Baseball is the slow food of sports, meant to be enjoyed, not consumed
The first thing I learned about baseball is this: If you raise your hand a man will bring you food. I learned this at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. In that first year I spent most of the game facing the wrong way looking for that man: Raise my hand, get ice cream, raise my hand, get popcorn, raise my hand, get peanuts. It was 1958.
Two years later I understood that this was a game. On summer afternoons I’d beg my brother to bring me to the lot where the kids played ball. I was falling in love with baseball.
Baseball the best teacher
Today is the home opener for the Pirates, a holiday for many of us, and a day of looking backwards — trivia and anecdotes — and a day of looking forward, “Maybe this year…” And today the debate begins again: Is baseball too slow? Do the new rules speed it up? Do we need to change more? Fools!
Here we are embracing slow food, playing music on turntables, and breaking up with our phones. We say we want to be mindful. We want mindfulness so much that we buy apps to help us breathe deeply, and other apps to block us from our own social media. Some even pay coaches to learn to slow down.
And we do all of that when the best teacher of mindfulness is right in front of us: baseball.
Baseball is the sport of the present moment and of mindfulness. Unlike hockey’s anxiety, and football’s aggression, baseball is about poise and calm and being centered.
Baseball influences society and sometimes reflects the values of society. Is that why we are trying to speed it up? Even as we swear — and spend — to slow our lives down?
A time to be present
Baseball is part of our culture, our American story, and our soundscape. There is no more elegant mantra needed than the sound of a baseball game being called play-by-play for a radio audience. Baseball is the only mindfulness practice that includes kielbasa, crab cakes and beer.
The present moment is an endangered species and baseball saves it. We are so distracted; it seems like we always want to be doing something other than what we’re doing — except at a baseball game.
Bart Giamatti, former president of Yale and former Commissioner of Baseball wrote, “Baseball has no clock and indeed moves counterclockwise, so anxious is it to establish its own rhythms independent of clock time.”
Dwelling in the present asks us to let go of both the past and the future. Not an easy thing, but the miracle of baseball is that it lets us be present even while embracing the game’s beautiful past and it’s hope-filled future.
The present moment — you know this from your calming apps and those mindfulness podcasts — is the gateway to heart and home. Also true in baseball: Home plate is where we begin and end. Home is safety, acceptance, freedom, and comfort.
Home safe
In baseball the goal is to get home and to be safe.
Again, Bart Giamatti: “Baseball is about home and how hard it is to get there, and how driven is our need to get back home.”
When the umpire slashes his arms, he declares that the runner is safe, and isn’t that what we all want: to make it home, and for something bigger than us to say, “You’re safe”?
Today, as the new baseball season begins, we’ll cheer for our team, and be calmed by the sights and sounds, and we’ll become part of something large, unchanging, and maybe even eternal.