• Franklin Park man uses passion for baseball, history to preserve the past, B-1
By the start of next week we’ll have broken the alltime record for days without Major League Baseball in this country, at least according to the people who possess two key qualifications: They know the full, tumultuous history of America’s pastime, and they can count.
For those who are more interested in the counting, today is the 249th day since the Washington Nationals won the 2019 World Series, next Sunday will be 256th day, matching the game’s previous longest absence, traceable to the 1994-95 players strike, and somehow the Lords of the Game think they can foresee an end to this tedious addition on July 23 or
24, meaning a final historic total of 267 or 268 baseball-free days.
Anyone told the coronavirus?
Think it will stand down in the face of a Pirates intrasquad game?
Given every contemporary exigency, I’ll believe there will be baseball when I see baseball. Same for hockey, basketball and football.
But the baseball void finally has forced some reflection, as that game still lies closer to my soul than the others, even if I don’t always like it as much as the others anymore. For too many decades to mention, I found the game’s pace — deliberate and thoughtful — soothing beyond description, even hypnotic. No more. Overrun by mathematicians, the game has been rusted into place like a weed-encircled Buick baking in the sunlight.
And still, after this recordbreaking absence, I miss it.
I miss its rhythms, because it still benefits from the fact that rhythm and pace are not the same thing. For the majority of the year, baseball informs the rhythm of the day, in the way the end of the work day leans toward game time, in its casual presence through a Sunday afternoon, in the mental scaffolding of how a weekend sets up around the league and the import that might have on the climax of a long, long summer. All of it forming a sirenic groove obstructed only by the ghastly All-Star break, a double irritant when you count the absence of rhythm coupled with the midsummer “classic” itself.
I miss that moment when a ninth inning popup gathers in its ascent a realization by the home crowd that it looks very much like the final out, that there’s a win they can stuff in their pockets just as soon as the baseball finds a glove to fall into.
I miss having the play-byplay guy remind me that they work on pitchers covering first base in spring training, but only when they’ve just botched that very play despite working on it
in spring training, even though everybody knows they don’t work on it every day in spring training. Not every day.
I miss even more the way baseball cozies up to your psyche in its unspoken encouragement. You can have a day that’s the psychological equivalent of being beaten, 12-0, but you always know that tomorrow, the field will be lined again, the batters box squared perfectly again, the foul lines drawn straight as a Sunday gospel to the back fence again, and the moment will come when the catcher will throw that final warm-up pitch down to second, and you can try again. And again. And again. That’s how life goes.
Baseball is where you can do most everything right and lose, 2-1; it’s where you can do most everything wrong and win, 8-6, because baseball, because life.
And there are things I miss about the ballpark, the smells and the grass and the summer, sure, but mostly the connections. Fathers and sons. Fathers and daughters,
Fathers and their fathers. Moms with everybody, because the game is not and has never been inherited exclusively through a Y chromosome. Young men and their girlfriends. Young women and their boyfriends. Old men who can’t believe they’re not bunting in this situation. Or can’t believe they are.
Unfortunately, like the America it so-long reflected and defined, baseball is in a bad place right now. When we’re getting deathly sick from congregating inside, especially for long periods where people are merely talking and laughing, what’s the general advisability of a clubhouse or a weight room or even a dugout? And the questions aren’t just practical, they are ethical.
In a country that still can’t provide enough testing to get ahead of the coronavirus, particularly in Arizona, Texas, Florida and Colorado, which all play host to major league franchises and all are being scalded by COVID-19, is baseball really going to test the same 30 or 60 or 90 people every other day?
All while desperate Americans wait for testing, all to stage a season that will go into the game’s history as essentially irrelevant?
If that’s what we’re about to do, this is one stupid country, but you knew that.