WHY BASEBALL?
A friend said, "I just don't get baseball. But I'm willing to keep an open mind if someone is willing to explain this to me." Here's my answer. It may not be what my friend was looking for, but it's what I have looked for.
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"It breaks your heart. It was meant to break your heart." So begins a most glorious essay by Bart Giamatti, former Commissioner of Major League Baseball and former professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature who wrote widely and variously on Dante and Spenser. Giamatti, like Dante and Spenser, knew about heartbreak; and Giamatti, like Dante and Spenser, knew that hearbreak is part of the glory of life.
Baseball, like Homer's Odyssey, is about returning home. The goal of every baserunner is to go "home". While the storms of life rack his bark and assail his soul, he struggles on against all odds because "home" is his goal. And when he is thrown out, or caught in a rundown, or forced out, it's the tragedy of not returning home, the pain at heart of dying away from the land of one's birth and family. Baseball is all about nostos as Homer tells it - the desire for returning home that marks the heart's desire of all wayfaring - and about nostalgia, the longing for home that may or may not be fulfilled but which drives a man ever on nonetheless.
Baseball, alone of all modern sports, has no clock. The clock is a hideous invention of modernity, designed to regulate us, to keep us always looking at "the time" rather than at the task to be accomplished. Football, basketball, hockey, all are dependent upon The Clock and when The Clock sounds its imperious call, all action must stop. But in baseball, the end of the game comes only when the narrative has reached its true conclusion; the end is determined by the action of the game, not by some arbitrary, Platonic limit. The ending of a good story is never determined by time or space limitations, but by the natural unfolding of events, and so is baseball.
This structure, determined not by time but by the events that alone should determine time, is teleological as history is teleological. History will end when God has determined that all things have unfolded as they should, and He knows what must pass. So in baseball, nine innings is not an arbitrary number, but a recognition that certain events must pass and the clock, which should simply help us measure the events, does so. It does not determine events, as in other sports. The tyranny of the clock in other sports is modernistic, like a factory whistle and punch clock. When the five o'clock whistle blows, you go home, whethter or not you've finished the job. But in the medieval tradition, the job alone determines when you go home, and so in baseball. Baseball is reflective of true time, of true teleology, of history as God tells its story, unlike all other sports.
Baseball, unlike any other sport, revels in the past, and knowledge of, and reflection on Baseball's past becomes part of any true fan's measure. He is no true fan who doesn't know who hit The Shot Heard Round The World, and that happened over fifty years ago. Other sports do have a history, true, and many know it, but in Baseball a familiarity with the past is essential, and just as in Scripture we are told to remember, remember, remember, so in Baseball, the essence of each new season is not just the bestial rush of excitement that fans of other sports crave, because they only live in the present, but rather it is the knowledge that, like the seasons themselves, the past will again come alive and be incarnate in the innings we watch and linger over and score in our books of memory.
Wander through any bookstore and simply measure by shelf length or book weight the relation of baseball books to books about other sports. And more to the point, notice how many books there are on the poetry, the inner grace, the life, of baseball. And then notice how the number of such books on other sports is relatively much smaller. Baseball is like flyfishing; it commends itself to the contemplative mind, the thoughtful soul; it encourages reflection, consideration, forethought, historical comparison, and so it calls forth books that do just those things.
Go to a baseball game and look at all the fans holding gloves in their hands, not just in hope of catching a foul ball but because of their instinctive identification with the men who play for us, and we in them. How many fans at a football game take a football with them? How many hockey fans carry a stick? Precious few, but baseball fans know the covenantal identity of fan with player, and far more baseball fans go home to play a little catch with their sons than football fans do. Oh sure, some football fans do throw the pigskin around and its a pleaure, but Baseball is called The National Sport for a reason: more people play, and can play baseball on their own, and more people do, and have done so for far longer than any other American sport. Forms of baseball were played at Valley Forge and so were present in the crucible of the forge of liberty. Baseball is American more than any other sport because it is democratic in the best sense - its a sport that promotes and encourages identity.
Football does have its ferocious defenders. So did the partisans of Green and Blue in ancient Constantinople, and so fierce was the loyalty that civil war broke out and had to be suppressed by Justinian. But Baseball's lovers are people everywhere who have one love beyond their team (great though that may be) and that is love of the game itself. When a baseball fan comes through the concourse and gets his first glimpse of the green of the playing field, there arises in his heart some small shadow of what we shall all feel when we see Paradise, some echo of what we felt in the green of Eden, some resonance with the Sabbath of Eternity, where the remaining fans smile on each other with brotherly affection as Time itself goes into Extra Innings.
****************
"It breaks your heart. It was meant to break your heart." So begins a most glorious essay by Bart Giamatti, former Commissioner of Major League Baseball and former professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature who wrote widely and variously on Dante and Spenser. Giamatti, like Dante and Spenser, knew about heartbreak; and Giamatti, like Dante and Spenser, knew that hearbreak is part of the glory of life.
Baseball, like Homer's Odyssey, is about returning home. The goal of every baserunner is to go "home". While the storms of life rack his bark and assail his soul, he struggles on against all odds because "home" is his goal. And when he is thrown out, or caught in a rundown, or forced out, it's the tragedy of not returning home, the pain at heart of dying away from the land of one's birth and family. Baseball is all about nostos as Homer tells it - the desire for returning home that marks the heart's desire of all wayfaring - and about nostalgia, the longing for home that may or may not be fulfilled but which drives a man ever on nonetheless.
Baseball, alone of all modern sports, has no clock. The clock is a hideous invention of modernity, designed to regulate us, to keep us always looking at "the time" rather than at the task to be accomplished. Football, basketball, hockey, all are dependent upon The Clock and when The Clock sounds its imperious call, all action must stop. But in baseball, the end of the game comes only when the narrative has reached its true conclusion; the end is determined by the action of the game, not by some arbitrary, Platonic limit. The ending of a good story is never determined by time or space limitations, but by the natural unfolding of events, and so is baseball.
This structure, determined not by time but by the events that alone should determine time, is teleological as history is teleological. History will end when God has determined that all things have unfolded as they should, and He knows what must pass. So in baseball, nine innings is not an arbitrary number, but a recognition that certain events must pass and the clock, which should simply help us measure the events, does so. It does not determine events, as in other sports. The tyranny of the clock in other sports is modernistic, like a factory whistle and punch clock. When the five o'clock whistle blows, you go home, whethter or not you've finished the job. But in the medieval tradition, the job alone determines when you go home, and so in baseball. Baseball is reflective of true time, of true teleology, of history as God tells its story, unlike all other sports.
Baseball, unlike any other sport, revels in the past, and knowledge of, and reflection on Baseball's past becomes part of any true fan's measure. He is no true fan who doesn't know who hit The Shot Heard Round The World, and that happened over fifty years ago. Other sports do have a history, true, and many know it, but in Baseball a familiarity with the past is essential, and just as in Scripture we are told to remember, remember, remember, so in Baseball, the essence of each new season is not just the bestial rush of excitement that fans of other sports crave, because they only live in the present, but rather it is the knowledge that, like the seasons themselves, the past will again come alive and be incarnate in the innings we watch and linger over and score in our books of memory.
Wander through any bookstore and simply measure by shelf length or book weight the relation of baseball books to books about other sports. And more to the point, notice how many books there are on the poetry, the inner grace, the life, of baseball. And then notice how the number of such books on other sports is relatively much smaller. Baseball is like flyfishing; it commends itself to the contemplative mind, the thoughtful soul; it encourages reflection, consideration, forethought, historical comparison, and so it calls forth books that do just those things.
Go to a baseball game and look at all the fans holding gloves in their hands, not just in hope of catching a foul ball but because of their instinctive identification with the men who play for us, and we in them. How many fans at a football game take a football with them? How many hockey fans carry a stick? Precious few, but baseball fans know the covenantal identity of fan with player, and far more baseball fans go home to play a little catch with their sons than football fans do. Oh sure, some football fans do throw the pigskin around and its a pleaure, but Baseball is called The National Sport for a reason: more people play, and can play baseball on their own, and more people do, and have done so for far longer than any other American sport. Forms of baseball were played at Valley Forge and so were present in the crucible of the forge of liberty. Baseball is American more than any other sport because it is democratic in the best sense - its a sport that promotes and encourages identity.
Football does have its ferocious defenders. So did the partisans of Green and Blue in ancient Constantinople, and so fierce was the loyalty that civil war broke out and had to be suppressed by Justinian. But Baseball's lovers are people everywhere who have one love beyond their team (great though that may be) and that is love of the game itself. When a baseball fan comes through the concourse and gets his first glimpse of the green of the playing field, there arises in his heart some small shadow of what we shall all feel when we see Paradise, some echo of what we felt in the green of Eden, some resonance with the Sabbath of Eternity, where the remaining fans smile on each other with brotherly affection as Time itself goes into Extra Innings.
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