by Andrew Koslosky KGCHS, Contributing Writer
There are few loves that survive one’s childhood intact.
Most of us outgrow our cap guns, comic books hidden inside schoolbooks, and strangely, the belief that adults always know what they’re doing. But baseball, for some of us, gets into us early and really never leaves. I personally have loved the game since I was a kid, in East New York Brooklyn.
Life was simple for us as long as our summers were full of baseball. It was a time when an old, battered glove felt like formal wear and summer evenings existed mainly so somebody could throw a baseball.
Long before I knew anything about mortgages, politics, or cholesterol, I knew the beauty of a baseball diamond, the hopeful thump of a ball in a mitt, and the solemn truth that no backyard game was official until someone argued about whether the runner was safe or out. There was something about the air in springtime and those sandlot pickup baseball games.
Baseball has a dignity about it that no one can quite explain, and everyone is afraid to disturb.
However, make no mistake about it, our National pastime is quite an interesting story when you sit down and think about it.
For instance, the first thing you notice at a baseball game is that no one arrives calmly. People approach a baseball stadium the way the Romans must have approached the Colosseum, with a determination to carry more things in the stadium than they could possibly need. They bring gloves to a place like Yankee Stadium, in case a foul ball comes their way, even though they’d have a better chance at hitting the Lottery.
Then there is that unforgettable smell at the ballpark. A baseball game has a smell like no other public gathering. It is part grilled onions, popcorn, sunscreen, part spilled soda and beer, and smoke that seems to rise from hot dogs that no one in their right mind should eat, but that everyone does. The hot dog at a ballgame is less a meal than a tradition wrapped in a napkin.
Amazingly, people who would insist on organic greens and filtered water at home, will stand in line twenty minutes for a hotdog of uncertain origin. All this, because at a baseball game, nutrition is suspended in favor of tradition. Turn down a hot dog at a ballpark, and you’ll be booed louder than an umpire who missed a call at third base.
Baseball is also the only major sport comfortable enough with itself to pause for long periods and dare you to complain.
In football, if nothing happens for ten seconds, men with headsets begin panicking.
In basketball, the score changes so often it has the emotional stability of the stock market.
Baseball, by contrast, looks you in the eye and says, “You’ll wait.” A ball player adjusts his cap, then his belt, and then adjusts “other areas.”
A will batter step out of the box to reconsider every major decision he has ever made. The catcher signals with such secrecy you’d think he was arranging a prisoner exchange. Then, after all that theater, the ball is thrown, fouled straight back, and everyone starts all over as if this is perfectly normal behavior for adults on a summer evening.
Players are no help at all if you’re looking for sensible behavior. Baseball players are among the most superstitious people ever permitted to wear white pants in public. One won’t step on the foul line. Another player eats the same pregame meal every day until he goes hitless, at which point the pasta is blamed.
No player in the dugout will speak to a pitcher between innings when he has a no-hitter going for fear of jinxing him. Of course, somewhere in every clubhouse is a man convinced that a certain pair of socks is responsible for his batting average. It says something marvelous about baseball that a game governed by careful statistics is played by grown men who occasionally trust their laundry more than their talent.
The fans, of course, are the real entertainment. Baseball attracts a special kind of expert, a person who has been wrong about the team’s strategy for twenty-five years and sees no reason to stop talking now.
Most interestingly, they seem unfazed by the economics of the game. A family of four who want to sit in a seat at Yankees Stadium in New York, where they don’t need goggles to watch the game, will pay $250 a seat, and $49 for parking, which brings us to $1049.00 for one night before you get to those wonderful hot dogs with a beer or soda.
Combine that with some popcorn or peanuts and you are at $1200. If you were thoughtful enough to buy your kids a jersey or a ball cap, maybe a yearbook or program, you would have been wise to take out a second mortgage on your home.
In the good old days, a person went to a baseball game in full dress. Men in coats and ties with the ladies in dresses and hats. Today’s dress code is far from formal wear. Then there is the matter of watching the game. Ballclubs and stadium staff are genuinely afraid that if your eyes remain on the field for more than forty-five consecutive seconds, you may wander off and take up reading.
So, they offer giant screens, flash trivia questions, cartoon hot dogs, race cartoon hamburgers, and a mascot in a costume who fires rolled T-shirts into the stands with a compressed air cannon. Let’s not forget the seven-foot bird mascot wearing sneakers and doing a dance contest next to the dugout. All for the good of our national pastime.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention baseball’s greatest anthem, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
You see, it all began in 1908 as a Tin Pan Alley tune written by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer. As it is in much of baseball lore, the story is seemingly written by humorists, as neither man had ever attended a baseball game when they wrote it. The song eventually became the ceremonial soundtrack of the seventh-inning stretch of every game in the major leagues, especially after Hall of Fame broadcaster Harry Caray popularized stadium sing-a-longs in the 1970s. You haven’t experienced a baseball game until you hear 50,000 fans in karaoke mode just before the last call for beer.
If you grow up loving baseball, you also grow up soaking in its language. Some remember batting averages and strike outs, but; I remember the lines that made the whole game sound wiser and funnier than ordinary life.
Few people ever spoke baseball better than Yogi Berra, who somehow made confusion sound like philosophy. He gave the game sayings like, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” “You can observe a lot by watching,” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Those lines were funny, of course, but they were also strangely perfect for baseball. One of my favorite lines attributed to Mr. Berra was… “No one goes there anymore…it’s too crowded.”
The language of baseball itself contributes to the comedy. A sport that calls its most important spring event “training” and its best autumn event “the Fall Classic” is clearly enjoying itself. Broadcasters speak in a soothing dialect of numbers and understatement. A line drive struck at 108 miles an hour is “hit pretty well.” A manager storming from the dugout to argue nose-to-nose with an umpire is “making his case.” A pitcher who has great movement on his pitches, “has great stuff.” Rain delays are discussed with the grave seriousness once reserved for naval battles.
But what separates baseball from all other sports is its history.
The discussions about how Babe Ruth would do in today’s game, or how hard Nolan Ryan would throw today with modern training methods, or how the 1927 Yankees would do playing in today’s game, makes for some interesting talks amongst the experts, and indeed there are many of them.
The “expert” speaks with authority because he once sat near the on-deck circle in 1994. Of course some of our older fans insist the game was better when players stayed with one team, uniforms were flannel, and nobody needed a hydration or dietary specialist. They say this while checking pitch velocity on a phone powerful enough to launch a satellite.
Baseball is full of these contradictions. We claim to love it because it never changes, then spend the whole game discussing replay reviews, advanced metrics, and whether the new rules will ruin civilization.
Then there are the vendors… the true show and philosophers of the ballpark. These men and women walk the aisles balancing trays that appear to weigh as much as a compact car, calling out “Peanuts!” or “Beer here,” with the urgency of town criers announcing an invasion.
Indeed, the game of baseball is absurd, but it is an orderly absurdity, and I have loved it too long to expect it to be anything else. It asks very little of us except patience, mild optimism, and a willingness to applaud strangers in uniforms. Every spring before the season starts, all the team records are even, and hope rings eternally that this is the year we win it all.
We will keep that going until sometime around the July all-star break, when, of course, reality sets in. It gives us an evening measured not by alarms or deadlines, but by innings. It lets grandparents tell stories, lets children keep score badly on paper, and lets otherwise reasonable adults believe a rally cap can influence the destiny of their favorite team.
For me, it still carries the feeling it had when I was a young man that summer was not complete without a game somewhere, without the sound of a bat meeting a ball cleanly. This was true for me when I played the game I loved as a young catcher through college or was when at a game with all of those wonderful memories such as seeing Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra play at Yankee Stadium, “The big ballpark in the Bronx.”
So yes, take me out to the ballgame. Let me sit in the crowd, overpay for peanuts, mistrust the umpire, and sing that old song with several thousand people who, after a few beers, are not going to win any awards.
Despite it all, people have been coming since Major League Baseball’s first full season was played in 1901.
In the words of Baseball’s greatest philosopher, Yogi Berra, “If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”
I suppose there is some truth to that statement. But some of us never needed to be stopped in the first place. We were lost to baseball early… and will happily remain so forevermore. Batter up…and Happy Fourth of July.
Peace my Brothers and Sisters, until next week…
by Hunter Dawkins/The Gazebo Gazette via Associated Press
