Don't stop, thinking about tomorrow,
Don't stop, it'll soon be here,
It'll be, better than before,
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone.
While prowling the baseball section of Borders Books in Downtown Crossing (just down the street from the Hub of the Universe), I discovered something that I absolutely had to buy and play with. As a superstitious freak, a baseball fan, an intermittent occultist, and a scholar of images and symbols as communication - I needed The Baseball Tarot. Not only to add to my collection of different decks and because I like seeing how the archetypes of the Tarot are done in different styles and with different concepts, but because it appealed to my sense of the utterly absurd.
But then again, perhaps it's not as absurd a concept as it seems on the surface. As the included guidebook to the deck notes, baseball is one of the most insidiously present games in our everyday life - where basketball provided us with rim-shots, rebounds, and three-pointers, football with downs and ten-yard penalties, golf with holes in one, baseball has generated an incredible number of phrases that drifted into common parlance: home run, on deck, thrown a curve, strike out, in the right ballpark, out in left field.... The introduction to the book begins with the Roger Angell quotation, "Baseball seems to have been invented solely for the purpose of explaining all other things in life."
This was, of course, the established purpose of the Tarot, through its history. Therefore, the meshing of the game with the cards does seem to have a certain poetic elegance to it; the images of the Tarot shifted slightly to encompass a whole rich new collection of images. Zen and the art of baseball.
The cards themselves are slightly larger and thicker than those in a standard tarot deck; they have a very thick coating and have a moderate tendency to stick together. The artwork is clear and real, with the faint fuzzing of a summer's heat haze in its effects; the images are of players, both Little Leaguers and adults, performing the complicated and elegant rituals of the great game. The backs of the cards feature a starry skyscape interwoven with pale blue lines and a veritable hailstorm of neatly drawn baseballs.
It is a full 78-card deck, with both Greater and Lesser Arcana - but with a twist; there are the Majors and the Minors. The suits, also, have been reshaped; Cups becomes Mitts, Swords becomes Balls, Rods or Staves becomes Bats, and Pentacles are now Bases. The elemental and mystical connotations remain the same across the suits - water, air, fire, and earth respectively. The choices of suits make for some interesting connotations and contemplations, in fact. Each of the Majors cards has been renamed; The Fool to the Rookie, for example, and concluding at the World's renaming to, of course, the World Series. The 56 Minors cards also each have their own name; instead of the standard Court Cards, however, the four highest cards in each suit are the Eleven, Twelve, Coach, and MVP.
The deck is entirely consistent with the standard images and interpretations of the Tarot. Instead of delving into the mysticism and apocryphal imagery common in many of the traditional Tarot decks, however, it illustrates each of the archetypes in a way immediately accessible to anyone who understands baseball. Instead of the standard requirement of looking up the Seven of Swords (treachery and betrayal, in the standard Tarot), a baseball fan who draws the Seven of Balls: Spitball knows full well that someone's cheating.
The progessive journey metaphor that is at the heart of the Greater Arcana of the Tarot continues in the Majors of the Baseball Tarot; the Rookie, the beginner, stepping out of the dugout with his bat in his hands and the number 0 on his back, progressing through the Fool's Journey and, eventually, reaching the fulfillment of all that is baseball: The October Classic. The virtues he must develop exist here: Control, Power. The people he will meet and work with are here: The Coach, the Manager, the Umpire, the Team. The Yin-Yang of baseball is here: the Hero and the Goat. Each of the archetypes is cast with its own unique spin, but in a way that expands the concept of the archetype into the new realm and shows that that new realm, too, is part of the same system of potentials, possibilities, victories and downfalls that it always has been; baseball explains everything.
The suit of Cups in the traditional Tarot is now the suit of Mitts, expressing receptivity, connection, flexibility, the element of water, the emotions. The names of the cards focus largely on the fielding aspect of the game, as appropriate to the suit - Double Play. Error. However, there are still moments that remind one of the 'theme' of the suit - Nostalgia, the reminder of the old childhood mitt lurking somewhere in a closet. (I know where mine is; I need to get it from my parents' garage when I go to visit them next.)
The air suit, of the mind and intellect, replaces Swords with Balls. Not only is this representative of the battle of the minds between pitcher and batter, conveyed into the physical realm by the physical presence of the ball's arc, but the greater intellectual realms of the game - analyzing the ball. Weighing the ball. How fast is the ball going? How far does the ball need to be thrown to make the play? Not only are there the aforementioned Spitball, the Curveball, and the Fastball in this suit, but the card of the Strikeout, and the Sacrifice.
Bats replace Wands in the suit of Fire - of action, creative force, violence. This is the suit of the offense, and well-chosen. Without the fire, the action in the game, nothing much would happen. The Single, the Grand Slam, the Out... the fight on the field - all parts of this suit. The bat is the motive force of the game, and the fire is the motive force of action, creative and destructive both, in the usual metaphysics of the Tarot.
The final suit deals with matters of the practical, the down-to-earth, the value; the suit of Bases. The intangible accomplishments of the game - hits, catches, throws - all come down in the end to the number of bases achieved, the practical count of finally managing to find the dirt at home plate. Here are the Rundown and the Pickoff, Home Plate, the Steal, being Safe, Hugging the Base.
In addition to the standard readings of the single card and the Celtic Cross, which are explained in the enclosed book, the Baseball Tarot includes several baseball-unique spreads. The most complicated of these is "The Diamond", a twelve-card reading which includes the nine defensive players, the batter, the umpire, and the on-deck circle. I think, however, that my favorite suggested reading was the three-card spread where the cards were referred to as "Who", "What" and "I Dunno." The introduction to the book includes a basic overview of Tarot use for the unfamiliar, as well as the suggested spreads. In addition, each card's full description in the book includes a quotation that seems appropriate to the card (including, gods help me, a Steinbrenner quote, which made me twitch; however, the thing was written by a Mets fan and a Yankee fan, so one must expect a certain bias towards New York).
Overall, I'm finding the Baseball Tarot to be not only an entertaining look at both the mysticism of the Tarot and the game of baseball, but an excellently done interpretation of both. It has a sense of humor, and a very keen insight into the important aspects of the imagery that needs to be conjured up by a successful Tarot deck. It is not for the Tarot purist, of course; it is an entirely modernist tack on the old archetypes, and for some mystics, this is too much to handle. It's entirely accessible even to those who aren't steeped in the traditional images and consciousness of the classical Tarot; the symbology has been carefully translated. To a non-purist dabbler in the Tarot like myself, it's a unique perspective that brings out a greater sense of the archetypes and cards of the original deck. (With every different deck I study, I actually remember more of the Lesser Arcana cards and stop having to look them up.) Whether or not one takes the Tarot seriously - or baseball seriously - the Baseball Tarot is an entertaining way of playing with the sort of mysticism baseball seems to encourage.
The Baseball Tarot was designed and written by Mark Lerner and Laura Philips, and illustrated by Dan Gardiner. It's published be Workman Publishing, and copyrighted 1999.
My major beef with the Baseball Tarot as of the moment is that the oversized, thick cards are almost impossible to shuffle properly. i gotta cramp in my knuckles. :}