Snippets from long ago
I have been thinking lately of a book I wrote long ago, in 1988, which I titled The Game for All America, borrowing from Ernie Harwell’s classic essay of 1955. That encomium to baseball was first published in The Sporting News on April 13, 1955; its opening appears below.
For inspiration to several essays appearing recently at Our Game, I have raided my old book. Now I do so again.
Ball, bat, glove. The basic tools of baseball are for the ages — and the ages of baseball are one: the kid exhibits the “all-business” approach of the pro, who struggles to recall the time when he played just for fun.
***
Only yesterday the old man was a worldbeater of ten or twelve or twenty, with a hop on his fastball and a chip on his shoulder … only yesterday. Baseball is intensely felt because it is intensely played, intensely watched, intensely worried over. And when the urgency of youth has faded, the game is still enjoyed intensely because now to the mix of bat and ball and sun and sod are added the unique delights of memory.
***
There are those who complain that baseball is too slow, too dull, too old-fashioned. Too much standing around, too much time-wasting. Let’s speed it up, they say, make it more like football or basketball or roller derby. Poor benighted souls — they see inactivity and they think nothing’s going on. Oh, well — only bores are bored.
***
Stretch! You can never tell how far you can go if you don’t. The impossible catch sticks in the web; you beat the throw that should have nailed you by ten feet; you pull a game-winning double down the line off a pitcher whose fastball you never could touch. More than six decades after it happened, I can still see myself racing back in center field, my back to home plate, reaching, and miraculously foiling destiny’s plans for a triple. I can recall everything about those five or six seconds in 1959, but I cannot explain how I came to make that catch, unless it was simply that I stretched farther than I knew I could.
***
How does a man from Alabama, by way of New York, win the hearts of San Francisco? The singularity of Willie Mays is not the answer; any player who wears our city’s baseball uniform becomes a hometown hero, no matter how he got here. These men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are often packed. And yet we call them our own, take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments. Strange thing, fandom. Strange, wonderful, and worthy of emulation.
***
As Hamlet is greater than anyone who ever played the part, baseball is greater than its greatest players. Today’s stars should savor their time in the sun, for their successors are in the playground bythe millions, hard at work.
***
Of play and players, what is remembered after all? The exhilaration of teamwork or the individual triumph? In the great American game as in the very concept of the republic, the two are indivisible.
***
Green is the color of spring, of hope, of baseball. In the green fields of the mind, to borrow Bart Giamatti’s marvelous phrase for the place where hope resides, baseball players think green thoughts. Why not get that first home run, or hit .400, or win the pennant?
***
No pain, no gain. Baseball the beautiful can also be baseball the brutal, but that too is part of the game’s appeal. Alexander Cartwright and his Knickerbockers of the 1840s, when they formulated the first rules that survive, never envisioned such unseemly behavior as barreling into the catcher or plunking a batter in the ribs. But earlier versions of baseball than Cartwright’s were less refined, less beholden to the gentrified ways of cricket, and the fusing of their rough spirit with the new rules transformed a gentlemen’s field exercise to a nation’s pastime.
***
So you would be a baseball bandit, eh? As Arthur “Bugs” Baer said of Ping Bodie, another improbably constituted brigand of the basepaths, “He had larceny in his heart, but his feet were honest.”
***
Pop quiz: What do the photograph and baseball have in common? (This otherwise pointless parenthetical intrusion is here simply to give you a moment to come up with the answer.) They both were officially invented in 1839 — though both debuts are in fact tough to pin down — and both stop time, permitting us to see and retain in our mind’s eye what in “real life” passes before us too quickly.
***
Baseball can be cruel, like life itself, and kids can learn valuable lessons through the countless small frustrations of an ordinary game: the full-count call that went the other way; the split-second stumble in the batter’s box that turned a hit into just another close play at first; the blistering drive caught in deepest center field. But where character is truly forged is in the crucible of crushing failure; if self-knowledge and resilience emerge from the ordeal, then another lesson is taught: that in today’s defeat is planted the seed of tomorrow’s victory.
***
He was out by a mile! No, safe by an eyelash! When you’ve made baseball your life, you’ve seen it all a thousand times over. And yet, every day you see something out on that field that you’ve never seen before. That’s baseball: endlessly repeated rhythms, ever changing detail.
***
Roy Campanella said it best: “You have to be a man to be a big leaguer, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you, too.” We look back with particular fondness on our baseball heroes who radiated that puckishness of youth. Rube Waddell, Rabbit Maranville, Lefty Gomez, Satchel Paige, Mark Fidrych, Bill Lee.
***
Players have often enough encountered trouble with their eyesight, or an umpire’s. Although veteran arbiter Bill Klem retired in 1940 because he could only see with one eye, four years later, Branch Rickey demanded his services for some spring exhibition games. “I got by fine,” Klem said. “I wasn’t surprised because I never thought eyesight was the most important thing in umpiring. The most important things are guts, honesty, common sense, a desire for fair play and an understanding of human nature.”
***
Boy meets bat; bat meets ball: the romance begins. As they say about learning to ride a bicycle, once you learn how, you never forget, no matter how long it’s been since your last ride. Still, even the most experienced rider, or player, will need to get back to basics if he is to keep his skills sharp. Baseball is a game of renewal, of beginning and beginning again, with each season, game, and at bat.
***
The skull sessions under the spreading oak and the grounders scooped in pregame drills prove their purpose in the heat of competition. It’s a long road from Little League to major league, and there are plenty of forks in the road beyond. Look at Mike Scott of the Astros, who hit the big time with a thud as a New York Met and only attained job security, let alone stardom, at the age of 30. And so the game offers up yet another life lesson: if at first you don’t succeed …
***
“Baseball-American,” Ring Lardner called the invasion of the game’s argot into the nation’s language. Double play, rhubarb, hit-and-run, caught off base. Add to these such vernacular phrases as ballpark figure, rabbit ears, raincheck, screwball, benchwarmer, bush leaguer, and scores more. All are baseball terms and images, of course, but think how impoverished the language of the citizen unconcerned with baseball — do such Americans exist?— would be without them.
***
There’s no place like home. Home is where the run is, and games are won with runs. A close play at second base or third is thrilling, but nothing in baseball compares with the tableau of runner, ball, and catcher intersecting at the plate. And in the end, isn’t coming home what baseball is all about?
Bits and Bytes and Bats and Balls was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.