It Might As Well Be Spring

To many of us the surest, most welcome harbinger of spring is that day when baseball’s pitchers and catchers report to their teams’ spring training camps and that day is Tuesday. Weather be damned wherever the rest of us might live, the Arizona desert and the Florida citrus groves that host the Cactus and Grapefruit leagues of Major League Baseball are sunny, warm and ready for the unmistakable thwack! of ball hitting mitt.

And just forty-four days later, home-plate umpires at fifteen ballparks will yell “Play ball!” and the long winter will ease its frozen grip and our discontent will turn to glorious revelry in the summer sun as some of us find a certain solace in a sport we once played and now are content to watch. Opening Day is more than the mere beginning of a new season of sport—it is a wondrously mystical symbol of re-birth rivaling that of any other in the Judeo-Christian repertoire.

Apparently not enough of us relish the game, however.

Like the parents who regularly disturb Little League contests with their whiny complaints about how their little Johnny should be afforded more opportunities on the field, the front office of MLB, which represents the leagues’ thirty owners and negotiates to keep the players’ union at bay, is whining loudly as it tries desperately to attract new fans by offering improvements upon a game that was perfect from its inception.

“Pace of game” is the phrase that Commissioner Rob Manfred tosses about with reckless abandon to describe an issue that most true baseball fans don’t believe even is one. (It’s an unrefined phrase as well. “Pace of play” would have at least offered an alliterative quality.)

In a nutshell, Manfred thinks that the average time of a nine-inning baseball game is about ten minutes too long, which is a clear sign that Manfred is not a baseball fan. How sad is that? Last year’s average nine-inning game lasted 3:05 hours and if that average time doesn’t drop to 2:55 hours over the course of this season he’s going to impose an 18-second pitch clock, 20 seconds if there are any runners on base. (There are variations on the pitch-clock theme that have to do with union negotiations, blah, blah, blah…)

Allow me to frank. Rob Manfred is an idiot—an idiot who is paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 million annually to kowtow to the wishes of his thirty bosses who apparently can’t fire him. (How do people find these jobs?)

Baseball is the only sport that is played without a clock—either in its execution or its final result. In fact, the game is so averse to time that the action on the bases runs counter-clockwise, thereby actually reversing time over the course of nine innings. OK, that’s kind of borderline metaphysical, but you get my drift.

For all I know, baseball might have more fans today than it ever has but clearly the owners want even more fans. They want more seats filled, more hot dogs and glasses of beer sold, more revenues from television, radio and internet streaming services. They are a greedy bunch that, led by their moronic Commissioner, believe if they could trim just ten minutes from the length of the game, thousands more will flock to the ballparks to watch 25-year-old athletically gifted multi-millionaires toss a ball around.

“Dude. Ya wanna go catch a game and have some brews and a dog?”

“Not ’til they improve the pace of game and cut the time by ten minutes, man. Maybe next year.”

Oddly enough, classical music has faced this same challenge over the years. Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of the Bach Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major takes about 18 minutes. If he could shorten it by about three minutes—perhaps by omitting Minuet II and picking up the pace of the Gigue—he’d likely draw bigger audiences to his concerts. Oh, wait a minute (or three), his concerts are always SRO. And that might have more to do with his virtuosic abilities than how long the damn song might be.

The last thing I want when I go to the symphony or the ballpark is for it to end. Both of those diversionary activities can be fun and soul-nourishing and gratifying. In the concert hall we are given the opportunity to hear genius interpreted; on the field we can marvel at how sports serve our society by providing inspired examples of excellence and achievement. Both put on public display the results of hard work and concerted effort, and both afford us opportunities to suspend the harsh reality of our daily lives—if only for three hours and five minutes.

Personally, I neither need nor want to get back to the grind ten minutes early.

A love of baseball is almost as difficult to explain as its opposite is to comprehend. How, I’ve wondered over the years when confronted with the question, can somebody not love this game? Why, I wonder as I walk our dog around the baseball complex in our little town, are there rarely any kids playing in the park’s six fields unless it’s a scheduled practice or game as an organized event? The latter question might play to the ubiquitous electronic media and its addictive offerings, and may be a contributing factor to an epidemic of juvenile obesity.

I grew up in Chicago and when at last the grass emerged from under the soot-blackened snows of winter, the glove went on and didn’t come off—except for drum or piano practice and meals—until the snow flew again by Thanksgiving. The glove sat next to me on the needlepoint piano bench and under my leg on the vinyl kitchen chair; I tucked it under my pillow at night and drifted off with the comforting smells of leather, dirt and neatsfoot oil. The kids in my first neighborhood played in alleys, backyards and vacant lots, inventing new versions of the national pastime to fit the number of players we had on any given day.

I grew up with baseball.

My childhood summers on the city’s West Side pretty much started with my leaving the house in the morning and returning home in time for dinner. With financing secured from my business of redeeming for pennies the soda bottles I found in the neighborhood alleys (that venture might well have been the most successful I have ever been in business), I would spend some of those halcyon days outside the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. I would take the green-and-white bus that ran along Roosevelt Road and turned onto Harlem Avenue to Oak Park. From there, I’d take the Blue Line El to the Loop and transfer to the Red Line to Addison Street and spend the afternoons alternating my location behind the outfield walls of Sheffield Avenue and Waveland Avenue, depending on who was at bat (we could hear the stadium announcer and of course we knew the lineup and who batted left or right). I played catch with kids I didn’t know, forever hoping a home run ball would leave the friendly confines of Wrigley Field and find its way into my glove.

And when one did, after bouncing off the concrete pavement, I played with it, scuffed it up. It never would have occurred to me to get it autographed.

Sometimes, if the bleachers weren’t filled, a door on Waveland would open and a bunch of us kids would get to scramble into the seats for the last inning or two. It was like winning the lottery.

On the days when I didn’t travel to Wrigley, I’d listen to the ball game on our Bakelite radio while sitting at the kitchen table, a pink Formica-topped table for four with a pattern of tiny, overlapping boomerang designs in white and gray, and a ribbed chrome skirting. WGN, which was owned by the Chicago Tribune and whose call letters stood for World’s Greatest Newspaper (clearly an arguable point then, as now), broadcast the games. Jack Brickhouse, whose mind and commentary frequently wandered far afield from baseball, was the announcer. My mother would interrupt the game at 2:00 p.m. to listen to a fifteen-minute daily broadcast by Liberace on another station. I hated that. I just wanted to listen to Ernie Banks and the Cubs play baseball.

DANIEL AND I SHARE A LOVE for baseball and when he turned thirteen we embarked on a baseball trip of major league parks that would be a substitute for both Hebrew lessons and his bar mitzvah, neither of which were conveniently available in Montana at the end of the last century.

As we traveled the country by train and rental car we would discuss and marvel at various aspects of the game: The genius and daring of the suicide squeeze, the swift poetry of the double-play, the balletic (unless the outfield wall is involved) snatching of the long fly ball, the sublime strategy behind the intentional walk, the seemingly bizarre superstitions and time-honored traditions, and how the DH has contributed to rendering the American League to second-class status in the world of competitive sports since its adoption in 1973.

The Pentateuch would provide allegorical discovery and analysis of both life and baseball.

Genesis would detail the names and lineage of the game’s players and legends; Exodus, the advent of the escape from slavery and segregation; Leviticus, the basic rules established to play (no mention of the DH, by the way); Numbers, the importance of faithfulness and trust, i.e., pick a team; and, finally, Deuteronomy, a finely detailed laundry list of by-now antiquated rules about a myriad of acceptable behaviors (augmented, of course, by the Talmud) along with acceptable foodstuffs that would never suggest which condiments belong on an all-beef hot dog, although a careful reading might reveal that ketchup on any hot dog is biblically unacceptable and perhaps not kosher.

I have long maintained that had Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) been written after the founding of Major League Baseball in 1869, he no doubt would have shared the view of other scholars who have noted that to know America is to know baseball. Conversely, to know baseball is to know America.

I fear that might be changing and I hope that I’m wrong.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska