America's Pastime

I can tell you
My love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer are gone....
- Don Henley, "The Boys of Summer"

Today was the fourth game of the 1999 Americal League pennant race, the ultimate baseball showdown - the New York Yankees against the Boston Red Sox. At the same time, the fifth game of the National League pennant ran overtime, and I watched that too, flipping to it when commercials were running for this game.

I love baseball.

The fact that I can border on baseball fanaticism seems to bewilder a lot of the people I know, if only because I am, overall, not a sports type. I'm largely non-athletic, despite my stint in the martial arts. I say derisive things about football when it seems appropriate, that being the sport that seems to be taking over as the weekend obsession of the United States. I'm indifferent to basketball, and nobody televises indoor soccer. (Washington Warthogs games were slightly surreal, and a lot of fun, that being the DC indoor soccer team, but I can count on one hand the people who knew an indoor soccer pro league existed before I told them.)

But I really do love baseball. I consider it a beautiful, almost elegant game. Football is too brutal for me; European soccer is hardly any better, basketball is a flurry of activity with very little sense of drama. But baseball - there's glory for you. (But glory doesn't mean a nice, knock-down argument....)

Baseball combines some of the best aspects of individual and team sports. The pitcher and the batter face off, with building tension, with an ongoing test of skill against skill. In the Mets-Braves game today, in the thirteenth? (something like) inning, a man was at bat for something like a dozen pitches, with a full count (three balls, two strikes), fouling off every pitch that was sent his way to continue what was becoming something of a battle of wills. The tension builds, each man taking his turn against the spheroid, waiting to bring joy or tears to Mudville - and when the batter wins that duel, the game goes on into a masterpiece of fluid coordination, as the defending team works like clockwork together, meshing capabilities and trying to keep that batter from getting on base, from advancing, from scoring.

Each individual has his own skills to demonstrate, to prove, to test himself against the pitcher he faces, or the ball that comes his way. But the team together wins or loses, and without the team and the coordination of the team, the individual players mean very little. In other sports, if it comes down to the crunch, the ball gets handed off to the proven best. But in baseball, sometimes it's the little guy who has to come through, make the miracle for his team. Troy O'Leary (pictured) didn't get much credit until he homered twice when it counted to get the Red Sox to the pennant this year, but none of the fans are forgetting those two, or the intentional walk he got at his third at-bat that game. Every baseball player knows that he's got a chance of being the one the team is looking to when the cards are down. It could be the star veteran hitter who's at bat in the bottom of the ninth, or the rookie who came in halfway through the season. Everything counts. Everyone counts.

I've heard people complain that baseball is a slow game. I've never found that to be the case, myself; everything counts, and everything matters. Even if the team I'm cheering for is deep in the hole at the end of the game, I'm still waiting, seeing if they can pull something out to change the flow, seeing what happens. Sure, there are plenty of innings where everyone goes in order and the side retires, and there are innings that go on forever. (Or games that go on forever, such as the fifteen-inning series monster.) Rather than a game of seeing how many points can be scored in a given abstract amount of time, racing against the clock, it's a game of seeing how many points can be scored in a given abstract amount of opposing skill. The game lasts as long as it takes to get it done.

And when the plays happen, they're mathematically beautiful. I know I'm more of a math freak than 99% of the population, but I find this part of the game exquisite. The arcing curve of a fly ball, the violence of the line drive, the rolls and sometimes unpredictable bounces of a ground ball, wondering if the fielder will catch it, if he'll make the throw, every fragment of the play a balance against the skill of throwing, the skill of catching, all racing against the unabstract factor of how long it takes for this particular runner to make it to the base. The tension builds up, snaps, and then the fielders play ball. Eventually, someone makes it across home plate. The game goes on.

In what other game are a certain fragment of the balls expected to wind up in the hands of the fans? What other game has such living trophies of victory or defeat?

I even like playing with the numbers. I spent a few hours this evening cruising the world wide web looking up statistics and definitions of those statistics. (My new word of the day is 'slugging average'. Isn't that a nice word? It means the number of bases a player has gotten on his hits divided by the number of at-bats he has. As opposed to batting average, which is just hits and doesn't factor in how far around the bases he got.) I'm not as much of a statistic junkie as my brother was when he was a real baseball freak, but I can carry on coherent conversation and make properly impressed noises when appropriate. I can tease meaning out of these numbers, and something about that appeals to me - as a former physics major, I can appreciate a game where there can be numbers broken down on so many different things, if only so I can mess around with them.

And of all the boys of summer, my first love is for the Red Sox. I was born in Boston, in the same region of the city as Fenway Park, and ever since I realized that there was baseball, I loved them, despite growing up in Orioles territory. My brother decided to be even more peculiar, and an Oakland Athletics fan, which made one of the pennant races a rabidly contested question back home. We watched it together on the old TV which only got intermittent colour and three channels, up in the guest bedroom, and he was intolerable about the A's sweep of the pennant.

Rooting for the Red Sox is rooting for the little guy. It's such a sterotypically American thing to do, really; I mean, one could root for the Yankees, the Yankees are incredible, the Yankees win games. But there isn't the same knucklebiting thrill, the same hope that maybe, just maybe, this time the Sox will get a little closer. The Sox always try really hard, and when they pull through for the fans, all Boston rejoices. When they don't quite make it, we take it on the chin like a man, slap them on the virtual shoulder, and say it'll be better next time. Boston Red Sox fans are rabidly loyal to their team.

It might be something about Fenway Park. Fenway's unique, the last of the old ballparks, without the frightful sameness of more modern fields, where you can get seats for three miles from the plate and need to bring a three-inch telescope to watch plays. The Green Monster is an institution. It feels like home, being in Fenway, and the fans have such a personal sense of the events in play that it really is 'us' who're playing. We the fans do tend to take losses personally, though some more stoically than others.

But mostly it comes down to just the feel of the team. Even coming from behind, the Red Sox keep trying. And the game's the thing, more than anything. One of the pitchers, when asked if he was nervous about going up against the Yankees, asked the interviewer, "What's to be nervous about?" He's there to play ball. And he's goign to go and play ball. And, he said, "If I suck, I suck." The gung-ho try, do your best, maybe not make it this time, but certainly try again tomorrow attitude is something that seems to be at the core of the Red Sox's sense of the game. It's certainly an attitude that keeps the fans rooting for them, because playing the game for the love of the game is much more endearing than the sense of playing it for the adulation, the money, whatever.

Not that there isn't money involved, after all, Pedro Martinez (pictured) is (I believe), the highest paid pitcher in the league. But the important thing is that he's up there, focused down on the game like a laser beam, and he plays good ball. He plays a beautiful game, and with him on the mound, the defense behind him meshes into the perfect clockwork that makes the entire game a glorious thing to see. His brother, Ramon, who is probably doomed forever to be known to Red Sox fans as "Pedro's big brother," is almost as good. The bullpen is strong and skilled when they're on, and when they're off, well, that's the way the game goes, and it'll be better the next time out.

It's the spirit that refuses to quit no matter how hard it's going that keeps me coming back to the Sox, who wheen they play, are beautiful, and when they lose, they just bounce back and try again. It's the same spirit that sends John Valentin flinging himself hard to one side to try to stop a ball going into the outfield despite his bad knees. It's the spirit that sends Butch Huskey lumping himself towards home at a dead run, despite a limp that makes me and my bad knees ache in sympathy. It's Jose Offerman trying to make the plate and almost managing it in a skid and a confusion of vectors in split-seconds with the ball coming in. It's the wide-eyed wonder in the eyes of Trot Nixon when he puts out his glove and suddenly discovers that the ball has landed in it. It's the throw that the same Trot Nixon makes that has him four feet up in the air and horizontal when he lets go, and rolling in the green of the outfield with his landing - that sort of effort, that sort of hope, that sort of spirit.

That's the spirit of baseball. And it's why I love the Red Sox.

(Now, there couldn't possibly be a comment about baseball from a Red Sox fan without a mention of Nomar Garciaparra (picture). But I left him for last but not least, because, well, because. I wrote it up all separate and special-like.)

The spirit of baseball touched here
And lit a sudden glow of a smile
Under the cap's brim.
To reach for a ball beyond reach
And catch it, backhanded
Making that catch look easy.
Perhaps a throw goes wrong
But is forgiven, for no-one else
Would have had the ball to throw.
The ritual of the at-bat, familiar,
Apporach, pause, adjust the gloves
Check each wrist, shift the bat,
Tap the brim, stand in.
Make the field work for the play
And never quite make it look
As simple as that leap beyond faith
Knowing the play
And having the ball, triumphant.
Three-fifty-seven does not express
The heart of signs reading
"Garciaparra for President" or
"Nomar Mr. Nice Guy."
Baseball's spirit touches Boston
And we still believe.

- written Monday, 18 October, 1999 at some ungodly hour of the morning

Images taken from http://majorleaguebaseball.com, the official (guess what) Major League Baseball site.