Opening Day in America
An ode to the sheer beauty of baseball
“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
- Rogers Hornby
As humans, we have become accustomed to the rhythms and cycles of the Earth. It is these cycles, which are predicated upon the exact position of our little planet along its ceaseless cosmic circuit around a middle-aged star we call, Sol, that dictates — and creates — the climatological and meteorological variations that occur we call: the weather and the seasons. For us as New Englanders, this seasonal change is a most welcome celebration of life, which every year helps us to mark the slow incessant passage of time and the procession of important calendar dates (the equinox and solstice), religious holidays, national holidays, and feast days.
Like all New Englanders, as it is here in the Monadnock region, the year is mostly dominated by winter; a bitterly cold and dark time of year, devoid of all color save an all-encompassing eiderdown of white, soft and pure, widespread and pervasive. For four months we sit entombed in our homes with our noses in books, our eyes on the television screens, and our hearts pining for fairer and more temperate temperatures. Waiting and longing for lazy summer days of deserved frivolity. Though, by late March, the barren tenebrosity and finality of winter give way to the emerging light and fond expectancy of springtime. Suddenly, seemingly without warning — a rather strange notion considering it happens every year around the same time — the white of winter gives way to the burgeoning panoply of color that begins to come to life as spring begins to take hold again. It is a time of imperishable hope, wherein the prospects of a new year lay ahead and the frustrations, transgressions, and errors of the past fade from memory. Soon — before you know it — the sky is a deeper and brighter blue, the flowers begin to blossom, the leaves begin to bud, and the grass begins to grow. The air is filled with the unmistakable aroma of chlorophyll, moist leaves, arising flora, sweetness, maturation and growth. In addition to this most welcome rush of resplendent beauty and rejuvenation, springtime always brings with it another thing of majestic and unequaled beauty: baseball.
Baseball is beautiful. It is a perfectly balanced game of endless minutiae, milliseconds, frozen moments in time, and intricacies of immense complexity; encased and entangled within a framework of elegant simplicity. Baseball is also intrinsically unique and employs a handful of unusual and distinctive rules of play that go beyond the “normal” rules of play that govern the other three major American sports — basketball, hockey, and football. For one, baseball is the only game where the defense controls the ball at all times and at no point does the offense ever touch or possess the ball — in fact, it is against the rules for them to do so; secondly, baseball has no clock, temporal restrictions, and therefore — theoretically — can go on forever; third, when a substitution occurs during play, the player who is substituted for is no longer eligible to return and cannot re-enter the game; fourth, when the ball leaves the field of play out of bounds — into what is known as foul territory — the defense has the option to catch the ball, though, if they do, it means the offense is now actuated and themselves can elect to run in an effort to advance through the bases; fifth, the baseball schedule is an incredibly demanding and grueling 162 games spread over a seven month period (and longer if you make the playoffs and the postseason), wherein you play almost every single day — for example, in 2018 the Red Sox had under twenty days off between March and early October — and where you play the same team three or four games in a row in small series, while traveling throughout and across the country constantly; six, though a team sport, it an amalgamation of individual micro-games within the actual game itself, which, in the end, results in a score and statistics built of compounded and cumulative individual achievements: the hitter against the pitcher, the pitcher against the hitter, the pitcher against the home plate umpire, the fielder against the ball, the runner against the fielder, all built around the chess-like maneuvering, tactics, and strategy employed by the individual managers who themselves are engaged in their own micro-game and battle of wits; and, finally, there are the architectural beauty and idiosyncrasies of a baseball park.
In all of the other major sports the dimensions associated with the football field, ice rink, and wooden parquet floors are exactly the same in every arena and stadium without variation, but a baseball park can have dimensions that vary wildly from park to park as long as a few paramount field dimensions are met: the distance of 90 feet between all four of the bases, a pitcher’s mound that is 60 ‘ 6 “ from home plate, and an outfield of pastoral green grass contained within a wall that is — for all of the newer parks built after 1958 — a minimum distance of 325 feet between home plate and the nearest right and left fence, and at least 400 feet from home plate to center field. In ways, the same is true of the players themselves, whose physical sizes are an amazing assemblage of shape and form. To be successful in football or basketball — and hockey, to a certain degree — there is a minimum size you need to be in order to compete at the professional level there are not a lot of 5’1”, 139 pounds basketball players running around the NBA, yet in baseball, there are players of every shape and size imaginable, ranging from the 3’-7” Eddie Gaedel of the old St. Louis Browns, to Cecil Fielder the 6’3”, 275 pound first baseman of the Detroit Tigers throughout the 1990s,or, more recently 5’8”, 175 pound Dustin Pedroia of the Boston Red Sox and the 6 ‘10”, 227 pound — feared — pitcher Randy Johnson.
Baseball is beautiful. It is a perfectly balanced game of endless minutiae, milliseconds, frozen moments in time, and intricacies of immense complexity; encased and entangled within a framework of elegant simplicity.
It is also a game that requires seemingly superhuman ability. A small ball of nine inch circumference is thrown from the mound to an awaiting batter at speeds upwards of 100mph, leaving the batter with a scant .375 to .421 seconds to identify the pitch (it takes the human eye 300 to 400 milliseconds for the human eye to blink), judge the speed, react, elect to swing, then swing the bat (which in itself takes .110 milliseconds). This is a feat so difficult that the “players who fail to do it seven out of every ten times are considered the game’s greatest heroes.” The game itself is built around a foundation of one hundred and fifty years of storied and legendary statistics, of which all who play the game are measured against, as they are ceaselessly compared to the ghosts of baseball’s past.
It is there, at this nexus point of athleticism and human drama, where baseball transcends the world of athletics and sport to become something totally unique and unto itself. It may be the statistics that comprise the infrastructure of baseball, but it is the men who play the game that decorate it so beautifully.
Baseball is also festooned with an amazing array of unique and eccentric personalities from all over America and across the world, whose personal achievements — and personal lives — have made them larger than life legends and icons, both in and out of baseball — enabling the rare few to even transcend the world of sport entirely. Within the lives of the fabled players who loved and played the game exists an array of endlessly interesting and amazing stories that not only involve their lives spent within the game of baseball, but also involve their lives outside of the game of baseball, and which cover the entire spectrum of human emotion, exemplify the human experience, and illustrate well the human condition itself. In fact, for some players, their personal stories, successes, and tragedies dwarf even their statistical accomplishments on the baseball field. It is there, at this nexus point of athleticism and human drama, where baseball transcends the world of athletics and sport to become something totally unique and unto itself. It may be the statistics that comprise the infrastructure of baseball, but it is the men who play the game that decorate it so beautifully.
During baseball’s earliest days the game’s greatest players and legends came from all over the country and from all walks of life: its rules were said to have been established by future Union General Abner Doubleday during the summer of 1839 — though the story is likely apocryphal; for nearly fifty years, a hardscrabble dirt poor “brawling Irish immigrant’s son,” named John McGraw, “preached a rough and scrambling brand of baseball in which anything went so as long victory was achieved,” a strategy that would make him one of the most feared — and one of the most successful and ingenious — managers of all-time. His star pitcher was a college-educated right-hander named Christy Mathewson, who was so “uniformly virtuous that millions of schoolboys worshipped him as ‘The Christian Gentleman’”, but whose exposure to poison gas during World War I would eventually lead to his early exit from baseball and untimely death.
In the early 20th century, a mill hand from Greenville, South Carolina who could neither read nor write anything save his own signature was one the greatest hitters the game had ever seen. His name was “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and his temptation to participate in a gambling scheme perpetrated by the Chicago Black Sox to throw the World Series of 1919 resulted in a lifetime ban from the game The all-time leader in hits (an astonishing 4,256), the legendary Pete Rose, who once said that he would “walk through Hell in a suit made of gasoline just to play one game of baseball,” would also receive a lifetime ban from baseball as a result of illicit gambling.
Born in 1876 rural Pennsylvania to a destitute oil worker and his wife, George Edward “Rube” Waddell, whose legendary low intelligence and overall naiveté would frequently result in him famously needing to be restrained whenever firetrucks could be heard or rode as he would immediately take off to chase them; disappearing for days at a time while travelling between games, being consistently late or missing starts all together starts, and getting lost to his inability to understand train schedules and read clocks. Despite all of that he still holds some of baseball’s most illustrious — and exceedingly difficult — pitching records, including the triple crown of pitching in 1905 (he went 27–10, 287 strikeouts, and ended the season with an exceedingly low 1.48 ERA).
Raised in relative luxury in Royston, Georgia Tyrus “Ty” Raymond Cobb was the son of a state senator and grandson of a federal circuit judge who secretly took him to his first games as a young boy. As a very serious man and professor of law, Cobb’s demanding father forbade him from participating in the sport, admonishing him constantly to “Not come home a failure,” and to stay in school. In 1905, in an apparent accident — but under suspicious circumstances — Cobb’s Mother shot his Father mistaking him for an intruder, then herself died a few years later. With nothing now to hold him back Cobb through his entire energy and being into the game of baseball, where he developed an unrivaled swift, savage, all-out, hard-nosed style that he observed made baseball “not unlike a war,” and made him an unstoppable force and competitor. He may have been the greatest player of all time, but his uncontrollable rage in the end made him more enemies than friends,” both in and out of baseball. He died respected — Cobb still retains some of baseball’s most coveted records (including the absolutely insane lifetime average of .367, 2,246 runs, and 4,189 hits) even over one hundred years later — but alone. None of his peers or teammates attended his funeral.
There is even the unlikely rags to riches story of the most well-known baseball player of all-time, George “Babe” Herman Ruth. He was born in the late 19th century slums of the industrial sector of Baltimore, Maryland, where his Father owned a rough-and-tumble saloon. Generally unsupervised, the Babe wandered the streets of Baltimore getting into mischief with the other street urchins, in constant trouble with the local police, resulting in merciless beatings from his father that he was brought within inches of his life. After a series of particularly bad transgressions, including throwing rocks at an on-duty police officer, a teenage Babe was sent to a Catholic reform school to straighten out. It was there at reform school that a Jesuit priest named Brother Mathias taught the Babe how to pitch and — most especially — how to hit. Eventually, the Babe would transform himself into one of the greatest hitters of all-time, and — by far — one of the biggest sports stars the nation and the world has ever seen. Over the years, Ruth revolutionized hitting and set several home run records, and in so doing became the most famous and successful baseball player of there ever was. In fact, in 1930 the Babe signed the largest sports contract ever signed by an athlete for the unheard of princely sum of $80,000. In an interview about the signing, a New York Times reporter asked the Babe how he felt about making more than President Hoover, to which the Babe cleverly quipped — as Hoover was now suffering through the second year of America’s Great Depression, “Why not? I had a better year than he did.”
At the top of the list of legendary baseball eccentrics is the enigmatic and endlessly mysterious Moe Berg. In a mind-bending story, this Columbia- and Yale-educated linguistic genius (he spoke seven languages), physicist, chemist, lawyer, professor of law, and itinerant major league baseball catcher was recruited by the O.S.S. (precursor to the C.I.A) to carry out a series of secret espionage missions throughout Europe and the Far East in the lead up to and during World War II, under the auspices of his alma maters and Major League Baseball. His missions in Europe read like a spy novel as he travelled the continent trying to discover if the Germans had developed atomic weapons, and, if not, prevent them from ever obtaining such capabilities. One mission saw Berg immersed in a wild kidnapping plot centered on the abduction of the celebrated Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi. Another mission even sent Berg to a physics symposium in Zurich, Switzerland with a revolver and a cyanide pill, with the explicit instructions to shoot German chemist and physicist Werner Heisenberg if he in anyway revealed in his speech that the Germans had attained nuclear fission. Berg was also sent to Japan in the 1930s with the Babe and a host of other stars as ambassadors of American baseball — affording a rare on-the-ground look of a then fairly secretive and isolationist society. Under the orders of the O.S.S. Berg brought along a primitive super 8mm camera that he used to take reconnaissance video of Japanese harbors, ports, airports, and cityscapes.
Baseball season has begun, bringing with it all whole new cast of characters, statistics, and possibilities. Unlike the other sports, again — I think — because of the uniqueness of the game, baseball enjoys amazing parity. In the NFL, the New England Patriots — whom I love, don’t get me wrong — have won an unparalleled six super bowls and fourteen division titles since 2002. In the NBA, the Golden State Warriors have won three out of the last four championships and four teams have won the last fifteen titles. Of the three other sports, hockey fares better than the other two, although a handful of teams have dominated the cup for the past ten years. In baseball, because of a variety of factors specific to the game itself — including the way baseball is run — baseball has unmatched equality between the teams and franchises. There has not been a repeat back to back World Series champ since the 1999/2000 New York Yankees, and since the unfortunate strike of 1994, fourteen different teams have won the World Series. Anything can happen over a 162 game seven month season, anything.
“In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing “base”, a certain game of ball. Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms, for the game of ball is glorious.”
- Walt Whitman