Massachusetts.
Baseball is also always happening in the here and now though. As Arthur Miller once said, “baseball is the purest form of drama there is”. It can be understood in any language and is more powerful than anything the human mind could on its own produce. The fact that it happens nearly every day for over six months in a row means that anything that can happen, will happen at some point. The highest highs, the lowest lows and then go to sleep and do it again the very next day. It’s a roller coaster ride that you can’t get off of. As Bill Simmons once said “if baseball were a girl you would have broken up with her long ago”. But you cant because you’re trapped. But like almost any relationship, after the pain of the bad fades away, what sticks with you are the good times. And that’s why even though I may die before my team wins it all, I will always enjoy the ride, and Ill always stay on as long as I know that someday they might.
All this being said though, I don’t know if it’s a ride you can get on halfway through. I think on a certain level you have to have been born with it, raised on it, and have a family who planned vacations around it. And thats okay I guess. I can’t get everyone, or even ANYone to embrace the game of baseball. But I hope you CAN embrace the IDEA of baseball. The concept of feeling so strongly about something that even when it causes you unbearable pain you stick with it. Something that can make you weep for joy, yell yourself horse and embrace complete strangers. To know passion that you couldn’t turn off even if you wanted to. So whatever it might be that gets you going, go with it and go all out. Because if you don’t go all out, then what’s the point? I could be a “casual fan” but what’s the fun in that? So whatever it is, find your baseball and don’t let go. Because from too many people over the next few weeks I’m sure Ill get looks that say:
“I don’t get it?”
“How can you get so worked up about something?”
“What’s your deal?”
or
“Are you crazy?”
Well you can call me crazy, but maybe that just means you need a little crazy in YOUR life.
Top 3 & 1/2 of the Week:
1.) Astros Baseball
2.) "Arcadia" by Tom Stoppard
3.) German Romanticism
3 & 1/2.) Popcorn
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