"The game of ball is glorious..."
Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs.
Let us leave our close rooms….
The game of ball is glorious.
— Walt Whitman
The whole “all we have to look forward to is death and taxes" thing is needlessly depressive. There is one silver lining it life.
Baseball.
Our nation is flailing. It is divided against itself and, unless something changes, it “cannot stand”. Lincoln didn’t say things like this because he loved the sound of his own voice. He stared into the abyss of disunion for 4 years. He held a blood-soaked nation together with both soaring rhetoric and the ability to, as it was called, “face the arithmetic”. This hugely empathetic man developed a killer instinct that still resonates in parts of the south right now. He saved the nation before it killed him. Perhaps only he alone could reconcile the hate and cruelty that has become so casual today. But, alas, there is no Lincoln on the horizon. He was the leader we deserved then. Perhaps we have the leader we deserve now, too. Maybe the recently slapped tariffs on an island inhabited only by penguins is the sort of absurdity that our tombstone deserves.
But still. It’s spring. Let us not dwell on such things. It’s time to play ball.
Lincoln was said to be an avid fan of the game, and would often skip cabinet meetings to play on the White House lawn.
"We boys hailed [Lincoln's] coming with delight because he would always join us on the lawn" a friend's son once recalled. "I remember vividly how he ran, how long were his strides, how his coattails stuck out behind."
How lovely an image is that? Lincoln busting it down the line to beat the throw, with perhaps his Top Hat giving way as he moved…..his long fashionable frock calling to mind a kite’s tail. I’ll bet Lincoln never loafed the way Bryce Harper sometimes does (I’m a Phillies fan….my bitterness is bottomless).
This is the America I wish to live in.
We seemingly agree on nothing…but baseball. Maybe this is where we need to start. With the promise of spring.
Has a more elegantly calibrated game ever been evented? Just look at the measurements. The idea to lay out the bases 90 feet apart. At 87 feet….routine grounders to the shortstop would be base hits. At 92 feet, stolen bases would disappear. The mound at 60 feet 6 inches. A few feet either way turns .300 hitters into .200 hitters, or earned run averages into double digits. The game is geometrically perfect. There’s no game clock. In theory, it could go on forever. A pitcher stands alone. The batter stands alone. It’s graceful combat. Even now, the view of the expanse of a ballfield can stop the heart. It can turn an adult into a child again. Poets don’t write about football or hockey. But stanzas on Fenway Park alone could fill wings of libraries. Even with the cursed pitch clock, baseball still gives us time for reflection. Our brains are wired to contemplate 1000 things that could happen on every pitch. And we do so with the speed of a super-computer. Curve ball away? Fast ball up and in? Take a pitch? Sit on a pitch? A ball off the wall? How does it carom? Can the runner score from first? How many outs are there? Is it worth sending him? Will the right fielder hit the cut-off man? If he doesn’t, can the batter grab an extra base? Who is backing up 3rd base? Who is backing up home?
We do this about 300 times a game.
The sounds of a ballpark. The chatter of the players. The crack of the bat. The thud of the 95 mph fastball into a bullpen glove. The way the crowd is seemingly tied together with string, and rise as one as a ball splits the gap, or as their pitcher gets out of a bases loaded jam with a perfectly placed slider. The color. The Field of Dreams. That shade of green. The kind that, when mixed with a painfully blue sky and the shape of the city itself hovering beyond the center field wall, turns the view into something that could hang in the Louvre.
“Is this heaven?”
“No. It’s Iowa”
Only baseball does this.
And there’s probably no scientific studies on this, but there doesn’t need to be. You know it’s true. A hot dog in a ball park just tastes better. A beer in a ball park is one of life’s simpler pleasures, even if its $13 price tag does what it can to ruin the experience. Give me a hot dog and a beer at the ballpark over the best steak and wine at the best table you can beg. I win.
If we must draw sides, let us choose nine. And if we find that we still cannot come together, perhaps, in the words of the great Ernie Banks, we need to play two.
In a bit…
—tf