Reflecting upon a lucky life
It is startling to think how few of the millions who play baseball competitively ever sign a pro contract — one in 40,000 — and how few of these hit the big time for even a day (three in a hundred). But statistics have never daunted anyone from pursuing a dream, and for an American or Latin American kid that dream is to become a star player, leaping above the wall like Kirby Puckett to pull back a home run, or belting a World Series homer like David Freese.
The dream is part hero worship: instructive until a certain age if destructive once beyond. More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you … past time itself.
For a child, the grownup world accepts that play is his rightful work, to which he applies a diligence any businessman would envy. For a boy on the cusp of manhood, his hope is that in a grownup’s world playing professional baseball might likewise be termed work. (As MLB’s historian, I too imagine myself to be doing work, although every bit of effort might also be termed fun.)
“When I was a boy growing up in Kansas,” an elderly Dwight David Eisenhower recalled, “a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of a summer afternoon on a river bank we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he’d like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.”
The bountiful pleasures of baseball begin with the body. There is the indescribable sense of well-being that comes with playing catch, the hearty satisfaction of a line drive whistling from the bat, the joy of running and leaping to the spontaneous choreography of the ball. The elemental acts of baseball — throwing, catching, hitting — are so awesomely complex as to beggar language. Is there anything in sport more challenging than hitting a fastball hurled high and tight? More neurologically intricate than judging a fly ball? More sinuously muscular than whipping the ball across the diamond?
While childhood skills are honed by repetition, life lessons are learned through competition. T-ballers and Little Leaguers, those most rugged of individualists, bow to the imperatives of teamwork and perhaps see its virtues. They learn to accept an umpire’s verdict if not endorse it. They learn that honesty is often if not always the best policy, that talent unmatched by effort is scorned, and that grace under pressure is so commended because it is so difficult.
Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grownup things. But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and, in America, never out of reach: where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now — perhaps more importantly — it reconnects men with the spirit of boys. Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young.
The Dream of Baseball was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.