I once spent an enjoyable hour in a pub in Auckland--The Shakespeare, on Albert Street--watching a Yankees-Red Sox game on Sky Sports and eavesdropping on one New Zealander explaining the intricacies of baseball to another.
He got a lot wrong, but then most Americans get things wrong about baseball, and even then I understood that no one appreciates being corrected when they're holding forth on the role of the closer and whether the second baseman grips the ball with the seams or across them as he turns a double play. (With the seams, always, obviously--just watch the grainy footage of the great Mazeroski.) So I just sat there smiling and sipping one of the tavern's craft beers.
Had I been born in Auckland, I imagine I would know a lot more about cricket, rugby union and netball than I do. Instead I flatter myself that I know baseball.
Or rather that I knew baseball; I studied it as surely as I studied anything--I would imagine I earned at least a M.S. in it. I knew its history and its techniques and even had some proficiency in it. I played it in Brazil and (granted, it was for a newspaper story) spent a week working with a Rookie League team affiliated with the California Angels. I was good enough to imagine myself good enough, and that kept me invested longer than I might otherwise have been; my muscles still remember the way to move.
I think about this when someone asks me the last time I actually threw a baseball. Maybe not that long ago; I have a vague memory of casually tossing one back to a kid outfielder after it had come loose during his pre-inning catch. It's strange how we retain the ability to throw a ball more or less where we mean to; I didn't have to think or aim, I just unleashed it. A soft liner released a little higher than eye level dropping to the kid's chest over the 30 or 40 feet it traveled. Somehow our brains and limbs collaborate on miracles.
Other than that, I haven't really thrown in more than 20 years.
That feels odd, though maybe not; maybe most people put away their childish things a lot sooner than I did. It is a luxury to indulge one's illusions; and a measure of my luck that I still keep half a dozen talismanic baseballs around. I pick them up and the feel of the horsehide--smoothed and shiny or roughed into suede--transports me to an America I remember but sounds fantastic even to me.
When I was a teenager, we used to have a baseball game on the Fourth of July. The men and the boys from the neighborhood, more than enough for two full teams, maybe 30 or us, would walk over to the high school diamond and play hardball--a full-nine inning game, fathers and sons, balls and strikes and someone playing umpire. There were soft-tossed concessions made for the youngest and the smallest, by consensus the game would pause to give the little kids at-bats, but mostly we chose up sides and played in earnest. The draw determined whether you played with or against your dad, your brother, your uncle.
I know I am being nostalgic and that it couldn't have been as I remember it; but I do remember it. People brought coolers with beer and RC Cola, wives and daughters and girlfriends sat on metal bleachers. (These days as many daughters as sons might want to play; that was how it was back then.)
Someone kept a scorebook, and someone on each team took responsibility for making substitutions (they were made freely; everyone played, you'd come out for an inning and go back in at another position) and while there was a wide range of competence and experience represented on the field, everyone wanted to win and sometimes the testosterone got out of hand. (Though I only remember one sort of real fight, and that was between two teenaged brothers, my American Legion teammates, who were close enough in age and stature that some people took them for twins.)
Funny, I remember almost nothing about the games themselves--though I often played the outfield in these games, which wasn't my regular position--but I recall with great specificity some tangential details. I remember shagging high flies out of an unclouded cobalt blue sky. I remember the sweat and grit on my neck. I remember the unlikely ball a skinny man in overalls (he seemed ancient, he might have been 50) one-hopped against the chain-link outfield fence.
I remember feeling proud and a little jealous of my soft-spoken father, who was close to 40 then but not so far removed from playing a high level brand of service ball. He'd been a genuine prospect in his youth and though he was an unprepossessing man, 5 feet 9 inches and maybe 160 pounds, he was so much better than the rest of us, a gliding aristocrat, a DiMaggio on the field. Though I was used to it, I understood that playing catch with my dad was intimidating -- he seemed to effortlessly charge the ball with a kind of ferocious life.
I loved watching him and the respect he commanded.
Some people like to say that baseball is America, or that it's like America, or that America is like baseball, and I think that's all specious and silly. The games we play--those intentional complications we impose on ourselves to divert ourselves--don't really reflect our character, much less build it. Baseball isn't a metaphor for life, it's something to do outside with sticks and balls. Other people do other things outside with sticks and balls. Some people don't need sticks. Some people don't need balls.
What we might need is the occasion to gather together, to do something as ultimately meaningless but as satisfyingly complicated as play (and watch) a game of baseball. Something that is idiosyncratically ours, requiring skills that don't easily translate to other with arcane rules that baffle good-natured foreigners in far-off pubs--baseball is one way to be American.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
MovieStyle on 07/02/2019