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| Senator James Flake: Field of Nightmares |
The mass shooting of Republican Congressional
baseball players is, of course, just the latest in the series of such acts,
mostly, it seems by loners of every stripe with axes—mostly irrational—to grind. It looks as if anybody could be a target, no
matter what age, race, sexual orientation, political ideology, being a school
student or whatever the shooter’s issue du
jour is.
Maybe
it’s because I’m a baseball fan, but this one strikes me as the most heinous of
all. Sports should be where we fight
mock battles—with a beer afterwards—not real ones. If baseball is no longer “America’s Pastime,”
and football or basketball is, that’s fine with me. But I think that baseball is still the
national sport in people’s nostalgia, maybe best expressed by James Earl Jones in the character of Terence
Mann in Field of Dreams:
“The one constant through all the years Ray,
has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s
been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked
the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of
all that once was good, and that could be again.”
Compared
with the continuous excitement of basketball, or the lurching physical pileups in
football, baseball is slow, except for a few seconds of action now and then,
giving girls like me time to gossip between plays, or, if I’m at a game alone
or watching one in TV, time to let my mind wander. The action is certainly physical, but, except
for some controversial plays or “bench clearers,” it is elegant, and slow
enough that you can see all the action of a play or a hit pretty clearly. It can extend an awfully long time, if a game
is tied and extra innings are needed, and, as George Carlin famously put it:
“The object in football is to march
downfield and penetrate enemy territory, and get
into
the end zone; in baseball, the object is to go home! "I'm going
home!"
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| A 19th-century baseball at the end of a game |
It’s
not that the game isn’t sometimes weird, crazy, or that its past wasn’t
violent. If you want to read a good
account of what it was like in its 19th century infancy, take a
taste of Robert Achorn’s terrific book, The
Summer of Beer and Whiskey, which chronicles baseball mainly in St. Louis
and Cincinnati in a big rivalry in 1883.
Those were the days when pitchers pitched whole games—maybe forty or
more in a season, sometimes day after day, when one ball would last a whole
game, and spectators would actually line the outfield and the ballpark roof to
watch.
I’m
old, but not that old. Still, I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan as a
little girl, and actually saw Jackie Robinson, Peewee Reese, Roy Campanella et.
al in Ebbets Field; and later, until most of my
New York family died off, a
Mets fan through good and bad. Here in
San Antonio I hold a quarter-season subscription for the Missions, our AA team.
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| Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese |
To
watch AA baseball, you really have to love the game: not only do good players
leave for AAA or even Major League ball early in the season, but over the
years, even the sponsoring teams have changed: in San Antonio, from L.A. to
Seattle to San Diego. In a way, at this
level, you don’t root for the team so much as for the game itself, and (maybe) our
mascot, Henry–The-Puffy-Taco. The park
is pretty small too, and so watching minor league ball lacks the real thrill
factor of watching the Rangers or the Astros.
Sometimes, college teams play better. On the other hand, it’s a sort of
compromise transition between amateur ball and the Show, and so it retains a
lot of the old Field of Dreams character.
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| Several contemporary S.A. Missions |
I
think my feeling of outrage about the Congressional ball team’s tragedy stems
from Baseball’s origin and popularity as America’s Pastime-mythological heroes
rather than the high-tech, speed-gun, instant replay and billionaire big league
players of the Majors now. Even with all
of this, Mythical Baseball is still the nostalgic ideal out there as something
that Americans play (and that includes Latin America too), and to attack it is
cowardly and very UnAmerican! The Republicans and Democrats will play their
game today, all wearing the same LSU uniform in memory of one of the men
wounded yesterday. Maybe it’s the memory of this myth that will start the partisan
healing process. Maybe it’s the memory and
example of baseball that will Make America Great Again!
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Edward
Achorn, The Summer of Beer and Whiskey:
How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies,
Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game, Public
Affairs, 2013 (and available on Kindle)
George Carlin’s monologue
on Baseball vs. Football can be watched at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhN1ExFCXNA
James Earl Jones’s Field of Dreams monologue can be watched
at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SB16il97yw
