I’ve been binge watching the Cubs West Coast swing and thinking about the way baseball is different from all other sports, a way that connects with our humanity like few other activities. I’m sending it out today. Sunday when I grew up often featured double-headers.
We live in “narrative space.” Our “moments” of bliss shine the way they do because of their position in a dramatic script. Life is drama and we can choose whether or not to accept parts on its many stages.
Gene McCarthy, once candidate for the Presidency, was an old first baseman and a student of the game. He compared baseball to a three-act play. The first three innings introduce the central plot and the protagonists—pitching battle let’s say—and the second three, introduce subplots and the last three resolve the dramatic tension that has built up since the “first act.”
One key to watching baseball is to feel each game as such a unique dramatic event, but that is only the beginning of how one might watch a game. A three-game series between two teams is itself a drama, a connected series of action with its own unity of plot and protagonists. The themes of the first game are still in play in the next. The players are continuing where they left off.
And, of course, a series is itself a part of a larger whole. In a sense, for a fan, the “play” is never over. Even one season leads on to the next. The Cubs of Three-finger Brown and Home Run Baker, of Tinkers and Evers and Chance, of the long slump of the 50s and 60s, the breakthrough of 2016, are still on the field, night after night. There will never be a final curtain. (We hope, until all the lights go out.)
And there are many micro-dramas that interweave throughout a single game. Each at bat, each inning, each player’s career is a narrative in itself. As true, is it not, of life?
And like life and drama, baseball is a game that suppresses egos. How can reasonable people expect to establish dominance when they only bat once every nine times and then make out, two out of three times?
Instead, it is a game of moments, unexpected and defiant. Any one player may at a crucial moment be in the spot-light at the center of the stage and remake history. The ball is hit to a particular player. The batter is the focus of the action. A fielder dives, the batter is out and everything has changed. Every once in a while, it seems like divine intervention takes a hand and an impossible throw or tag or slide turns the game around.
And it is not just the same individual over and over again. The outcome depends on SOMEONE getting the key hit. And remember the odds are always against the batter. The best batting averages are only a little over .300. This is the reality (the glue) that creates the greatest of all human invention, the team. No ego can, or should, survive two defeats out of three. But combine several players (each an out, two out of three times) and you score runs.
And note that so many defensive plays are routine, i.e. no room for ego once again. In fact the chance for an error is more likely than the spectacular play. But it is the occasional “impossible” play that “saves the game.”
Baseball games, as does life, interweave simultaneously the reality of an individual and the abstract idea of a team. Every player is anticipating the next pitch and is in action as the pitch is delivered, placing oneself to potentially change the game.
For every player matters. The ball seems to find the careless or the clumsy. I remember being on teams where we couldn’t hide a particular player. As sure as anything, the last ball of the game would be hit in his direction and we either won or loss.
I remember bases loaded and our three best hitters up and no outs. This is the drama of one inning. One run to tie and two to win. The first batter nearly took the head off the first basemen, but he caught the ball. The next, the same to third and the final batter hit it to the fence in left and it was caught. For me no sport can compare to this. And the meaning of these at bats was related to all the preceding plays and innings. The game takes a single moment to the heights and then brings it crashing down to the earth. A soaring fly ball, at the fence, over the fence, a leaping catch. Batter out; game over.
I once recruited for our softball team one of the best players in the region. He hit three home runs and made every play at shortstop. We lost something like 7 or 8 to 3. Baseball is the team game that no one individual can dominate, and yet which is won, or lost, by a memorable play by one or several individuals.
I remember when one or our less likely players contributed that key moment to a game. Celebrating afterwards, he clashed beer steins and broke his mug. That’s excitement. That’s baseball. Our hero for the moment. The moment, the only space we can ever occupy in time. And never, until death itself, the final out.
We in Boston like those in Chicago have become very philosophical about the actions of our baseball teams. 2004 did wonders for Boston; 2016 did wonders for Chicago. This column sits in that same wonder which we of age can accommodate much easier than our younger selves. Well done, age mate John Bing.