For the Love of the Game
The finest gesture on the field is a pat on the behind. Whether it’s an opposing player or your own team, it means: “you’re doing it, kid.” It’s the romantic love tap; the crazy stupid love fans live for; and dream it was theirs. (Or ours – as the team matters.)
The time after time when we show up at these dream cathedrals, and pull for our will-do-no-wrong-today star. The basket catches, the head-firsts into third, the cannon-shot throw that nabs the tying run at home plate delights us like a child on hookie. And the towering blast that hangs mid-space, as if ready for orbit, that brings 42,385 standing room-only fans to the edge of sanity. These are the moments and treasures traditional to all spor
ts.
But it all started with baseball.
As this analysis trekked from the ebbs in morality to the heights of statistical overkill that bounced across a hard and dusty sandlot called America, the purpose or the plea was to see another man’s dream game. His picturesque view may not include a Cubs win, or a Cards win, or a trade by Kansas City, or a draft board at the Coliseum stacked by a stat package; or seats at Dodger Stadium, dog in hand and Scully in ear, or the playground in San Diego, or a slide in Milwaukee, or atop the Green Monster on a chilly October night. He’ll wear a different ball cap from you. Maybe, his naval whites while off base – rooting for the lovable losers so far from his home at just eighteen. He might have packed the kids up to go to the park for their very first time. Or cut out on work; or fell on hard times, and this is his final solace before going home to break that depressing news like so many of us have done in our lives.
His goal was to see the game his way. In totality, he has a fifty-fifty shot. That keeps him coming.
Baseball is not numbers. It is not championships. It certainly is not a business. Instead, it is a marriage, a first date, a break-up, an obsession, a rekindling of love lost, a soulmate search, all rolled into one. And it is not to be forgotten in this short life we inhabit.
In the 140 years of duty to the title, “a professional game,” baseball brought us seven generations of talent. From Harry Wright, Cy Young, Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Reggie Jackson, to finally, Greg Maddux, is but one theorized path to cover that span. The connections to the past game are still strong, the men saying, “I can remember when…”
When we no longer can look up to these athletes with any fondness, or awe, the game will be lost. We will have deserted a vital piece of the American Experience – that of growing up playing the game, watching our heroes battle, dreaming their human flaws absent, their perfections transfixed via the ball yard, with the Homeric game-deciding call, and the flickering of a tube late into that August summer night.
Very few things have been done so right. Baseball, for all of its warts, is one
of them.
That ultimately, many men yet to come will do better justice to the game via their play and their deeds glorious and inspiring. While yet another era is shaped via the words of the media and the romantic visions of the fans. And our American history is lively because of it all. And We, the People, will still, most definitel
y, come.
Episode 173: A Half Century, A Field of Dreams