Reasons for Baseball's Timeless Lure

[Gregory Pratt]

Jon Jarrett is a Professor at UIC who has taught at Harvard, Cornell and Vermont. He shared this essay with me awhile ago and it is my favorite write-up on baseball. I thought I'd share it with you all, but I suspect that "the older crowd" will enjoy it more than anyone else. It's very good.

 

http://www.muscatinejournal.com/articles/2...7e825791397.txt

 

For some, the sighting of the first robin is the harbinger of spring. For the baseball fan, the first announcement of “pitchers and catchers report” is the surest portent of the coming season-the baseball season.

 

Sometime around the third week of February, when the cold, dreary off-season still has our game in its cruel grip, the Major League pitchers and catchers make their way to Florida or Arizona for a few days of preliminary workouts. A short time later, the remainder of the squads begin to arrive.

 

By the time March is in full swing, so are the spring training games themselves, with intraleague schedules for the Grapefruit League in Florida and the Cactus League in Arizona. Then, at long last, April brings us Opening Day, and the season takes bloom.

 

To those unfortunate souls who lack a passion for baseball, it’s difficult to convey the stir of emotions the annual rites of spring training evoke in the rest of us. Of course, I can only speak for myself.

 

We baseball fans are a multifarious lot, so much so that the notion of the “representative” fan is inherently elusive. With my rejection of team allegiance, my firm belief that the only honorable form of competition is that with oneself, and my failure to have a settled view on the DH rule, I suppose myself to be highly atypical of this lot.

 

Nevertheless, I suspect that for most of us there are some shared sentiments that tend to resurface with the start of spring training.

 

In my opinion, these shared sentiments are most commonly found in a mixture of nostalgia for one’s childhood with an existential security attaching to the continuity of life. In the spring, life begins anew. The snow melts, and the world is green once more. Baseball returns, and if you pull for a particular team, this could be their year!

 

Everything starts over, it’s a fresh chance, a rebirth. (In his moving essay, “Green Fields of the Mind,” Bart Giamatti wrote most eloquently of the significance of the baseball season and the seasons of the year. Out of respect for Giamatti’s work, I’ll not excise a quotation. It deserves to be read in its entirety. If the reader is not familiar with that essay, I urge you to find it and savor it.)

 

That rookie standout of only a few seasons ago is now a grizzled veteran trying to defy the passage of time and to excel for just a bit longer before he hangs up the cleats and waits for that call from the Hall of Fame. So many new faces and new names are mixed in with the familiar. Are these kids really the counterparts to the men we ourselves idolized in our youth, their cardboard images even serving as our legal tender? A new generation unfolds, gradually supplanting the old, only to fade and be supplanted themselves, in an eternal, unbroken circle.

 

Clarence and Amy Valett lived next door to my family while I was growing up in Muscatine, Iowa. Besides our love for baseball, Clarence and I shared a birthday. He turned 60 on the day I was born. We always shared our birthday cakes with each other on our special day, which happens to fall during the dog days of the baseball season.

 

Clarence and Amy had no children of their own, but I think most of the kids in the neighborhood knew that Clarence and Amy loved us as if we were theirs. I remember one sunny, summer afternoon waiting on deck to bat in a neighborhood pick-up game. I had that eerie feeling one gets just before realizing that someone is watching. I turned my head and saw Clarence. His aged countenance bore the most inexplicably beatific smile.

 

As I recall, the adjective that occurred to me at the time was “goofy.”

 

In my more recent days, I’ve taken great pleasure in watching my little nieces and nephews play baseball. (Like Clarence, I have no children of my own.) I can only wonder whether, behind that curious glance one of them gives me as I watch them play, the word “goofy” (or, perhaps, some more modern functional equivalent) is being used to describe the smile across my own “old man’s” face.

 

Upon leaving for college, I vowed (to myself) to visit Clarence whenever I returned to Muscatine. (Amy had passed away by this time.) Clarence was nearly 80 when I began my freshman year at Iowa State University. After each visit home, I’d depart with the sad thought that I might have just seen Clarence for the final time.

 

During one visit, Clarence told me of a day in his own childhood when Muscatine was abuzz with the news that the Chicago Cubs were in town for a stop on a barnstorming tour, and that Zip Zabel, the Cubs’ promising rookie hurler, was to pitch against the locals. His eyes twinkled as he told me that the school day was cut short so that everyone could attend the big game. Clarence practically flew on his bicycle all the way to (what is now) Tom Bruner Field in Muscatine’s Southend, where he watched in awe as batter after batter failed to touch Zabel’s blinding fastball.

 

As Clarence’s eyes drifted to a vacant corner of the room, I noticed the simultaneous start of a smile and a tear, and his voice softened. “I can still hear the sound his fastball made as it landed in the catcher’s mitt,” he whispered, as though he were hearing it at that very moment.

 

Clarence Valett was 101 years old and in his penultimate season when he told me this. I cannot but believe that I’m growing ever closer to understanding fully the meaning of his words and his feelings.

 

Every baseball fan knows people (including many friends and relatives) who complain that baseball is boring and that it’s just too slow. Some complain, too, about aloof, overpaid professional athletes and steroid scandals. Naturally, I have my own views about these and myriad other issues involving our game.

 

But with pitchers and catchers about to report, I find myself disinclined to engage in debate. This is my time to relish the coming of the new season. What will it bring? I have my own perspective and opinions, borne of many seasons played and many ballparks trod.

 

If you, dear reader, suspect I’m (consciously or otherwise) suggesting that baseball is a strained metaphor for life, I ask you to consider the possibility that life is a struggling metaphor for baseball. I cannot say.

 

But at this particular moment, neither can I decide whether the difference even matters.

 

PLAY BALL!

[WCSox]

Very nice. Thanks for sharing that.