Monday is Major League Baseball’s Opening Day, a notion somewhat undercut by the pair of games the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks played in Australia last week. Still, baseball begins in earnest tomorrow, and within a couple of months the White House will respond to a beer company-sponsored petition to make the day a national holiday. (As someone who believes in insulating affairs of state from religion, I’m not sure I can support the idea.)
Some of us measure out our lives in sports seasons, the increasingly overlapping progress of various teams and individuals pursuing nothing of much consequence, in which a few of us invest everything.
I grew up with the habit of marking time this way. Dozens, if not hundreds, of sporting moments serve as signposts in my personal history. The greatest NFL game ever played occurred a little more than a month after my birth; my father missed the end of it because he ran out of quarters to feed the coin-operated TV in the waiting room of the hospital where my panicky parents had taken their colicky infant son. He didn’t see the Colts’ Alan Ameche take the hand off from Johnny Unitas and fall into the end zone to beat the New York “football” Giants in sudden death overtime. (I don’t know that my father ever saw it, though you can see the game on YouTube now.)
Opening days are less important now than they have ever been, but I still feel a little tug in the springtime. Baseball was not my best sport growing up, but it was the one I found the most addictive. I loved its columns and ranks, its lines of tiny type that seemed to give up secret knowledge to those with the patience to parse them. I collected cards and books with a nerdish, near-autistic singlemindedness.
I made up games with dice and charts sketched on notebook paper that roughly reflected the probability of real-world outcomes. Each player in my game would have a slightly different chart, and sometimes more than one roll of the dice was required to determine the consequences of each pitch. I had leagues, populated with players fictitious and real, alternate worlds where Willie Mays and Hank Aaron competed with my friends and teammates and kids from other schools. Somewhere in those sheets I’d have my own stat line-I was a good player, not the best, but usually the second best on a team that could challenge for the pennant.
I never played out a championship series in these paper seasons; that would have required me to curate a second competing league, something I had neither the time or the imagination for as a child.
Lest that seem hopelessly sad, let me say I also played the game, and not just in the organized leagues. I could play solo inside the garage when my parents were at work. I would fire a tennis ball as hard as I could against the wall and swing at it on the rebound.
I got fairly good at this. It took quickness and a short stroke. I also discovered a talent for hitting in the fifth and sixth grades when my friends and I devised a game that involved hitting bottle caps with a broomstick. There was a way of flicking the caps off the fingers so they would spin and dive that I never mastered, but I was the best at finding solid contact with these whizzing, whistling little discs. I’d end games sometimes by whacking them into the woods or out of playable shape.
My athletic peak probably came when I was about 12 years old, but it took me another seven years or so to realize that my peers had closed the gap and there was nothing genuinely special about my abilities. I held on longer than most boys to the irrational notion of my own exceptionalism, and even now there are nights when I dream about my at bats. Usually there is something like the monolith from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in the box, impeding my swing; sometimes I cannot get out of the dugout, or I can’t find my bat, or my feet slog through cement.
I don’t hold any illusions about the game. It is not a suitable metaphor for life and does not explain America any more than what we call soccer explains the rest of the world. Baseball’s relationship with time is unusual in that the game is measured only in outs, and that no margin is insurmountable given continued small successes. If we can only avoid making the next out, we can make our clockless game stand for almost anything. But that is just because we are the storytelling animal, and the coupling of our self-regard and desire for narrative substance causes us to imbue our most trivial pursuits with meaning.
I used to think that baseball was a sport that only struck the dull as slow, but I understand that differently now. Football, especially the way it’s played at its highest levels, is a much more complex if not cerebral game. There’s not much chance that anyone who has not invested years in playing and coaching the game can really know its intricacies. There is too much to watch in football, and much of what there is to watch occurs away from the ball. I used to be a snob about football, I thought it all brute force and raw speed, a kind of Americanized sumo with outsized men pushing and pulling on each other, but I know better now. Football is easy enough to follow-it’s basically a kind of mitigated war, a contest over territory-but probably impossible for a lay person to understand.
While baseball is a deep subject with a lot of intricacies, I know it better and therefore appreciate its nuances. It has nothing to do with it being a better game (though at least when I was a kid it seemed the one game that a normal-sized person could plausibly play at its highest level).
Baseball is the church in which I was raised; its antique rituals still resonate. I know it is just dirt and leather, wood and sweat, a game played by profane young men who probably care nothing for the tender sympathies of those who pay to watch them, but I don’t much care.
I still mark Opening Day as a holy day of obligation, whether anyone gets a day off or not.
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Perspective, Pages 82 on 03/30/2014