Talkin' Baseball

"Life is not divided into semesters," propounds Charles J. Sykes on the cut-out-of-the-newspaper-to-scare-the-teenagers-in-the-house article that graced my fridge during high school. "And you don't get a new life every 10 weeks," Sykes continued. "It just goes on and on."

This, I am happy to say, is hogwash.

Fear not. The true heartbeat of America gives us pace, regulation and a new life each the spring. We have two long stretches of regular attendance and then a set of final exams. Some win, some lose, but it all starts again the following year.

I speak, of course of baseball. Basketball and lacrosse are more original American inventions, football may have more revenue and hockey the quickest action, but baseball is America's only pastime.

The sport speaks as a metaphor for the American idyll. Professor of History William E. Gienapp teaches a course on the subject and surely has more to say about it than me, but it seems to me the American story in miniature. Mixing the dust of the base-paths with the grass of the outfield might just conjure up some sort of urban farm, where instead of rotten apples hit with a stick we have formalized it to a cork-and-rubber ball and perfectly-honed bats.

Baseball is a thoroughly national pastime too. Those bats come from Kentucky and the balls are rubbed with Georgia mud and then shipped to ballparks in all 50 states, if you count the minor league. Folks in Lowell, Mass., and Laredo, Texas, have home teams as well as regional powers to root for.

For those of us from the baseball hinterland, keeping the baseball faith is even more important in Boston. Red Sox fans can teach us about perseverance, dedication and preservation. You've got to love a city whose stadium controversy is about whether to keep the ballpark that opened in 1912 or to build a brand-new one that, according to the team website, would be "taking all the great things with us. The Green Monster. Pesky's Pole. The manual scoreboard." To travel to Camden Yards in Baltimore is to understand the profound influence that the park in the Boston Fens has had on baseball as a whole.

Last summer I made an opposite pilgrimage, to the "Tell It Goodbye" celebration at 3COM (ne Candlestick) Park in San Francisco. The folks who brought sushi to the ballpark spent a year praising the faults of their park. They spoke lovingly of the winds that could turn a pop fly into a home run and a homer into a grounder, the need for wool blankets in the stands, the same sort of all-purpose sins of design that stain ballparks in San Diego, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and beyond.

As much as chiding the old was group therapy, the new home of the Giants is being brought in with communal fanfare. In less than two months, play will begin in Pacific Bell Park, "The Sweetest Little Park in Baseball" they are building in downtown San Francisco. In fact, since February, the team and the phone company have coordinated a "Park Pitch Road Trip," through which the ball that will used for the first pitch in the new stadium has been on tour. The folk of Sacramento, Chico and Berkeley have had a chance to throw the ball and symbolically take part in the opening. The celebration will culminate Opening Day in the new park, when a "Pitch Relay" will deliver the ball, Olympic-like, through the streets of San Francisco.

Of course, baseball is not perfect. The sport has been tarnished by money worries of men who play a game for a living and those who make money on these men's talents. It has languished without the voice of an independent commissioner; it still lacks representative numbers of minorities in management positions. I do not deny that these issues mar the game as we know it.

However, baseball just seems "right" in way other professional sports in America do not. Basketball is about giants. Golf is just plain boring as well as being a huge waste of water and space. Hockey and football have muscle-bound players you wouldn't want to meet in an open square, let alone a dark alley. Baseball can be scary too--just think back to John Kruk's reaction when meeting Randy Johnson at the All-Star Game--it is simply a game where a normal guy can get up there, on more than any given Sunday, and have a chance against the league's best. The lyric "Put me in coach/ I'm ready to play today" is about baseball for a reason.

I know I speak with the logic of an enthused lemming nearing the cliff of Opening Day. Why have newscasts been filled with footage of players playing catch and stretching at spring training, instead of hockey or basketball highlights? Because spring training is the proof that there is a new life coming in April, a new passion to grip us from Opening Day to the playoffs and World Series, a life to live between the foul lines.

Besides, what sound can compare with the crack of the bat?

Adam I. Arenson '00-'01 is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.