Baseball been bery, bery good to me

Yay, the Giants won the World Series. I admit to getting caught up in the excitement only during the playoffs. I used to love baseball, as a kid. During the summer there was always a game on TV or the radio, and that special sound, the hum of a stadium full of fans, was part of the texture of my childhood. Baseball is perfect for childhood, when the days seem endless and your life seems to stretch out into infinity. But at some point, probably around 1965, I suddenly realized that life just wasn’t long enough to sit through a scoreless game between the Cubs and the (pre-miracle) Mets.


I continued, however, to admire the idea of baseball – as a contest between worthy competitors, as a metaphor for the hero’s journey, as a symbol for the pure innocence that once was America. And I love baseball novels – The Natural, of course, and The Great American Novel and Bang the Drum Slowly, plus ones you might not have heard of, like The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and The Universal Baseball Association, J. Waugh, Prop. Sadly, the reality of modern baseball did not keep pace with the ideal. When I saw the new and improved Mark McGwire I wondered why no one seemed to be commenting on his Popeye arms. Forearms like that do not happen naturally outside of cartoons! And now critics are calling this baseball’s steroid era.

So I watched the World Series on TV, and boy, those commentators do not shut up! Since we can see what’s going on they feel they have to fill the silence with meaningless statistics. My dad used to turn off the sound on the TV and listen to the game on the radio, and I understand why. Radio broadcasters paint a picture of what’s going on, and it’s beautiful and poetic, plus they get excited: “The count is 0-and-2 and here comes the pitch, a high fastball, and Mays leans into it, and it’s back, back, back, it’s bye-bye baby!”

That was baseball.