Baseball

I love baseball. Not in a memorize-every-stat kind of way, more as a romantic ideal. Football is brute force with some strategy thrown in for appearance. Hockey is strength and fury. Baseball is enchantment played out on a field of grass and dirt. Baseball takes us out of our own thoughts and into a (somewhat) civilized world of order, ritual and history.

There’s a poetry to baseball, a prose that reveals itself over 9 innings, where the outcome can change right up to the last pitch. There’s an assured calm to baseball - not pin-drop quiet but rather a feeling that for 2-and-a-half hours on a sunny afternoon everything is right in the world.

Baseball is Joe Carter’s dramatic home run in the dying moments of the ’93 World Series. It’s Kirk Gibson coming into the game with a bad leg injury, 9th inning, game 1 of the ’85 World Series and pounding it into the stands to win it for the Dodgers. It’s the late Tom Cheek’s fatherly voice calling the game on the radio, occasionally dropping in anecdotes of the great players and the great plays.

Baseball transcends everyday life, and every October when the last pitch has been thrown and the final out has been called I feel a certain sadness that winter is upon us, and a good friend has gone away.