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The Greatest Game of All
I knew we were in for a long season when we lined up for the National Anthem on Opening Day and one of my players said, 'Every time I hear that song I have a bad game'. You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of all.
It's Opening Day. No more sitting around in a gloomy existential funk like The Rajah, waiting for April to finally come. It's here. Time to play ball. Last night, in the first game of the season, the New York Mets crushed the Saint Louis Cardinals in a typical coulda-woulda-shoulda reprise of last season's harrowing National League pennant match-up. This morning, I gleefully emailed the box score and the quotes above to a friend. It's an understatement to say he's not a big fan of the game. His response?
'Last night this all started again? Oh God.'
Yep. It starts again. The pastoral cliches. The slow diurnal rhythms. The eternal truths. The last at-bat heroics and the sniping clubhouse intrigues. The barstool arguments, the ebullient hosannas, and the enraged cursing of the heavens above. I don't quite consider my friend's dismay secular heresy, since some people find baseball about as exciting as watching paint dry. But I do find it a bit puzzling. Honestly, the sheer beauty of baseball lies in the fact that it's the only game not subject to the constraints of a clock. All the action happens in real time, and without interruption, save the sudden downpour. It writes its own dramatic narrative as it proceeds. Although the standard nine innings are prescribed, twelve- or fourteen-inning games, while rare, are not unusual. Now suppose adding a couple of extra hours to the day just because a few things were left unfinished, or maybe even calling the whole thing off on account of rain... We experience the game as idle participants, sensing its unfolding mysteries in ways that, come to think of it, are preternaturally similar to how we look at paintings, or how we listen to music. Baseball is not a spectator sport. On occasion, it offers us opportunities in which we may find ourselves at peace in the world with our fellows.
Kids will play in the summertime from sunrise to sunset. At least that's what I remember about growing up in the Seventies, during what was arguably baseball's last great Golden Age. One clear July afternoon, two boys with a ball, a glove, and a bat get a 'game' together with the schoolyard brick wall as backstop. The quirky, unruly, powerful figure of the imagination takes the field with them. 'I'm Joe Morgan. I'm Rollie Fingers. I'm Dennis Eckersley. I'm Rod Carew'. Another boy with a glove drifts by on a bicycle, as restless and bored in the summer heat as Hornsby was at his window, and gets to play outfielder. 'He's Oscar Gamble.'
The rules of baseball are sometimes curiously organized, even to the point where a game may inexplicably end in a tie, which defies all logic, as with the preposterous 2002 All-Star Game. For all its compulsive obsession with distances, speeds, and statistics, baseball has a loose structure, and from now until October a contest will arise almost anywhere, anytime, from street to sandlot to stadium, with an absolute minimum or maximum of players involved. Play is governed solely by consensual agreement, from the ad-hoc statement 'This sewer grate is second base' to the binding contract which stipulates 'You will be paid $252 million dollars over the next ten years to play this game'. The numbers are malleable. The framework is that of the concept of a game, baseball, and the game itself is completely improvisational, even provisional.
Oddly, it resembles a language, as it is based upon principles of flexible substitution. A pitching staff is governed by a rotation. The ace hurler blows his arm out. The line-up is juggled. The youngster from Triple-A is called up to The Show, as he'd once dreamt back in the schoolyard. This does not suggest that players are expendable, or even indispensable. Their value is simply determined at any given moment by the circumstances at hand. The American League position of Designated Hitter is the fearsome apotheosis of this brusque mercenary thinking, as pitchers are characteristically horrible batsmen, and in the AL do not appear at the plate. The DH rule, instituted in '73, is considered by priggish zealots to be impure, or an abomination. Although I've been an abstract painter for nearly twenty years, hard-edges aside, I'm neither zealot or prig, and am very happy that Travis Hafner will start at DH for the Cleveland Indians this season. In a pinch, I've never quite believed that a walk is as good as a hit.
It's Opening Day. Yankee deadbeat Carl Pavano heads to the hill for the first time since anyone can remember when, and New York clips Tampa Bay. Toronto takes the Tigers in ten. The hapless Royals unexpectedly get Curt Schilling's number early, and the Red Sox go down. Chicago has new skipper Lou Pinella at the helm, but the Reds sink the Cubs, 5-1. Sweet Lou does not see fit to kick any dirt or scream apoplectic invective or hurl any bases around the diamond this soon in the season, but give him time. It's one of those eternal truths I mentioned earlier. Oh, and Dustin, Natalie, Angie, and Michael: Dan Rose and I will meet you at The Bat at six-thirty on the seventeenth. Beers at Stan's before the first pitch. Go Tribe.
Michael Zahn is a Brooklyn-based artist. He will present a project at MINUS SPACE project space on April 21-22, 2007.
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