A Field of Dreams

The never-ending American belief in a better future.

Photo by Phil Goodwin on Unsplash

A park or an arena?  A field or a gridiron.  How well does language explain the nature of our lives!  As we culturally experience the end of a sporting era and the establishment of the next, as football surpasses baseball as the national game, we need to ask what insights our choices of play tell us about who we were, are and will become. 

Games either for the participants or the spectators are a reset.  We move from the losses and pains of an everyday life to a place both similar and different.  We choose to play that which express aspects of our lives but also provides a context that frees us from our everyday limits.  Life for millions is still as hard as ever.  So many shots on the goal.  So many blocked and most fly wide.  Back and forth the game moves, until the sudden moment.  A score.  Our side is ahead.  Not surprising is it that this game whether called soccer or football appeals to most of the world’s population.

But America always had baseball.  And if it is rivaled, perhaps surpassed by our “football,” it persists as an unchanging reminder of the kind of America we dream is possible.

Perhaps, you will say it is finally going the way or all 19^th century rural pursuits.  Originally baseball was known as “town ball.”  But I think this misses the fact that baseball thrived in the 20^th century.  One might call it the immigrant game, for those who came to our cities from within or outside the country, people who were moving from established, although often unsustainable farmlands and social barriers, to brick and steel, crowded neighborhoods, a start at the bottom, foraging in a foreign world for the food and security necessary for a young family, leaving home and going out, if you will, where the defense controlled the ball, to do what was necessary, steal, slide, deceive, sacrifice to bring a “score” home, across the plate. 

So it was America’s game, at least to every immigrant group that found a home in the city. 

It reset the urban environment, a field in a park.  An oasis amidst the noise, the dirt, the crowding of the neighborhood.   A game to watch with friends and family, slow paced “I don’t care if I ever get back.”

A fantasized escape that rewarded talent, that overcame “positioned” players.  That gave chances, three strikes, and nine opportunities, not bound to time, to score and score and score. 

The game has always resisted change and new fans revived its inner meaning, because it remained true to an underlying reality.    

Commentators do refer to the “new game.”  Baseball which always complied statistics, was an easy convert to analytics.  And team names have changed.  But what I see is another very American story, one that will take another blog to describe in depth.  Baseball is emergent.  Constantly offense adjusts to defense and defense to offence.  It is a dialectic; it parallels a deep-seated American form of progress.  Remember it is not a reproduction of reality.  That would not be worth our “game time.”  Why suffer the same losses as so many of us experience in a ”real” world, where legal codings embed privilege and wealth?  Again, the subject of another discussion?

No it is still the escape from economic torment.  It is still the game of the outsider.  It still imagines the kind of world that we see in our dreams.  It still allows each generation to explore a world more fair (as both sides get to play the defense) an America that still beckons--in a field, in a park, that offers “scores” not “goals,” and a fresh start the next day, the score reset, the innings on the scoreboard dazzlingly empty.