Life Itself

We are living in a world gone mad. Alias in Wonderland.  Lewis Carroll has us speaking in Jabberwocky. The hush money is loud. Vaginas, says Trump, are landmines. What was sordid and illegal has become a virtue for evangelicals. Is a life of crime to be rewarded with Bozo in the Oval?

All of which explains why I take refuge in baseball. (Wait, don't go away... yet)

It's a small vice. The crack of the bat is better than breaking news. The human drama makes sense (even though it is meaningless). Players observe the rules. The scoreboard doesn’t lie. There are no goalposts to be moved. Yes, teams steal signs but that’s not even a misdemeanor.

Fans know implicitly that baseball is a lifespan with its decades of nine innings including a seventh inning stretch which must signify something. Then there are the metaphorical bases we must traverse depositing us back where we started at home.

Every game has a loser and no manager with arrested development demands a recount declaring the winner's runs are rigged.  Failures teach us to get over it. Fandom also crosses our current ideological divide, even as it sets up a generally harmless rivalry.

The ballpark is made of primordial elements: infield earth, outfield grass with agreed-upon boundaries. I have traced its origins to my ancestor Igor who swatted some flying insect with a tree branch or was it when he halted a rock aimed at his cave entrance? Rock to ball to planet. The experience of connecting: barrel of bat to ball, is beyond the reach of mere words. The one I hit seventy-five years ago is still in flight orbiting a distant sun. It gets better with every recall.

This season the teams have decided to speed up the game against my mild resistance. Nothing wrong with slow, say I. Where else can a poem be written in between pitches? It used to be a time for contemplation interrupted by an occasional hurrah. More than once the meaning of life was nearly within my grasp.

Baseball was once a pastoral sport played on fallow fields or parks with trees as foul poles. Now it has yielded to urbanity, aligned with our impatience. Enter: the clock. No more lingering. Buy a hot dog at your peril of missing an historic play while the mustard is dripping on your jersey.

There are no alternative truths in the stadium. No fact-checks needed except to see if some record has just been broken. Consider it as a clash of dialectical proportions. In recent years stats have been dominant. But it is still a game of hunches. The rational coexists with the intuitive. Out of these opposites something emerges that feels like life itself.