Issue One 2011

    Pythagoras, the ancient Greek, supposedly believed that the world is composed of numbers.  His followers saw no distinction between math and religion; to calculate was to worship.  And so, all baseball fans are, in one way or another, modern day Pythagoreans.  For us, statistics are prisms which we twist and turn, this way and that, to describe the infinite wonder of the game.  We are not data-driven wonks who relentlessly reduce reality to the bottom line.  Baseball fans–and I’m talking about the ones who have top-of-mind recollection of the name of the third baseman for the Mets in 1969 or the four twenty-game winners in the Orioles’ rotation in 1971, who pour over the box scores at breakfast and take communion each morning from ESPN and will buy a ticket to any baseball game anywhere at any level be it in the middle of Pittsburgh or in the middle of Iowa in the middle of July just to see again the emerald green (I hate using “emerald” here to describe the color of the outfield but it is so hard to describe the jolt of green you see when you first enter the ballpark; Lorca          describes the color best and simply in his poem “Romance Sonambulo” “Green, how I want you green./Green wind.  Green branches./The ship out on the sea/and the horse on the mountain) juxtaposed with damp clay and those white, white base lines (which serve also as bass lines that support the melody of the afternoon)–are essentially metaphysicians.  They are   always tugged by the gravitational pull of the game. 

My theme is the spiritual dimension of sports.  I am not talking about the religion of sports you might hear from some sociologists where sports provide a sort of mind and soul numbing opiate to the masses or a cathartic release without which we would all turn into murderous spouses or which turn us into actual murderous spouses.  I’m talking about the deep engagement of the individual with the community and with Creation itself.  Do you think this is overstated? Am I giving too much credit to a bunch of overgrown boys spitting tobacco juice and grabbing their crotches?  When was the last time you considered the infinite? When was the last time you entered into limned space protected from the profanity of the limited world? Can you find such a space in a church? a synagogue? a mosque? a sweat lodge? a stupa? a cathedral of evergreens in the middle of a woods? Perhaps-but only if, when you walk into one of these worship places, you are grabbed, swept away, transformed.  Most of us who watch baseball feel this feeling every time we walk through the tunnel of a stadium and emerge through the aperture of light that opens onto the diamond and we see that perfectly mowed lawn and those lines that extend forever and the huge white numbers on the scoreboard announcing that you are in the temple of Pythagoras where everything counts and thus will be counted.  This feeling of descending into darkness from a crowded street and coming out into a sculpted space of light and lawn and water and numbers-this is what I’m thinking about when I’m thinking baseball in the winter.

    I think of space:
    There are two team sports that take place in infinite spaces.  One is hockey, which is played in an oval (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there are no corners in a hockey rink and we have raised generations of geometrically challenged skaters who believe that the curves in a rink form right angles that they can dig pucks out of) whose surface is composed of circles within circles.  The other is baseball, where the field is only limited by how far you can hit the ball.  Baseball is the only game bounded by true rays.  A line, geometrically speaking, extends forever in both directions.  A line segment is a line that begins at a certain point and ends at a certain point.  But a ray is a straight line that begins at a certain point (in baseball, this would be home plate) and extends forever in one direction.  In other words, there are no baselines in baseball-there are only baserays because the field is only artificially demarcated by the grandstands.  The great homerun hitters know this geometrical fact.  Homerun derby at the All-Star game is a ritual where fans and hitters alike scoff at the stadium architect’s attempt to limit the scope of the field’s rays.  Homerun derby is a geometrician’s celebration and metaphysician’s exploration of the implied infinity of the ray.  As human observers and participants, we realize both the limitations of human power and still-Icarus like-continue to explore just how close to the infinite we can become as we see how far one of our fellow humans can hit the ball and travel the distance of the rays that beam out from home plate. 
    Do you see now how limited football fields and basketball and tennis courts are? Most team sports take place within squares and rectangles composed of line segments.  There is no 40-yard line on a football field.  There is no side-line either on a football field.  If there were yard lines and sidelines, geometrically speaking, a football field would go on forever.  Running backs would run and run and run.  So it’s more accurate to announce that the Bills have the ball, first and ten, at the 40-yard line segment; whoever their current coach at the moment is will be pacing up and down the side line segment. 
    But a baseball field (notice it’s a field, not a court or a grid) is composed of rays that go on—again, geometrically speaking—forever.  It is this geometric infinity that grabs you when you take your seat in the grandstand.  There is no escaping it even if you don’t ever think about it.
    I think of time:
    We all know that the length of a baseball game is not governed by a clock.  There are no ties in baseball and you can play inning after inning.  Theoretically, a game could go on forever or what might seem like forever.  On April 18-19, 1981, for instance, the Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox commenced what would turn out to be a 33 inning game.  The first 32 innings took until 4:07 a.m.  to complete.  The game had to be completed months later on June 23rd, with the Red Sox winning 3-2 in the bottom of the 33rd.  No clock and the prospect, rare though it may be, that your afternoon will turn into an evening and then into a nighttime vigil lasting through to nearly the dawn (19 fans remained in the stands in Pawtucket on April 19th when the game was suspended just before Easter morning) subjects the baseball fan to ancient rhythms more akin to phases of the moon and lunar tides than the modern-day synchronization of clocks and calendars.
    There are infinities within infinities in a baseball game.  The first ring of infinity, which is the length of the game itself, wraps itself around the second ring, which is the basic unit of the inning.  Just as the game itself could go on forever, so too can each inning.  Theoretically, a team can be “up” forever as long it can continue to hit and to walk.  Within the inning, there exists the third ring of infinity: the battle between the pitcher and batter.  Every at-bat is a potential eternal face-off lasting as long as the batter can continue to smack or just timidly tip foul balls.  The ability of a batter to foul off pitch after pitch until he gets one he can handle all the while exhausting the pitcher is one of the great subtle skills in all of sports.  Roger Angell—the greatest baseball writer of all time, just so you know—is right on to focus on Johnny Damon’s 9-pitch at-bat against Brad Lidge in Game 4 as the moment when the New York Yankees really won the 2009 World Series Champions.  Damon fouled off 9 pitches, finally singled, and then stole two bases to ignite the Yankee’s 9th-inning come-back.  For those of us who watched it, we knew that Damon was in command the whole time.  He was like a shaman perched on a mountain top, serene and confident with his sledgehammer jaw jutting out, willing to wait for eternity for just the right pitch to come his way.
    The ancient Greeks used two words for time: chronos and kairos.  “Chronos” refers to clock and calendar time.  It is how our days and lives are quantitatively measured.  But kairos, ah kairos, is a time out of time; it is a moment in between the ticks of a clock when something momentous is about to happen.  In Christian theology, kairos is the time when history stops in its tracks and is redirected; it is the moment when the purpose of God is enacted.  The minute a batter steps into the box and waves his bat around and around the back of his head and stares out at the pitcher, chronos-time stops and kairos-time takes over.  The spirituality of baseball sparks to life in precisely this moment in between pitches, for we know that there will be a break in the narrative after the next pitch and a new narrative will begin with the next pitch, perhaps one that will change the direction of the game or even history itself. 

    I think of redemption:
    In the instant of kairos, we are redeemed.  Baseball is-more than any game-a continual search for redemption.  Despite all that I have said above, despite the fact that a baseball game and a ball park provide the ripe mystical conditions of time and space; despite our understanding that a baseball field etches a setting for infinity whether it is in the middle of a city or in back of a high school, humans still fall short within this sacred space.  Balls fall to the ground.  Teams make three outs.  Innings end.  Games are won and lost and completed.  Balls dribble under gloves and between feet and the sun goes down and we all go home.  Though the time and space dimensions of baseball tap on our shoulders, reminding us of the presence of another reality, we rarely do get to experience the transcendent at a baseball game.  Most games, like most days, are full of the quotidian.
    Every parent who has ever had to console a son or daughter who has struck out has said something like: Don’t worry.  Baseball is a game of failure.  The best hitters fail 7 out of every 10 times.  I’ve said this many times but as I think baseball I think I have been wrong.  Baseball is not a game of failure—it is a game of redemption.  After every out, there is always a next at bat.  It is a game of skill full of chances.  Indeed, “chances” is a baseball term indicating the number of times a fielder gets to make a play in the field. 
    No incident in baseball history better illustrates this point than the story of Bobo Holloman.  Born Alva Lee Holloman in 1926 in Thomaston, Georgia, he nicknamed himself “Bobo” after Bobo Newsome, a very good but eccentric pitcher.  Despite Bobo’s inflated image of himself as a star baseball player, he was by all measures a mediocre pitcher.  He toiled in the minor leagues and eventually wound up in the St.  Louis Browns’ system.  The St.  Louis Browns, who later became the Baltimore Orioles, were an awful team.  In 1953, the Browns were so broke they did not have clean baseballs.  Unable to spend money on good players, they signed Bobo, who had actually won 16 games for the minor-league Syracuse Chiefs in 1952.  Through the spring and early summer months of the 1953 baseball season, it looked like Bobo would be returning to Syracuse.  He was terrible.  Used only as a relief pitcher, opposing batters destroyed Bobo.  Out of the bullpen, he gave up an average of one run and two hits per inning. 
    Then one night, Bobo stumbled, breathing heavily and sweating profusely, upon his kairos moment.  On May 6, Bobo was named the Browns’ starting pitcher against the Philadelphia Athletics.  It would be his first major league start as a pitcher.  That night it rained, and Bobo feared that his big chance would be washed out, but the game began as planned.  Despite the rain, he pitched the entire game but he did not pitch particularly well.  He was continually in trouble with walks and he needed several spectacular plays from his defense to snare smashed line drives and near homeruns.  But before 2,473 St.  Louis fans on that night, Bobo pitched a no-hitter in his first start, the first and only modern day pitcher to perform such a feat. 
    The next day, The New York Times seemed reluctant to give Bobo credit for his record.  The Times’ headline read: “Rookie Baffles Athletics, 6 to 0, in His Debut as a St. Louis Starter” and then belatedly mentioned the no-hitter in its sub-headline, “Six Batters Reach First, Five on Walks and One on Error by Holloman in No Hitter” making the point that Bobo had pitched an ugly game.  He faced 31 batters, walked 5 and only struck out 3.  He outperformed himself as a hitter, driving in 3 RBIs that night.
    St.  Louis celebrated Bobo’s record by putting him in the starting rotation.  In his next major league start, he lasted less than two innings.  He never completed a game again.  In 1953, he pitched in 22 games, won 3 and lost 7, with a 5.23 ERA, allowing 69 hits in 65.1 innings, walking 50 batters and only striking out 25.  By July, Bobo was sold to the Toronto Maple Leafs, a minor league team, for $7,500.
    Bobo’s no-hitter has always represented for me the idea that greatness lies in everyone, that the spark of genius resides in us all, and that one’s moment of infinite grace is just around the corner.  What we learn by watching baseball is that we will all have a next at bat, a next pitch, a next chance in the field.  Bobo Holloman’s no-hitter, which I first read about when I was in elementary school, has been very nearly a sacred story for me my whole life for it teaches that we are just one start away from a taste of perfection.  For most of us, this will not happen on a playing field.  But maybe we’ll experience the extraordinary in our kitchen.  Or with our kids on a bench on a playground.  Or looking out of an airplane window at a black sky and a full moon.  Or at the first sound of the morning through a window you left open all night.  No ever knows precisely where or when your genius will call you. 
    In the city where I live, Buffalo, there is a baseball school in a low-slung metal hangar on the outskirts of town next to a train station.  Go there on a December night with shards of snow in the air and, in the background, the clanging of a lonesome evening Amtrack train arriving late.  Ringed by empty warehouses, the baseball school’s parking lot is totally dark except for a halo of light at its front door.  When you walk in, your eyes have to adjust to the skim milk quality of the indoor lighting.  It’s murky inside and hard to see the infield and the batting cages lined with thin green carpeting.  At 7:30 p.m., the place is full of young boys and girls and high school baseball and softball players pitching and fielding and throwing and hitting.  Parents sit slumped on ratty chairs watching their kids practice.  They are biding their chronos time in this metal shack in the middle of nowhere waiting for spring, waiting for the sun and the heat and the dust and the grass.  The calendar and clock govern their winter vigil, but when it ends and we move outside, the sidelines and the field will continue forever and eternity will yawn-for us all–from the first inning on.