Born to an age where horror has become commonplace . . . we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, when skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket. – Thomas Boswell, Why Time Begins on Opening Day (Penguin Books, 1984)
The annual rite of spring has arrived, winter’s frost having
given way to the April sun. After four months of darkness, a new baseball season
is upon us, marked these first two weeks with opening day ceremonies in big
league parks across North America. All 30 major league teams have ascended from
Florida and Arizona after preparing for another long season. Six weeks of wind
sprints and fielding drills, of shagging flies and picking grounders, of
hitters dropping down bunts and slicing balls to the opposite field. Baseball
players at work, perfecting their trade; hitters working on timing, outfielders
on hitting the cut-off man, pitchers on commanding their fastballs; middle
infielders perfecting their footwork, pivoting and slide-stepping the bag to
turn a double play, catchers blocking pitches in the dirt, first basemen
scooping errant throws. The field work of spring ball finally completed, it is
time for the season to start.
Although the Cardinals won a major-league-leading 100 games
last season, I feel uneasy about this team. It could be me, but they look flat
and uninspired as season play begins (losing the first three games to the
Pirates did nothing to alleviate my concerns). Injuries have already claimed
their starting shortstop and an assortment of other players.
And yet . . . I hope. It is why the start of a new season is
like opening a new book, the pages promising an intriguing story with a happy
ending. On good days, I see what could be the best starting rotation in
baseball, anchored by the crafty veterans Wainwright and Leake, the
hard-throwing youngsters Wacha and Martinez, and the soft-tossing southpaw
Garcia. And I see a lineup filled with the bright lights of Piscotty and
Grichuk in the outfield, Wong and Carpenter in the infield, and I hope some
more.
Most fans at this time of year are filled with hope,
ignoring the gloomy predictions of the baseball prognosticators on ESPN and MLB
TV. Like shifting trade winds on the high seas, much can happen over the
marathon of a baseball season that alters the course of a pennant race.
Injuries and luck – bad and good (though mostly bad) – are part of the game.
How a team resolves adversity is the best predictor of how well its season
ends.
In Why Time Begins on Opening Day, Thomas Boswell writes
that baseball is “merely one of our many refuges within the real where we try
to create a sense of order on our own terms.” Baseball offers us continuity and
new beginnings, symmetry and timelessness. The ballpark itself is “living
theater and physical poetry.” It possesses a pastoral beauty rooted in American
history, memory, grass and dirt, wind and sun.
For the baseball fan, opening day is the start of a new
year. Our calendar begins in April and ends in October. For me personally, the
next seven months demands that all social plans be cleared through the
Cardinals’ schedule. Tickets to the play on Sunday afternoon? Uh, I’m afraid
not, the Cards have a day game against the Cubs. Saturday night at the movies?
I don’t think so – but if we see an afternoon show, we can have dinner and make
it back for the 8:15 start. I know, don’t say it. But that’s how it would go in
a perfect world.
Whenever Andrea complains about my obsessive baseball
watching, I remind her of when I binge-watched re-runs of The Sopranos through
the winter of 2015. More recently, it was five full seasons of Breaking Bad.
She quickly relents. When confronted with the alternative of murder, blood,
vile crime, and petty corruption, the sweet innocence of our national pastime
looks pretty good. Andrea now sighs in relief when the Cardinals come on the
tube. She freely acknowledges the subtle beauty and elegance of the sport. And
she appreciates, though she remains somewhat perplexed, by my life-long loyalty
to the Cardinals. It is a loyalty grounded in childhood, in years of box scores
and baseball cards, Strat-O-Matic games and the imagination of a ten-year-old
boy throwing a ball against a pitching net in his back yard. It is why, as
Boswell suggests, my “affection for the game has held steady for decades, maybe
even grown with age.”
“The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins
again,” wrote the late A. Bartlett Giamatti before he became Commissioner of
Major League Baseball, when he was still President of Yale University. It is a
common theme in baseball literature, this linking of baseball to time, to
history, to seasons past and present. The game “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.”
Like Giamatti, I rely on the games “to buffer the passage of
time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive,” and through its transparent
simplicity, “to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.” In
quiet moments of reflection, I understand it is possible that I put too much
emphasis on baseball’s importance in my life. To this day, when the Cardinals
lose, I sometimes enter the darker, brooding, depressed impulses of my soul.
But I understand how difficult the game is, and I feel for players in a slump.
Although I often dreamed of playing professional baseball, deep down I always
knew I lacked the mental toughness and skill required to succeed at higher
levels.
When I attend games in person, whether at the grand
cathedrals of major league baseball or at the local high school fields and
parks near my home, I love to watch the action between innings, when the
pitcher takes his warm-up throws, the first baseman lofts ground balls to the
infielders, and the outfielders play a relaxed game of catch from 200 feet
apart. The graceful rhythms of the ballplayers create a symphony of movement,
baseballs flowing in multiple directions, all with a sense of linear purpose.
At these moments, the game encompasses my imagination, allows me to remember
the feelings and love I had for the game as a player, and reminds me of the
dreams I held onto until reality and life set me straight. It is then I
realize, as did Giamatti in his brilliant essay on baseball, that some
. . . were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.
Amen. Opening day has arrived. Let the season begin.