PLAY BALL!

Today there was a snow storm in Minnesota. I got to experience it first hand, driving from Duluth to Minneapolis and back. It was also the opening day of the 2008 baseball season. One can be grateful that at this time, the Minnesota Twins play ball indoors, though most of us baseball fans prefer the game outdoors.

I have been a baseball fan since I was a boy. One of the first books I ever owned was a Scholastic Book Club selection, The Greatest in Baseball, a book of portraits of some of the games greatest players into the 1950s (a book I still have somewhere). I collected baseball cards (and I have moved these around over the years, too), and invented a way for my teams to play one another. I enjoyed listening to Minnesota Twins baseball games on a transistor radio – Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Rod Carew, Bob Allison, Jim Perry, Dave Boswell. In elementary school, boys tried to sneak radios to school and listen to parts of the afternoon season opener as we could.

Though my interest in the game has risen and fallen some over the years, there remains something special about it, and I find myself drawn back to the game again and again. Recently, I read in The Boston Review that the eminent philosopher, John Rawls, was a devoted baseball fan. They printed a letter Rawls wrote about a conversation he had with Harry Kalven, a legal scholar, on the splendid features of baseball – among which is the familiar fact that baseball is one of the few games where time doesn’t matter. The game goes on until nine innings are played – more if the game is knotted up. “This means there is always time for the losing side to make a comeback. The last of the ninth inning becomes one of the most potentially exciting parts of the game.” I also listened the other day to Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour broadcast on baseball (a free CD given out awhile back with the purchase of another Bob Dylan CD). I was reminded why I enjoy this game, and was reminded of some of my favorite words about it.

So in honor of opening day, I share two pictures from the Twins game in 2004 where I had the privilege of delivering the ceremonial first pitch. I hadn’t really picked up on the irony of the beer and casino ads flanking the sign with my name until looking at this picture again! I also share three pieces of writing about the game,found in Baseball: A Literary Anthology, published by the Library of America.

Baseball certainly is a diversion, but an uncommonly familiar one to a large number of people who summon from the daily nine-inning narrative a cast of heroes and villains, scraps of gossip, ethical conundrums, moments of despair, laughter, tears, plenty of hope, and the occasional lasting satisfaction. It acquires significance by virtue of the emotions that people invest in it. Perhaps the most important baseball games take place in the mind, memory and imagination of the individual fan. The daily ballgame isn’t as important as the decisions of generals and politicians, but something that absorbs so many private imaginations has an emotional heft that cannot be dismissed…. The wonderful irresistible game of baseball, so enduring in its rules and rhythms, so varied in its lore and lexicon, has everything a writer could ask for, most especially the opportunity for vivid characters to involve themselves in a highly dramatic activity. Baseball is governed by no clock, and there is no margin that spells ruin until the last inning is over. Because baseball is so fundamentally timeless, it is fundamentally prone to surprises.
Nicholas Dawidoff

Baseball’s time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our father’s youth, and even back then… there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.
Roger Angell

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 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…. Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.
A. Bartlett Giamatti

With Faith and With Feathers (at the start of a new season),

David