Baseball

We are about a month into the 2009 baseball season. The Minnesota Twins are two games under .500 and three games out of the American League Central lead. Thus far, inconsistency in their pitching, starting pitching and relief pitching, seems to be the biggest problem. Still, they have been fun to watch and I watch a few innings when I can.

I am not sure what it is about baseball that draws me. Some find the game absolutely boring, but where they find boring I find an unforced rhythm of grace (stealing a phrase from Eugene Peterson’s translation of Matthew 11). I know many of the interesting comparisons between baseball and life – the fine balance between team and individual, getting a hit 4 times out of ten makes you a huge success, and some of the songs sung about baseball’s uniqueness – the obscure statistics, the only game played without a clock. There is something in all of this that attracts me to the game. More than that, however, there is in baseball a deep connection to my childhood and youth. Unless one’s childhood is completely marred by family violence and dysfunction, by poverty, by violence in the society in which one lives, there are probably some deep, loving connections with that time in our life that continue to tug at our souls. Baseball seems one of those for me. One great tragedy about family violence and dysfunction, grinding poverty, war-torn nations and violent neighborhoods is the lasting scars left on children, the loss to their souls.

I began collecting baseball cards when I was in grade school. I loved listening to the games on the radio. Baseball is a great game for radio, which may be why it is not as popular as it once was. Baseball is a game you can listen too when you cannot watch. I alphabetized my cards by teams, wrote up rosters for each team and played games with my cards. I was horrified by the barbarians who used their baseball cards to help their bicycles make noise – clipping a card onto part of the fender with a clothespin so the card caught in the bike spokes and made a quick tich-tich-tich sound. The only cards that should be used for such purposes were the checklists. Not even the most inept player for the Montreal Expos deserved such treatment.

Baseball was a game you could read about, too. One of the earliest purchased books in my personal library is a thin volume called “The Greatest in Baseball.” I probably bought it in the second grade, maybe third. My life-long love for reading has roots in my love of baseball. Thankfully my reading skills developed beyond my baseball skills.

John Updike, who died earlier this year, is one of the authors whose books line my shelves, rather like my baseball cards stacked in boxes – alphabetized by team and banded together. Updike was such a prolific author that two posthumous books are out within six months of his death – a book of poems last month and a book of stories in June. In the book of poems (Endpoint), one finds a poem entitled “Baseball.” Here is the first stanza:

It looks easy from a distance,
easy and lazy, even,
until you stand up to the plate
and see the fastball sailing inside,
an inch from your chin,
or circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.

Much earlier in his writing career, Updike wrote a famous essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” about Ted Williams last game and “the affair between Boston and Ted Williams… a marriage composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories.” Ever the word lover, Updike uses a strange noun in a footnote – Schlagballewusstein, which he renders baseball-consciousness. Updike’s Schlagballewusstein was a long-lived one. He writes in the Williams essay about following box scores as a boy in Pennsylvania, and his poem in Endpoint testifies to his interest in baseball to the end. Updike’s interests certainly spanned well beyond baseball, but baseball-consciousness remained a part of his self-consciousness for life. Maybe for him, too, baseball touched a part of the soul that belonged to the child.

“Baseball is a game of the long season,” Updike wrote in his essay. In that way, too, it is like life. In the long season of life, baseball and good books make wonderful companions.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David

My one moment on a major league field, 2004, throwing out a first pitch at a Twins Game