Home of the Brave, Play Ball!

Rain drenched Boston on a particular Saturday in the heat of the pennant race, but I sat through nearly seven hours of baseball in Fenway Park to watch my teams surrender a four-run lead in the ninth inning then lose in the tenth. Afterwards, I washed down the defeat with rancid coffee, several perusals of the damp and dismal scorecard, and the lofty notion that I had, after all, witnessed a game that would slosh itself into history--perhaps as the famous Rain Game.

Neither of the two teams made it into the World Series, so that pluvious contest will surely never attain the significance I wished for it in my dolor. But my disinterested effort to view a baseball game as historic certainly avoids the consternation that a partisan fan must confront when his team loses, and it may also be the more honorable attitude for the spectator to maintain in the crush of the pennant race. No justification beyond some stretched definition of civic pride exists for the vehement strain of chauvinism that some people, and I am one, hold for a baseball team. There is something contemptuous about the person who pins his felicity on the fortune of nine men he doesn't even know. And I submit to this bludgeoning self-disapproval whenever I find myself reeling from a tough loss.

It is at such times that I would like to label the anguishing defeat a historic contest and have done with partisan furor forever. But a conversion to such intellectual detachment would mean the adoption of other, more alien, sensibilities. Judging from the nature of disinterested baseball lovers at Harvard, I suspect I would have to learn how to read only those box-scores that are over ten years old, to develop a compassion for the charred skeleton of Connie Mack Stadium, to preserve the line- ups of the Hitless Wonders and the Whiz Kids, to prepare a comparison of Satchel Paige and Walter Johnson.

Difficult as those tasks may be, certain heretical aspects of the game as it is played in my ballpark today make historic diversion attractive. Even for a dyed-in-the-wool rooter, double-knit uniforms, artificial turf, and blazer-and-turtleneck bedizened umpires all need at least ten years aging before they might be countenanced on the diamond. It may be a century before products of the sandlots assimilate the Designated Hitter. Such gaudy perversions have me clinging to the Goldberg's Peanut Chews billboard which one adorned the left field wall in extinct Shibe Park's power alley. Still, there is nothing like the day-to-day exhilaration of a pennant race to lend life--whether it is endured in a crusty New England college or not a hot inner-city alley--a sharpness. Furthermore, I will be the first to castigate trivia fiends as obscurantists, conservatives, or reactionary nostalgoids.

There is a middle ground. I am a sucker for all the splendid sentiments that disinterested baseball lovers will produce on the beauty of the game. Forming theories on the geometry of baseball, the individual in baseball, or the uniqueness of baseball among major sports in a favorite occupation.

However, neither baseball's heroic individualism nor its breath-taking system of converging lines is a quality that especially endears the game to the intellectual. What matters, for trivialists or dispassionate baseball believers, is the durable history of the game. Professional baseball has been around longer than any other organized pro sport in the United States and with each passing season increases that margin in time played. While no other sport boasts even 1000 playing hours a season, baseball teams play close to 6000 a year and make the game the unrivalled quarry for trivia hunters.

Beyond such arithmetics, the nature of the sport makes the daily fray somewhat irrelevant as a contest. Stefan Kanfer has noted that baseball records are the most durable of all sports records and thus render the early days of the sport as significant statistically as the last decade. Other major sports are either too young or too modified to have left recognized landmarks in the 1880s.

An individual baseball game is suited more for poets than partisans. Because a baseball team plays 162 games, the significance in the final standings of one of them is tiny. But a baseball game, just as it is a more frequent occurrence than a basketball or football match, is a more natural one. Baseball players are not tyrannized by a clock, but are expected to enforce the order themselves. A frame is over not when time runs out but when one team has contrived to get three opposing players out; a game could go on forever. The inevitable emphasis in baseball is not on who won, but on what great plays were made.

A reasonable conclusion is that one can maintain a proper distance from the fate of a particular team and still love baseball. And I accepted this the afternoon after that disheartening loss in mid-September when I repaired to Fenway's rightfield bleachers--450 feet from the plate--with a raft of nonpartisan Harvard students. My team won that day, however, and I was right back on the band-wagon.