Game-Changer

Baseball is what makes life coherent, said Plato or was it my step-son? I’ve never known him to be wrong about such things.  Seen up close it contains all the elements of human existence  from humility to Hubris, from heroics to dumb hustle. It also mirrors the racism that infects the American soul and the attempts to remedy our pathology.

Today is Jackie Robinson day. Every player in Major League Baseball wears his number 42 and ceremonies are conducted at each stadium to memorialize his achievement. Robinson was the first four-letter athlete at UCLA. A national Track & Field champion in the long-jump, he led the country in punt returns for the football team and started on their basketball team. He also excelled nationally in tennis. Baseball was his worst sport.

He enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor, rose to 2^nd lieutenant and was then court-martialed for refusing to sit in the back of a bus in Texas. He was exonerated and received an honorary discharge.

By 1947 he had honed his baseball skills and broke through the segregated color-line in baseball. Much is made of the way he swallowed the threats and humiliation aimed at him. This has always struck me as the White man's fantasy of an acceptable Black man. I prefer to remember him as one of the most competitive and daring base-runners to play the game. I would say he and the score of Black players who followed changed the way the game is played.

Baseball is a stoic sport governed by unwritten rules of behavior which regard displays of emotion as show-boating. Robinson’s game was to taunt the pitcher when he got on base. He rattled pitchers with his long leads and fake sprints.  Nineteen times in his abbreviated career he stole home, arguably the most exciting play to watch. It took stealth and guts.

Robinson brought a new dimension to the sport. He made every appearance fraught with possibility. He ignited the crowd, generated a charge and enlivened the game. Six times in his ten year career the Dodgers won the pennant.

Today only 8% of players are African-American. That works out to 2 per 25 man roster. Thirty years ago the number was twice as high. Actually three teams have none, the St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks. Apparently the best Black athletes favor basketball and football where more scholarships are available and the jump to pro level is much faster. Baseball in the inner city is a tough sell.

However baseball has far more players from the Caribbean with black skin than ever before. It is the ticket out of abject poverty. Again the culture of the game is undergoing change. Recent defectors from Cuba have brought with them more emotion and risk-taking than we’ve ever seen before. Some of it has been called dumb-hustle which can put an entire career in jeopardy but it all goes under the heading of entertainment which is what fans come to see. It hardly needs to be said that the ugliness of human trafficking would disappear if our administration had the courage and political will to end the embargo and normalize relations with Cuba. 

Baseball needs to be goosed periodically. If it takes swagger, dugout dances and in-your-face antics so be it.  There are enough geometry and stats already. Bring on the loosey-goosey and unexpected elements that cannot be quantified.

Why I Didn't Became A Major League Baseball Player

Besides peaking at age twelve and not having any particular talent beyond my years for throwing, catching, hitting or running…. it’s the scrutiny, stupid. There is no other enterprise where ERRORS are noted on a scoreboard. 

I couldn’t imagine living my working life in a fishbowl called a stadium. Think of your dentist going O for 5 one day or your barber in a slump and the whole country knowing about it. Performers do, at least for their limited audience but a flat note here or missed step there, is pardonable. Even umpires are said to err half a dozen times during a game with impunity. But no occupation labors under greater transparency than athletes and especially baseball players. Every pitch thrown, bat swung and ball caught is noted. There are people who tally such stats. 

Who cares?, you may ask and I shall ignore the question as a spokesman for this alternative universe called sports. I was one of them who cared for a time. Memorizing batting averages and such is an entry into the adult world for many kids and a sure way for first generation children of immigrants to become fully American. If a player goes hitless or makes a game-changing error, thousands of fans think less of him. Conversely, if he goes on a tear his value is raised a notch or two. The numbers are tallied not just for tomorrow’s newspaper, they are indelibly inked into the great ledger in baseball heaven. What was the ratio of walks to strike outs for Joe DiMaggio, I hear you ask. I have the answer in my baseball encyclopedia on one of its 2,780 pages. 

If the man who waters the lettuce in the market misses the Iceberg or overdoes the romaine only he knows. Society even allows a trial lawyer a margin of error when the judge instructs the jury to disregard that last remark. Crimes are expunged from the record but not a shortstops’s bobble; it follows him into his grave and afterlife. 

In this digitalized world of data-collecting Google may know more about me than I do. Our consumer-based society is moving toward the obsessive culture of baseball statisticians. Paradoxically, at the same time, everything non-quantifiable becomes more valuable, even in baseball. Some years ago when Jackie Robinson was receiving death-threats, a teammate, Pee-Wee Reese put his arm around him as they took their positions on the field. The desegregation of the game was assured. Another great player, Roberto Clemente, donated tons of goods for earthquake victims in Nicaragua. He went down with his chartered plane; human moments beyond measure and neither act appears in any record book

Take Me Out To the Ballgame

It's not the way I remember it back then when we got to Ebbets Field at 10 for Sunday double-headers riding the F train then GG local and transfer to the el all for a nickel with Jackie, Campy and Newk gods mingled among us then bleacher seats fifty cents seven hours no back to lean on when we knew players without programs both teams even the umps man inside the scoreboard darting around pushing out numbers quietly no blasts no replays no cameras zooming no jerseys on our back white shirts ties even we could smell cigar smoke hot dogs peanut shells the mowed grass this was Flatbush Brooklyn with no bushes and no brooks

Now in Chavez Ravine with increments of green San Gabriel’s distant grey rolling as pastoral as it gets crickets drowned by amplified noise non-stop L.E.D. ads here then gone and back again to the game starts with bombastic anthem what so proudly we hail to the home of the free-agency for next year’s fat contract blessed by Irving Berlin’s stretch in the bottom of the 7th Americana home sweet home runs by God almighty thank you Jeez the jeers the cheers high fives Friday fireworks bursting the night sky higher than a pop flying peanuts at six bucks a throw washed down by ten dollar beer white with ocean foam waves in the stands ring the stadium

Scully still part bard his voice captions the field with more than stats upon stats everything and nothing has changed brush-backs signs by cap & chin spit and scratch nose-to-nose with umps still the unaccountable streaks and slumps as if it matters and somehow it does while millionaire boys of spring, summer and fall with surgically repaired arms congenitally endowed raised on Olympus to keep the continuum of Hermes / Hercules / Hero stay Spartan stay large stay loose stay stoic as the 44,812 go wild as a Greek chorus can go

What inning of life this is we don’t know maybe we’ll get picked off third and be gone or thrown out stretching maybe caught in a rundown going on for years or be the pitcher yanked after a slow trot to the mound or just finished with a walk-off hit no double-headers anymore let the ground crew rake wet and smooth the infield earth so defined such symmetry the order that exists no where else Euclidian precision the rhyme of ninety feet an order promised so we thought that is nowhere

Spring Training

Late February, early March; it may be winter to most people but to baseball fans it is spring. Daffodils and tulips are inching up through their frozen fuse. Even with global warming, airports will be locked down from a blast of arctic air. Ski masks can be seen on faces which are not holding up a bank. But in the citrus and cactus leagues, where the living is easy, a crack of the bat and old bones can be heard.

Veterans swear they’re good for another season in spite of reporting to camp forty pounds overweight. Hungry rookies with fresh legs vie for the one or two open spots on the roster. This morning’s cantaloupe had ripe written all over it but clearly wasn’t ready for prime time. The mystery of melon is the same with ballplayers. Some peak early and never develop beyond that. Young prospects will feel the scrutiny of many eyes; whether they get a jump on a fly ball, whether they have baseball-smarts, if their faults are correctible, if they will ripen.

Reporters look for an angle and a back story. Statisticians sharpen their pencils. Announcers practice their clichés. Umps prepare to get the lip. Ground-keepers go over their wet-down and smoothing of infield dirt. Is their anything more virgin, more Spring than an untrammeled infield?

Fans open the sport’s section and skip to page 6 or 7 for notes about their team. Any tidbit will do. A new clubhouse leader emerges. Another one, in three paragraphs, says he’s not talking to the press anymore.

There will be a month of freakish injuries which only happen to baseball players. A pitcher will cut his throwing hand on a can opener, so he says. Actually he was in a bar when he crushed his third martini glass. The promising young shortstop will slip a disc lifting up his 2-year old. Though unnamed sources say he was seen after curfew exiting a motel room.

You have to love the game for its non-athletic-looking athletes, alone. Some uber-arms often attached themselves to under-nourished bodies. Unlike most contact sports with jocks who look like they were genetically engineered, baseball has found room for nerds and wonks that would fit in at H & R Block.

Spring training is followed avidly by incorrigible fans still grumbling over winter trades that happened or didn’t. What do we care what the owner spends? The more he lavishes we take it as a form of love. He owes it to us after all we’ve done for him.

The players come with baggage, dragging columns of numbers. How does he hit against southpaws, at night versus daytime, with runners on base? With all this analysis the game remains a mystery. The outcome may hinge on a missed sign, a bad call, even the infield dirt, over-watered which slows a runner or the ball. As a fan I will feel a tad better or worse about life for a few minutes even as I know the outcome has no consequences.

I need this alternative universe. It is in my body rhythm. Nothing signifies renewal so much as the clean slate of opening day. Every player is batting zero. To start the season in 1940, Bob Feller pitched a no-hitter for Cleveland. By the end of the day everyone on the White Sox was still hitting zero. But the season was underway.

Hope springs eternal until mid-July when most of us accept our team’s fate, with resignation. Yet we continue to root for an individual, his streak, his stats, his record-breaking something. Every game is a new drama, unrehearsed, where a never-to-be-forgotten moment might occur. Sort of reminds me of life.

Robinson Still Running

My friend insists Jackie Robinson was out. 

Yes and No, I say, 

he’s running still In fields of MLK’s dream 

since that ’55 Series, not only toward, but from. 

 He is running from the strange fruit of the noose, 

from white sheets and the back of the bus, 

a unanimous Supreme Court decision in his cleats. 

He carries generations on his back. 

His route is underground, an up-hill ninety feet, 

swung low to carry him home…. plate points north. 

And there is Yogi, the philosopher, Berra, of all people, 

who never said half of what he said. 

If there’s a fork in the road, take it, 

because nobody goes that way since it’s too crowded. 

Yogi understands the every which way of life. 

He lives in the in-between in a run-down 

between safe and out and when he speaks 

you listen hard and scratch your head. 

Yogi knew and Jackie knew they would collide, 

ball and cleats, cloud of dust, ump leaning, cameras flashing 

and another fifty thousand umps in the stands with perfect eyes. 

Jackie had done it eighteen times before. 

Not the fastest man coming down the line 

but he could slide falling away and hook, 

even late, he owned an inch of plate. 

Yogi tore off his mask then stomped and swore as if it really mattered. 

In ’54 the high court, all nine umps, ruled him safe to integrate. 

Jackie got a jump, already heading home. 

Baseball is a gentleman’s game, they say, 

watched by poets, followed for its geometry and stats, 

seen by hayseeds and men in straw hats 

with white shirts and skin to match. 

Jackie Robinson dared them all, 

brought color, moved it from the pasture to the hood. 

He stole hearts, snapped chains, swiped white bases 

and turned fans to see themselves.

Baseball Haiku

Opening Day first pitch 

slow and wild 

from celebrity's vain hand.

Opening Day Flag 

tells nothing of what’s to come

missed bunt   spring's first lurch

Swung on and missed 

Amazonian butterfly 

adjusts to the whiff. 

Brush back fast ball 

lost in straw hats and shirts 

nineteen twenty four again. 

 

Leaving early beats traffic.

Tea gulped 

without even ceremony. 

Over-watered grass in mid-day sun 

picked off first 

naked and erased.

Coach flashes signs. 

Batter distracted by butterflies. 

Rally squandered.

Inside the park home-run. 

Rounding third 

he knew enough to retire. 

 

Methodically the batter 

knocks dirt that isn’t there 

from his cleats 

Out stretching double. 

Summer’s tenancy expired. 

Inning over.

Butterflies in his stomach 

knuckleball pitcher 

serves them to the plate.

Unshaven rookie pitcher 

throws his menace 

at patient veteran.

Squeeze play. 

Forty thousand eyes crowd home plate.

Ump, like God, decides his fate 

On pitcher’s brow 

beads of perspiration 

he throws to sweating hitter. 

Ground crew waters the infield. 

Grass leans in thirst

bracing for sliding cleats. 

Conference on the mound 

Pitcher with head down.

Gnats regroup on raked hill 

Cicadas drone requiem 

for the double-header 

no longer played. 

Into a forest Of green blades

a  baseball rolls

stitch over red stich. 

Batter steps out of the box,

crickets hesitate. 

No clock presiding.

Early innings on an August night.

Sun yields 

to a thousand light bulbs. 

The mirrored moon in the tarp

declares game called.

The gulls will drink to that.

 Somersault catch in the outfield..

 Ants repair damage 

with crowds cheering.

moon hurries across innings 

Hot dispute in umps' face

who bit the moon.

Baseball As Life

There is something about baseball that is irresistible to poets and writers. It could be the geometry of the field, the architecture of the game itself, its disdain of the clock, the sequential nature of the innings or the equipoise between going by the book versus the hunch. It is surely an exercise in frustration and nowhere has this inherent failure been more vividly enacted than in the book I just read called Bottom of the 33rd.

New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Dan Barry, details the longest game ever played. It happened on Easter eve in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1982 and lasted eight hours, barely beating out Jesus in his annual resurrection. The paid attendance was 1,700 with 19 diehards left in the stands at 4 o’clock in the morning. The temperature hovered around 40 degrees. To keep warm fires were lit in oil cans. Actually the game was called after 32 innings and resumed two months later only to be abruptly ended the next inning.

The futility of the players to end the marathon earlier is overshadowed by their persistence in playing out the ritual as if they recognized their role in some archetypal struggle. It was a re-statement of the adage that one finishes what they start. Their devotion to the game and the umpires reluctance to end it earlier became a national news story at the time; a reminder that our National Pastime possesses a defiance of time itself. Every at bat is a re-winding of the clock as the runner goes around the bases counter-clockwise. Baseball, our pastoral sport, has persevered a century of the tyranny of the stop-watch, two-minute warnings and urban razzle-dazzle.

The Pawtucket Red Sox, Boston’s farm team, finally prevailed over the Rochester Redwings, the Baltimore affiliate, in the Triple A International League. The author gives us the personal lives of several players in great detail; their marriages, how they got there and what glory or ignominy was to be their script. Two players on the field that night went on to The Hall of Fame, Wade Boggs and Cal Ripkin Jr. Others also made it to the Major Leagues but most were either has-beens or wanabes

Minor League players have Major League dreams and when they die it is with a thud. The saddest story belongs to a Pawtucket player, Dave Koza, who was never called up to Boston. His hit finally won the game but his seven years in expectation followed the myth of Sisyphus. He pushed the rock up the mountain expecting to reach his goal only to watch it dribble down, season after season. The killing of the dream led him to alcoholism and the end of his marriage.

The early adulation an athlete receives often ends in bitter disillusion. For most aspiring ballplayers the minor leagues are a graveyard. They have gambled a valuable decade in pursuit of fame and fortune often the last to see their own limited skills.

Baseball is an alternative universe for fans like me. It keeps the child alive. No rational argument to the contrary dissuades me. Not the greed nor the swagger, nor the inconsequential outcome. It could be a metaphor for life itself. One of those inexplicable indulgences I’m happy to leave alone.

Dan Barry also presents us with the supporting cast on that historic night………umpire and bat boy, official scorer and vendor. Everyone has a story. It reminded me of Our Town with each life recorded in the great ledger. There is a symphony of voices to be heard even in a dilapidated ballpark on a chilly April night extending into Easter morning. It sounds like a hymn to America.

National Time-Past

National Time-Past

In uncertain times one needs an alternative universe. When have times ever not been uncertain and when has the baseball season not served that purpose?

Football is done. Basketball is over-done; too many games with too many points. Even though I played the sport against dead backboards in schoolyards and as a freshman in college it doesn't conjure the sensory memories of baseball with its smell of bubblegum cards, the fervor of a box score, the feel of a first baseman's mitt and the infield chatter, Chuck easy baby.

Spring training is soon upon us. Just in time to save me from the malice that spews from Fox fabled news. Daily they test my threshold. Of course baseball also tests my tolerance for greed and arrogance but somehow my infantilism has emerged in tact. Anything to keep that inner child alive.

Maybe it's the pace of our pastoral game that slips me into reverie. The absence of a clock and irregular expanse of outfield grass puts it on the margin of space-time.

In the popular imagination baseball is associated with open spaces or sand lots yet urban kids found facsimiles in stoop ball, stick ball, punch ball and hitting fungo. Manhole covers served just fine as bases or home plate. And if you didn’t play you could follow the sport as living history arcana.

I think it was the first thing I knew that my parents didn't. An entrée into the grown-up world; not all adults but enough to give it some legitimacy. For many first generation kids or refugees, baseball was a portal into American life. I expect many immigrants learned English listening to the radio broadcasts.

What Joe DiMaggio did for Italian-Americans, Hank Greenberg did for the Jewish population in and around Detroit. The war years interrupted both these icons in their prime but not sufficiently to deny them a permanent place in the hearts of their followers.

As a Dodger fan I worshipped Red Barber, with his casual erudition, which raised the experience a notch or two. In those days I listened to re-creations of games played as far west as St. Louis, every pitch coming over ticker-tape. I could see the green grass in the radio speaker and even smell the hot dogs.

The game probably helped introduce me to early arithmetic with its batting averages, RBIs and pitcher's ERA. It is a world of numbers but it also contains a mystery that eludes the statisticians. Call it contingency. Call it the human factor. Call it life.

Baseball and The Gods

There is something about baseball that attracts poets and writers. Is it the statistics or the pastoral pace? My guess is the divinely-inspired proportions of the field, or so it seems.

The game has a certain logic which is overturned, the more you embrace it, by an illogic. Unlike all those oblong sports, played against a ticking clock and the suggestion of opposing armies gaining real estate or aiming a projectile, baseball runs on a kind of squared-off circle and proceeds heedless of the clock. In fact a batter hits a ball and runs counter-clockwise, as if unwinding the clock. The duration of a game is measured in innings and intervals theoretically stretching to infinity.

The pace of the game and layout of the stadium allows the tactician to chew on a multitude of contingencies. Consider the precision of the infield diamond contrasted with the indeterminacy of the outfield grass. The game is a metaphor of human possibility.

Every so often a player comes along who seems to possess the fast wrist and the eagle eye to make it all look simple. When this happens we, as fans, are lifted vicariously as if it translates to our reaching the unattainable.............even if he happens to be on the hated Giants. Such a player is the rookie, Buster Posey who inspired this poem.

Buster Posey

Did your mother name you that
or did you pick it up to show the world where to get off?
Sorry but as a Buster you just don't pass muster
Never mind Buston Brown or Keaton,
my idea of a Buster is a greasy guy with a Fu Manchu,
weighing in at 240, the guy in the subway
no one wants to inhale,
hanging on to an overhead strap.
But you, look at you. You're no Buster
I’ll bet you never swore, spit or shaved.
Can you really be a catcher with a choir boy’s face
and a voice that hasn’t changed?
You are the Boy Scouts of America, still tenderfooted,
yet you soar so near the sun
and your wax isn’t even sweating.
You’ve got the gift of the great eye / hand
returning me to that season of ‘41
when DiMaggio hit for a string of pearls
and Ted batted over the white cliffs of Dover.
Buster Posey, Buster Posey, our jaw drops
and we all fall down when you hit it on the nosey
and run a ring around the rosy.
Are you Malamud’s, Natural, Roy Hobbs
or are you Mudville’s Casey?

Do you realize, Posey, how you have busted in,
flaunting Euclid’s geometry?
Suddenly, sixty feet, six inches won‘t do.
In your unshaven innocence you have trampled
on the mathematician’s elegant, divine dimensions
but on Phythagorean metaphysics and the Platonic ideal.
The gods are gathering on the mound,
scratching and hitching their belts
reconfiguring what were once sublime proportions.
There could be hell to pay for your hubris
or they might etch your Posey on Olympus.

Striking Out In The Information Age

In baseball-dom we have witnessed four no-hitters, two of them, (really three) perfect games in half a season. This is as statistically improbable as Obama getting re-elected unanimously or receiving an invitation to a Bar Mitzvah in the Gaza Strip. What’s going on here?

One quick answer might be the abrupt end of steroidal hitters. Anabolic arms are getting flabby and barrel chests, caving in. But juiced pitchers are also yesterday’s news so the playing field is level. Perhaps the expansion of major league teams almost twenty years ago has brought some truly minor leaguers into the big time.

I propose a more sociological answer. Armed with a plethora of information batters are going up to the plate thinking too much. Call it paralysis from analysis. If they face the pitcher thinking that he usually throws a curve ball when he gets two strikes or a low-outside slider on the first pitch…they are doomed. To be successful the hitter must focus on the nanosecond of the ball’s spin, not try to out-think what the stats say he will be throwing.

Analytical thinking is bread and butter for the announcer up in the booth but for the athlete on the field it’s a curse. It’s also the difference between an artist and a critic. If he is to be successful a writer becomes his own best critic. He may connect or he may fall on his face but he is sure to strike out through self-censure or by listening to self-appointed arbiters of good taste. Imagine relying on a manual on how to tie your shoes. In such cases information is devoutly to be ignored.

Here we are, stuck in the Information Age. There’s a glut of it. Wikipedia has seen to it that we've all been deputized as experts. Facts and stats are coming out of our ears. Both the athlete and the creative individual may be feeling the weight of it. Ballplayers need to rely on their muscle memory and artists on the muscle of their imagination.

I notice a hitter walking up to the batter’s box with a ritual. He circles the plate, fingers his bling, crosses himself, plays with his Velcro and then knocks the dirt from his cleats (that isn’t there) ………all this to quiet his brain and relocate everything he knows into his kinesthesiology.

So, too, a writer needs to quiet those interjected voices of a censorious parent or the teacher who rapped his knuckles for transgressing before he can recover his own voice and take its dictation.

There is a place for analysis……in the laboratory or academia. And of course, there are batting coaches to remedy a hitter’s funk. I only question the art critic who would argue the merit of a particular Pollock drip or the literary maven who delights in tearing apart an author’s sentence, often out of context. This is like boiling a watch to see what makes it tick. The critic does best when he illuminates the creator’s work or articulates it in ways that the artist has chosen not to.

I know we are more likely to be fans than players and art appreciators more than working artists however we need to think like them. Otherwise we become passive consumers with our critical faculty overwhelming our creative one. Analysts assume the role of screeners of public taste. In a sense we are all artists in our being, struggling to express ourselves. We all intrepret the Zeitgeist and feel the press of convention keeping us in line, resisting change. We are more than consumers; we keep art alive.

I've allowed myself to wander in this piece and I'm now far afield from the baseball diamond. I'm not sure how I got here but I suppose my point is that I (we) are makers of our own lives and it wouldn;t hurt to close the distance between us and what we read, hear or witness.

I don’t mean to dismiss the value of learning the craft, be it sports or creativity. In the former case one may recognize his endowments early on and work hard to hone the skills. The same may be true for any artist. Study the material, practice draftsmanship or take in the rules of grammar and such……but at some point get it out the head into the hand and let it fly.

It Happens Every Spring

Passover has passed, taxes not quite due and the voice of the turtle can be heard throughout the land ...along with the crack of the bat. Play ball.

Obama threw out the first ball yesterday. It was high and wide. He didn't want to bounce it to home plate like some past presidents. The custom started with William Howard Taft who would have made a better fullback. Obama is arguably our most athletic chef executive and even he had some trouble.

Nothing about baseball comes naturally. I would have to train for a month before I felt comfortable throwing overhand those 20 yards. Yet batters are expected to hit a ball, the size of an apple with a branch, traveling 50% faster than a car going at the speed limit. It’s like hitting a marble with a backscratcher and not just making contact but hitting it where they ain't.

It's all about eye-hand coordination, bat speed, powerful wrists, picking up sight of the ball in a nanosecond and making adjustments as it is coming at you. I would have to start my swing before the ball leaves the pitcher's hand.

The great Ted Williams had eyes that could count the stitches on a fastball. Some said he could spot the pitcher's fingerprints. He saw what we were not meant to see. The way Mozart heard music of the spheres he could reverse the sphere, launch planetary bodies and baseballs into new orbits and reconfigure the night sky.

When DiMaggio swung it was poetry, even if he missed. So Greco-Roman was his body he seemed to be yearning for marble. As a kid I imagined myself, broomstick in hand, sending that tennis ball over the fence even if it came at me faster than a bright idea. The moment of contact has never left me; that conjunction of wood meeting hurled object; the trajectory of an extended arm colliding with life itself. You strike the dark air and listen for a sound that could be music.

Baseball seems to be the game of choice for intellectuals. Its symmetry, stats, dimensions and pace all appeal to the literary set. Yet many of these voices have, in recent years, turned against the sport as if they've been betrayed. They cite the tarnished image steroids have left along with the usual charges of baseball's degradation by spoiled player millionaires and greedy owner billionaires, or do I have that backwards?

I don't want to hear any of this. My interest in baseball is extra-rational and therefore beyond all analysis and critical judgment. It exists in some precinct of my mind not subject to scrutiny. I go into the same zone of non-thinking that a hitter enters when he steps into the batter's box, knocks dirt that isn't there from his cleats, fiddles with the Velcro of his batting glove, then spits and scratches just to allow his muscle memory to take over from his brain. I always runs the risk of not having a return ticket but it's worth it the trip.

As for the statistics one must study the game assiduously in a monastic cell and then un-learn almost everything. Hunches are our delight, as five out of four fans will tell you ...when they work. Otherwise we live by the numbers and curse the manager for not playing by the book. So I go slumming in this underworld of inarticulate jocks, handicapped by early adoration and managers who live by the seat of their pants. My rational side goes on sabbatical until October.

Baseball, as some ancient sage remarked, is what makes life coherent. I've always subscribed to eternal verities.

World Serious

Are you serious, baseball in November? Given rain delays and the demands of television which dictate the scheduling it is now certain that the games will extend beyond October.

In our collective imagination baseball is a pastoral game but the pasture is frozen. On city streets the manhole cover is no longer home plate; it’s the new goal line. You can't play stickball with galoshes. Footballs are spiraling, basketballs are dribbling yet baseball goes on.

Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball; baseball invented him. He was, indeed, a real person, a civil war officer but his connection to the game ranks up there with Casey and Mudville. In fact baseball probably goes back to the first caveman when he hit a rock with a stick. Maybe there was a championship game between the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. But it was surely played on a hot summer day.

I can hardly wait for the season to be officially done so the real competition can begin with free agency, trades and arbitration supplying our fantasies for the coming year. A baseball fan never sleeps.

In recent years the World Series has become well-named. The major leagues are filled with players from Caribbean countries, Central and South America, Canada, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and has now spread to The Netherlands. There was only one Anglo among the position players for the Dodgers starting team this year. The game has practically been out-sourced and the sweat-shops have returned to our shores. But the players own the shop.

Being a baseball fan is a humbling experience. The best players fail twice as often as they succeed. No one questions this ratio anymore than the distance between bases. It feels like an a priori number. Yet the dimensions of each ballpark are different. Some things must just be accepted. Life ain’t fair. Umps miss calls. If you’re on a streak, don’t gloat. If you knew what you’re doing right you would never have any slumps. Stop thinking so much and remember, for everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn.

Umps Versus Imps

John Keats would have made a terrible umpire.

Umpires live in a world of absolutes. You're either safe or you're out, it's fair or foul, ball or strike. It is either raining or it isn't. It can't be both and it can't be neither.There is no time for indecision, nor the inclination.

The imp is full of mischief. He's the trickster,the elf and as such, the poet. Keats encouraged "Negative Capability"; being comfortable with doubt and ambiguity. The poet's trade is nuance, ellipsis, even irresolution.

If the umpire is the reigning patriarch the imp is the misbehaved child.

One umpire famously declared, "I don't call them as I see them, I call them as they are." This a triumph of objective reality over the subjective; as if the umpire, as a supreme being,is more than an expert observer, he is the teller of truth itself.
It is a declaration that truth exists independent of us; he is merely reporting what already exists.In his formidable black suit he signals his decree and walks away.

My rational mind also believes that the tree in forest needs no witness to fall. However I have found that this sort of thinking doesn't serve the imagination, the imp. The now archaic meaning of "imp" was one who furnishes wings. It is those wings that the poet insists upon. While the umpire defines the box and makes it his address the imp/poet/artist finds portals through the box walls.

In baseball we cede that power to his authority in order to get through the innings. In the real world we reject infallibility unless you have assigned your autonomy to one Ayatollah or another.

The closest we come to such irrefutable decision-making is our Supreme Court justices and we all know how astigmatic their lens can be. They are our umpires with a touch of the imp.

A book I am reading describes the fraternity of umpires as generallly conservative Republican, misogynist, WASP and homophobic. Pray that our high court is comprised of no more than four of such in their black robes.

Baseball As Life

As those of us know who live the well-examined life and yet are still seventeen while pushing eighty, baseball makes life coherent. It's the geometry of the thing, the measured dimensions of the infield which seem divinely inspired along with the random configurations of the outfield which lend it the frailty of humanity. More than most sports baseball is a game of defeat. A 70% failure rate almost ensures a place in the Hall of Fame.

It's the permutations of the game that made it playable on the streets of the city with manhole covers and fire hydrants serving as bases and sawed-off broomsticks as bats. For many of us baseball became punchball or stickball with a list of ground rules that might served a paralegal mind.

Why, I ask myself, has my interest persevered lo these many decades? The game must have a corresponding resonance with the rhythm of my life; an appeal in ways elusive to analysis.There is the on-going dialog between the pull of statistics and the allure of the hunch and the illusion that life is under control in this alternative universe.

Baseball seems to be teeming with metaphors; its pastoral beginnings, the inherent disregard for the clock, the arcane hand signs, the safety of the base and risk of stealing or stretching, the smell of green grass and hot dogs, the way a batter comes to the plate with his own ritual to keep from thinking too much and even the counter-clockwise path of the baserunner as if winding back time itself and finally the exhilaration and exhaustion at the end of life's odyssey....home plate

So many of our geo-political dramas unfold according to lines drawn years ago and articulated in altogether expected ways. Spectator sports can serve as a form of unscripted theatre which incite great passions and seem closer to our understanding if not control.

I am particularly interested in the relationship between fans and the game. How many of us believe,on some level, that our actions determine the outcome? The scene was Kirk Gibson hobbling to the plate in the 9th inning. Raise your hand if you think that my dear step-son, who remained seated while the crowd was on its feet, did not cause that home run. He never saw the immortal drive into the rightfield stands but can take credit for it. Ron stayed in contact with the wood, the tree, the bat, the forces of nature. Crazy but lovable.

On a more rational level I wonder how we fans (the Greek chorus) are complicit with the players (the actors). Do we not push them up on a pedestal as if to extend ourselves only to tear them down when they are detected with suspicious pee or even when they lose some bat speed and half a step? How much can we forgive? And how much do we forgive ourselves.

I wonder, too, about slumps and streaks. After all the numbers are in and films of past performances are studied no one seems to know what went wrong or what went right. There is always an X factor just as we go through our lives in inexplicable ways.

My earliest baseball memory happened in the 1941 World Series when my beloved Dodgers let the 4th game get way after the Yankee hitter seemingly struck out to end the game. The pitch eluded Mickey Owen, the catcher,(or was it the Hugh Casey spitter?) and Tommy Henrich took first base starting a rally they never got over. Nor did I. My team was a perennial loser and the Yankees were a product of providential intervention.

My guess is that Yankee fans grew up with an expectation of success; perhaps even a sense of entitlement. For years they bought their teams using other clubs as their farm system.They were paragons of capitalism. Don't tell me identification doesn't work on the psyche.Are they not the ones who bought Intel at three...and sold the day before the crash?

I owned my subordinate role; the hard-luck but well-intentioned guy identified with underdogs and the down-trodden. When it was Dodgers who broke the color line with Jackie Robinson it seemed a given to me. When they followed me to Los Angeles it felt like compensation for all those losing seasons and almost made me a believer in that great puppeteer in the sky.

Through the years my team has won their share and their ownership has displayed greed and stupidity. The players also have tested my threshold of tolerance but none of this is subject to rational scrutiny. In the last inning maybe that is its appeal.