Reading Baseball
by Douglas Jones, a friend, even though he is senior editor for that other magazine. Free agency anyone?

We can read anything in the world from at least two perspectives, that of science and that of poetry. The scientific angle on something has its place, but it can only grasp physical quantities, visible edges, and materialistic efficiencies. It has to strip off all the more uniquely human aspects of life - meanings, symbols, beauty, morality, and spirit. It can't measure those things so it pretends they don't exist.

All the most wonderful things in life look pretty stupid from a scientific angle. Weddings, feasts, worship, kisses, dances, poems, jokes, symphonies, and games make no scientific sense. They are all wasteful and inefficient. They are unnecessarily complicated and intentionally mysterious. Their patterned colors, meaningful sounds, and elegant movements are quite silly and irrelevant if one is seeking a bare scientific list of causes and parts. That is why the modern world is regularly boring. It can only see surfaces and quantities.

Baseball is one of those wonderful gifts of life that many can't see because of a modern squint. Most gut-level objections to baseball come from those looking at it in a scientific mode. They can't perceive its rhythms, its tensions, its patterns, its story. They just see guys standing around, scratching. The only thing they count as action is a bat hitting a ball. That part, at least, stands out because it's nicely causal and scientific. But almost every complaint about baseball could be equally directed against Bach and Shakespeare. No jumpy movements; no meat-fisted meanings; no car crashes. And thus, many perceive glory as boring.

Grand symbols surround all games. As some have noted, baseball is not a ritual reenactment of war. It is a story of a journey. An odyssey of leaving home, fighting adversaries in the field, plundering tyrants, ranging far and wide, and finally seeking home again and rest. One sets off
from home by overcoming the hurler who challenges you at your front door. To beat him you must undermine his fellow tyrants at every island. Only then can you be safe at home.

Rectangle-ping-pong sports like football and basketball are indeed reenactments of breaking through enemy lines to plant your flag. I like these sports, but they present odd representations of war. There is a revengeful pettiness that runs through these games, games in which gargantuan "warriors" are punished for touching another warrior "unfairly."

What kind of war cares about such things? Only a bureaucratic mind could really be satisfied with such a constant echo of pettiness. Truly great warriors would overlook infractions, not manipulate them to enslave. These games are at their lowest when players triumph by hiding in intentional fouls and the mommy-protection of an abstract clock. Though it has errors, baseball has no inherent penalties, let alone trivial ones. An individual's errors are imputed as team errors in large lights, but the game continues with maturity. Baseball doesn't suffocate manly virtue by school-marm smallness.

When you watch a baseball game, especially a professional or college game, you have to picture a whole pattern of flowing and natural actions and rests of threes. They build and create each other, pausing, not by a clock, but by completions of other threes. These are wonderfully Dantean rhythms of threes: three outs followed by three outs make an inning; three strikes make an out; passing through three bases earns a run; three by three innings complete a normal game. The pauses that arrive, do so as a natural part of the game, not as intrusive, artificial stops for penalties or clocks.

But these rhythms of threes are not directionless or horizontal. They build like a melody. They form a narrative that grows toward a crescendo of tension. The first three innings set the stage and determine the tone of a particular game. Pitchers may stumble and then find a rhythm.

Batters use early at-bats to try to predict the pitcher's cycle of pitches within various counts. The middle three innings turn in favor of batters as they have learned to anticipate and predict speeds, angles, and purposely bad pitches. But just at that point where the batters might gain their confidence, the starting pitcher might leave in the sixth or seventh inning to be replaced by the new patterns of a reliever. Both sides are approaching the end. Spectators take one last rest in the seventh. Every batter must learn about new pitchers with shorter time, and pitches must deal with unexpected, pinch batters too. The story reaches its climax in the desperations of the eighth inning. Games are usually one or lost by then. The ninth inning is a time of holding things together or breaking hearts at the last moment.

The greatest source of tension at any point of a game lies in its wild unpredictability. The
ping-pong sports are fun games, but their ping-pong returns are predictable, back and forth, back and forth, by preset plays. There is no home; they are vagabonds. They have busy movements, no natural rests, and always a procrastinated flurry in the final seconds. But in baseball, silence builds painful tension because each pitch might redirect the game wildly to glory or disaster. A pitch might be hit short or far, left or right, down the line or up the middle, and the fielders have to be able to move instinctively in any direction instantly or their whole defensive effort may crumble under a nightmare rally.

No other team sport plays so dramatically with silence and stillness, explosiveness and bullet speeds, rhythm and rest. Each game of baseball is an epic novel, full of failure, tension, rest, build, crescendo, heartbreak, and triumph. To play is a delight not to be missed, but to be able to absorb all the parts of the story, especially over radio, is one of the reasons we were put on earth.