Can baseball restore our well-being, like in 2001?
Enjoying the trivial demonstrates our determination to triumph over the horrific.
In 2001, Major League Baseball saved us. There is no doubt.
We learned in the dark days after Sept. 11, after four commercial airlines were hijacked and more than 3,000 people were killed, that tragedy does not put sporting events into perspective. It is sporting events (and other meaningless diversions) that put tragedy into perspective. Enjoying the trivial demonstrates our determination to triumph over the horrific.
Baseball did that for us in 2001. I’m not sure baseball can do that for us again. Not this time.
In 2001 we were trying to put a tragedy behind us, and trying to deal with the anxiety over other possible attacks. That isn’t the case in 2020. We are living our coronavirus crisis day in and day out. It is ongoing. Seemingly relentless. We are in the middle of it. At least we hope it’s the middle.
In 2001 there were several weeks in October and one week in November when everyone in the country was a baseball fan, and through the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks was able to pay a little more attention to a series of glorious but ultimately meaningless ballgames than to our troubled state of affairs.
It was the greatest World Series ever, not simply because it came down to the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game, but because of what it meant to play those games, to remain who we are in the face of horror. To not give in.
The stadiums were filled to overflowing. We were out there with them. Defiant.
The rest of us watched baseball on TV. We cheered. We booed. We complained about the managing, the umpiring, the play. We lived our lives, with all their silly diversions.
Baseball seemed in those days to be an act of joy and defiance. We all felt it. The full stadiums, the homemade signs, the cheering.
It’s not like that, now. It can’t be. The pandemic is like a massive, lowlying cloud, slipping through the cracks and under the doors of everything, even baseball.
The baseball season had to be reduced to what will be, hopefully, 60 games. And a postseason. Hopefully. Though there are no crowds, no cheering (except piped-in recordings.)
Still, there is baseball. And that is something. And that hasn’t changed. Baseball remains baseball, like it always was, like it still is.
Back in 1954, the great newspaper columnist Jimmy Cannon defined the value of the sport in a column he wrote about Hall-of-Fame ballplayer Willie Mays.
Cannon wrote, “You brought people together in the bantering arguments of sports. You make time pass for the bored with a bright rush. It is a fine accomplishment in a terrible age.”
Yes, it is.