My Alternative Universe

I’m told by friends, who don’t want to hurt my feelings, that they enjoy my blogs…. except for those about baseball. I can only sympathize with their loss. Then again, my brow is too low for opera and I never subscribed to Mechanics Illustrated. We all have our deprivations.

The season about to begin offers an alternative universe to distract me from the real world. It’s a matter of keeping my child alive while finding a human drama, unrehearsed and unrigged, which makes more sense than the seismic upheaval we are living in.

Many great poets and writers have embraced the game. Among them are May Swenson, William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Donald Hall, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jack Spicer and Shakespeare. I just threw him in to see if you were paying attention.

There are haikus in the outfield grass and sonnets in the turning of innings. Consider the clash between stats and hunches, precision and randomness. It is a triumph of the inexplicable, linear as a board game, yet with a simultaneity of many moving parts.

The confluence of wood and sphere which reminds the poet in us of an epiphany on the page. The pause between pitches, between innings as if stanzas might be written. The crowd focused on the lone batter. His futility to hit the unhittable or say the unsayable. Slumps like writer’s block. And what of streaks when everything feels so right, so easy and they have exceeded themselves? The fastball down the middle they’ve been waiting for.

The next word, next pitch is unknown. Where does it come from? The poet’s line travels faster than a radar gun and defies gravity with a leap. The game is new every day or night. A curtain goes up on today’s theater. When you may think nothing is happening consider the gulls counting innings waiting to descend for a midnight feast. Regard the umps in black anticipating the next play. Coaches wiggling signs. Fielders in deliberate choreography. The pitcher with his leg kick. The hitter with his cleats, fidgeting with Velcro on his batting glove. Arm angles, launch angles. The route less taken in centerfield. Tarpaulin rolled out for the thunderstorm, gnats of August, October fog. The wind seen in the flag.

The rhythms of the game are poetic. The pitch, the crack, the dash, the throw…. constitute the line or stanza and then the long interval. It can be mythopoeic with outsized heroes, goats, scandals of the fix, the drugs, the curse, stats of super-human feats never to be met. Those glory days which get better every time I remember the feel of perfect contact which renders words incapable.

Baseball is a long haul. A season of sore arms, spiked calves, hitches in swings, pulled muscles, hours in the weight room, taunts from fans, ups and downs. Some salaries are obscene, some are bargains. Careers are uncertain and then what? It’s a game; it’s a business.  A magnificent regression to childhood. It was the first thing I knew that my parents didn’t. A time when we weren’t quite sure what mattered……but this would do for a while as we grew up and some of us never did.

Given its century and a half of tradition and constancy, it creates an illusion of order, strategy and permanence. Every spring is marked by whiffs of hot dogs, mowed grass, cracks of the bat and thwack of a ball in a mitt. Like birdsong, it ushers in spring and the held breath of possibilities.