Opening Day - Apr 1 2021

In honour of opening day of baseball season (April 1 this year), I'm posting something a little out of the ordinary. This is from an email I wrote to a friend. I had mentioned to her my love of baseball, and I think she was a little surprised. I'd told her that I regarded myself more as an essayist than a poet. And we'd also been talking a little about jazz, which explains that short reference.  /B

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As a woman of letters, you may be interested to know that the best writing about sports has been inspired by baseball. Actually, some of the best writing about anything.

And talking, too. Baseball announcers are notorious for their brilliant use of language: the badinage in the broadcast booth, their creative idiom, the homespun vernacular. It's the nature of baseball: a slow patient game of anticipation; of positioning more than action; and of long pauses between sudden outbursts of almost balletically choreographed play. So unlike sports with continuous action, there is all that dead air to fill.

Oddly, there also seems to be an intersection of baseball and jazz: more often than not, an enthusiast of one form is also a fan of the other.

One of the finest experiences in life is a long distance drive on a summer night.  It's not hard to argue that listening to a game on the radio is better than TV:  the pictures are better on radio. After a hot humid day, the cool air is settling; it's black outside except for the cone of your headlights; you're bathed in the greenish glow of the dashboard lights; and accompanying the rumble of rubber on asphalt is the sound of some announcer with a southern whisky-smooth drawl bringing to life a night game from some distant city you've only imagined: the beautifully manicured field, a radiant green under the artificial light ...the hum of the crowd, rising to a crescendo when something brilliant happens ... and the crack of the bat and the umpire's guttural call. You have forever to go, so you love that the game takes its time and there is no clock. You love that the field theoretically extends to infinity; or would, if anyone could hit a ball that far. And you love that as they wait for the next pitch, the first baseman and the opposing base-runner don't glare at each other as the gladiators of football would, but rather laugh and chat and spit tobacco like good ol' boys in a friendly sandlot game.

This is part of the reassuring ritual of baseball, a sport that far more than any other reveres its traditions and history. It involves a respectable version of “manliness”: a team game of fair play and unwritten conventions. It's also a game that teaches you to be a graceful loser. Because even the greatest hitter might just tip past a .300 batting average: which means that 7 out of 10 times, he fails.

It's also a game in which you can still recognize yourself in the players. They aren't all 7 foot giants, as in basketball. Or the hulking beefcake of football. In baseball, not only can a little man excel; even a chubby unlikely looking schlub can become a star!

Here's part of an address written by former commissioner of baseball Bart Giamatti (who also just happened to be a professor of English Renaissance literature, as well President of Yale), a fine addition to the canon of great baseball writing. I admire its elegiac and bittersweet quality. (Especially bittersweet knowing that 5 months in, his tenure suddenly ended when he died of a heart attack.)

"The Green Fields of the Mind "

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn't this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio--not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television--and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come.