"The Value Of Baseball" Part IV (end)

Baseball is fair because there is no clock, no time limit. The end, regardless of time spent, pitches thrown, batters faced, errors committed, or runs scored, comes only after the losing team records their twenty-seventh out. The batter could foul off pitches forever. The home team could fail to get out of the top of the first. The bottom of the third could never end. Baseball is fair because ties are not acceptable. Extra-innings are forced, the teams must play to a decision, the effort must be judged, there must be a winner. Baseball is fair because the defenders have the ball––the power. The batter can only do what the defense allows, can only take advantage of the defender’s mistakes, can only hit the pitch the pitcher did not want to hang, can only steal the base on a slow delivery and an errant throw.

Baseball is fair because crossing the plate is one run regardless of the effort, regardless of being walked in or having to collide with the pitcher, regardless of a squeeze play or a passed-ball error, regardless of a five-hundred foot blast or a sacrifice fly, the ground-rule double or the two-base RBI. Baseball is fair because no man is an island; yet, all batters stand alone in the box and try to pull the middle-in fast ball and fail more times than not; yet, the right fielder is on his own judging his leap for the fly ball heading toward the wall; yet, there will be an error recorded beside his name in the books if the left fielder drops the routine pop, if the third baseman boots the grounder, or if the first baseman cannot take the throw on the short hop; and later, when the veteran hangs up his glove, when his knees will no longer carry him around the base path, when his shoulder will no longer allow the ninety-seven mile-an-hour fast ball, when even the DH is too grueling, we can sit back and print out his stats and commemorate his feeble efforts––his three hits out of every ten at bats, his one-hundred-fifty-two career errors, one hundred and six coming from second base, the rest from later, when he was converted to a first baseman; and we can not only hold him accountable, we can use these numbers to back up our claim. Baseball is fair because of the old-time lazy Sunday afternoon doubleheader were a guy could sit in the sun for six hours drinking draft beer from a plastic cup and dropping peanut shells at his feet, where a guy could settle into the flow of the thrown ball, the labored pace of the pitcher, the beauty of the diamond, and forget his job, his debt, his dying father, his leaky sink, his life; where a guy could claim sanctuary, become part of the crowd, the community, the congregation and not be the foreigner he has become, where the followers worship and yell for their heroes, their deities, and collectively express their distraught and their frustration, their jubilation and their triumph. Baseball is fair because there at the ballpark, at old Forbes Field or Three Rivers Stadium, at old Municipal Stadium or Jacobs Field, my father is not a worker and I am not an academic, no, there we are a sect, together, unified without boundaries. 

Harvey never cared for baseball, but Bud followed it passionately, and just as Bud took my father, my father has taken me to the ballparks of Pittsburgh and Cleveland. My childhood ballpark memories are intricately wrapped up in these steel and concrete structures. But, Bud was not Harvey, he could not be my father’s father, and so the games of my father’s childhood were not what the games of mine are to me. My father needed a different connection, a different tie, and perhaps I too would have worked through my ineptitude, my feebleness, and strove to become a heavy plate and black iron worker, a master welder who at fifty-six could lie on his back on a filthy floor and back-weld above his head, if it were not for those fields, those players, those occasional days at the ballpark, if it were not for my father releasing me from the circle, and I wonder if he knows what he did. When the father, frustrated and angry, beats his son, humiliates his son, antagonizes his son into killing the erne, the son becomes a man. And I wonder if the father knows what he did. When the coach, fed-up and pressured, rides the player’s back till the fires of hatred burn in the player’s eyes and the player moves beyond the ordinary, the player becomes the star. And I wonder if the coach knows what he did. And I wonder if my father knows what he did. During all our ballpark times, I have never asked him.

My grandfather Harvey and my father never managed to pound out much of a relationship, and Bud never understood why my father took that apprenticeship at that shop and worked beside Harvey for all those years, but I know why my father worked there; I know why he hid his face behind the black glass of his hood; I know why he refused to give up his creed, refused to move on; and for that very same reason, I now sit at Jacobs Field and look through those old binoculars, and beside me, protected from the sun by a blue cap, sits my beaten father, and when we watch Kenny Lofton chase down a fly ball in center field, I know my father does not need his uncle Bud’s binoculars, that he has never needed them; I know he can see Willie Mayes, Larry Doby, Uncle Bud, and his father as plain as day.