Nonnus

Opening Day 2009: Limitlessness & the Dead-Ball Era

For opening day this year, a brief review of baseball during the dead-ball era.

Before 1920, the same ball would be put into play with almost every pitch. Because the ball would become softer and more loosely-wrapped as the game went on, hitters choked up on the bat and specialized in placing their hits precisely around the field. Base stealing was also important. 

Home runs of the long fly-ball variety were not common, and stadium dimensions were expansive. In 1908, it was 635 feet to center field at Boston's Huntington Avenue American League Baseball Grounds. When crowds were especially large, fans were seated behind ropes in the outfield.

Because the foul lines are rays extending from home plate, baseball will always possess an echo of mathematical infinitude. As Paul Goldberger points out in his recent New Yorker profile of the new stadiums in New York:

"A baseball outfield, technically, has no outer limits, just as a baseball game has no set time to end. The outfield stops where the stadium's builders decide it will stop. Urban ballparks had façades in front, to fit in with neighboring buildings, but were usually left low and open in the outfield, which had the effect of weaving the park into the neighborhood, so that, from the right place, you might catch an enticing glimpse of the green paradise within."

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Opening Day 2008

"Everywhere from Portland to Pawtucket, baseball's the same slow, sometimes stately, sometimes tedious game governed by extensive, complexly arbitrary rules, and practiced according to arcane, informal mores and runic vocabularies which compel that almost every act of play be routine. Even the great smashes, the balletic defensive turns, and the unparalleled pitching performances—by being so formally anticipated, so contemplated and longed-for by the fans—become ritual, even foregone. It's a Platonic game in this way, with all visible excellence (and even unexcellence) ratified by a prior scheme of invisible excellence which is the game itself." —Richard Ford, "A Minors Affair" Harper's Magazine, September 1992, p. 32

Richard Ford's idea is an elegant one. He sees baseball as a game without drama. It is a ritual performed for its own sake, with greater or lesser degrees of accuracy, or faithfulness to the underlying form. For that reason he claims to enjoy flawed, imperfect minor league games as much or more than Major League games performed at a high level. The simplicity of the Minors allows access to the form without flourish or distraction. It's an idea I'd like to test against the more conventional (or traditional) notion that formal perfection is the outworking of morality, the good. Without supposing that we watch baseball to be preached to, I prefer the conventional wisdom in this case.

It's why I'd like to work this season to deactivate the too-familiar notion that "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." This idea, attributed to Vince Lombardi, has a lot to do with why football has supplanted baseball as the most popular sport in this country. We're impatient for success. On the surface of it, football is less boring. But Lombardi, as every coach must, spent more time working for success than he spent actually succeeding.

As long as we describe sports as an "entertainment product," we undermine its core value. Sport is entertaining only as long as it is dramatic, and the drama of any game is a direct result of its participants need to work at success. Drama is not the result of promotional hype, generated enthusiasm or even an intense sense of vicarious participation through a rooting interest. The Red Sox success in 2004 was far more entertaining than the World Series win in '07 because the odds against it were so much greater. They had to work for it. As an audience, we were interested in the details of the team's success, and the drama was heightened.

It is precisely the boring parts of baseball that provide the spectator with time and distance enough to examine the dramatic arc of the actual contest: three-and-four hour games often played in 90-degree heat, over the course of a grueling six-month, 162-game season. Can atheletes earning annual salaries of twenty million dollars* remain motivated to work hard under such conditions?

A single-minded dedication to winning must be qualified by emphasizing the role of effort, discipline, will, and hard work. Winning must be demonstrated every day, not just in the playoffs. Whether or not an athlete has talent, we watch to see if he is capable of bringing the best of himself to the task. Has he enriched the quality of the game and himself by rising to increasingly difficult, specialized and nuanced challenges? Simply bringing one's talent to the contest at its broadest level—winning or losing—is not enough. We've all got to risk failing at increasingly higher levels. In sport and life, that means choosing one field of competition, and trying oneself at it over an extended period of time. That's what we learn from and enjoy. It's the source of excellence, whether we want dramatic "entertainment," great art, or nothing more than a tolerable quality of life and a sense of identity in our vocation, religion, family and friends.

*For the next eight years, 24-year-old Miguel Cabrera will earn an average of $19,000,000 per season playing for the Detroit Tigers. And Cabrera's is only the fourth-richest contract in Major League Baseball. Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter and Manny Ramirez all earn more.

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Opening Day 2007

The Major League Baseball season started a week ago. It gives us the opportunity to consider what we enjoy about watching this game. It's also an excuse to consider things that are related to, but not entirely about baseball.

Walking into Wrigley Field or old Tiger Stadium, the spectator moves from a dark, indoor concourse to a bright, enclosed green space open to the sky. It's clear that this is a space that's been set apart. Many players make an effort to step over the foul lines. Sparky Anderson was ostentatious in his avoidance of the chalk-line boundaries.

The garden is a mythical space marked by non-time. The Garden of Eden existed outside of time. In eternity. With time came death.

Besides taking place in a quasi-sacred space (I know this is overstating things a bit), the game of baseball is unique in that it literally stops, or removes, time. Unlike American football or basketball, baseball doesn't use a clock. If a team's offense happened to be good enough to never make three outs, the game really could go on forever.

Finally, baseball is divided into simple triads—three bases, three strikes per out, three outs per inning, nine innings per game. It might also be worth noting that the infield of a baseball diamond looks something like the face of a clock. The Tibetan Kalachakra, "wheel of time" Mandala is described as a work of art that when seen, considered and meditated upon, turns time into a wheel (a simple machine) which in turn produces enlightenment. It also looks like a celestial baseball game's going on (see the image below). The Kalachakra deity is on the mound, with more Buddhas playing the outfield.

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Embodied Wisdom

"The Lord by wisdom founded the earth,
By understanding He established the heavens.
By His knowledge the deeps were broken up
And the skies drip with dew."
(Proverbs 3:19,20)

Philosophy, or the love of wisdom, as it is presented in the wisdom literature of the great religious traditions, has much to do with the development of a familiarity with the space between knowing how a thing is done and doing it well—between stumbling through life and living it well.

According to the great traditions, wisdom is an understanding that is not just known (like “book learning”), felt (as in “emotional intelligence”), or done (“practical knowledge”). Real wisdom involves all of these things. A virtue, for example, is not just in your mind. It’s in your body too, and is evident in your “character.” A virtue must be practiced. Information can be forgotten. Even less manageable is emotional knowledge; moods and feelings are unpredictable.

One of the most powerful images of this sort of understanding is the traditional artist/craftsman/practioner as someone who has mastered his or her craft. The traditional artist combines memory with spiritual understanding and a practical, physical knowledge until it becomes automatic, the way an athlete is said to have developed “muscle memory.”

Learning for the craftsman is described as “practice” and is continued throughout his or her career. This is knowledge located only partly in the mind. It’s mostly in the hands, the tools, and in carefully repeated movements. Everything is ritualized, and considered to a certain extent, mysterious.

In his memoir about growing up surfing in Florida, Thad Ziolkowski describes learning how to surf: “Here I’m making real mistakes and being punished, by either the waves or the [other] surfers. . . . I feel rather than think these things. . . . It’s as if the thoughts and bits of knowledge are moving through my body, through my veins, instead of my mind.”*

For the art critic Dave Hickey, the word “cool” becomes a synonym for embodied wisdom. “How would you define cool?” he asks. “To be cool is to not insist upon what you believe. But it is also to be what you believe. Surfing is sort of the classic embodiment of cool because surfing is one of those things where you can’t think and do. No thought, no reflection, no doubt; you do it.”**

* Thad Ziolkowski, On a Wave (New York: Grove Press, 2002), p. 66.
**Dave Hickey interviewed in Art City: A Ruling Passion. DVD. Produced & distributed by Twelve Films, 2002.

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Remembering Opening Day 2006

The Tigers just beat the Yankees to advance to the American League Championship Series! Wow.

The following was originally posted April 3, 2006.

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Opening Day

"He is a lesson in theology,
My neighbor, a fan of the Cubs. . . .
    I have heard him
summer evenings after work, evangelical
in the garden."

—Larry Moffi, "Comparative Theology"*

Larry Moffi's tone befits his subject. It's unseemly to get too poetic or sentimental about baseball. The reason is, of course, that baseball doesn't need it. A baseball game is beautiful all by itself. We can't add anything to it. The most we can do is try to describe our experience of it. And that, without getting difficult at all, is precisely what baseball and religion have in common. Both allow us, from time to time, opportunities for hope in the face of hopelessness, and fleeting moments of what feels very much like transcendence.

According to George Will, A. Bartlett Giamatti, the seventh commissioner of baseball and a former professor of Renaissance literature at Yale University, was "fond of noting the etymological fact that the root of the word paradise is an ancient Persian word meaning 'enclosed park or green.'"**

While they can become tedious, all the rehersals of theology and history are just attempts to recreate, understand and share an experience. It's been said that no other sport has fans who keep score so religiously as baseball. And it's true. Look around next time you go to a game. Those are the scribes and theologians of the game. They know that if they write it down now, in the moment, they can go back later and remember.

Like paradise, memory is central to both religion and baseball. All the stats and scores become stories, and baseball stories are told for generations. One of today's wise men of the game, Tom Stanton, set out in 1999 to attend every home game of what would be the 88th and final season at historic Tiger Stadium. During the last game he noticed that "it's not the seventy- and eighty-year-old men who are wiping their eyes. It's the generations that came after them. . . . This season," Stanton writes, "has helped me realize that my life is becoming more like the stories of my father and my uncles, set in places that exist only in memory."***

But as important as memory is, today is Opening Day. It's spring, and every team is in first place. There is a lot to look forward to.

*quoted in Deanne Westbrook, Ground Rules: Baseball & Myth (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 147
**George Will, Men at Work (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 5
***Tom Stanton, The Final Season (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001), 239-40

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April 03, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

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