Baseball Zen

When you think about it, baseball makes no sense. Unless, of course, you think about it too much. Then it makes all the sense in the world. There is wisdom in baseball. And mystery. Something infinite and indefinable. Like America, contradiction is what it does best. A simple game riddled with nuance and complexity. A team sport in which each player stands alone. A game of excellence in which failure is the norm. Like Zen it reconciles the simplicity of the soul with the complexity of the universe and vice versa. It finds truth in paradox. It's even got a Yogi and more than its share of koans.

Baseball is such an integral part of the American experience we tend to take it for granted. I don't remember all that much about my childhood. Probably a subconscious decision. Some things are better forgotten. But I do remember baseball.

I tried out for Little League when I was nine (Little League was more competitive and less inclusive then). When my turn came to pitch, I strolled to the mound, kicked the rubber and scuffed my Keds into the dirt, preparing to show them my best stuff. Not blessed with a blazing fastball I needed to impress the coaches with my control. Maybe even toss in a curve ball I had been working on. The coach, standing behind home plate, threw me the ball to begin my try-out. I lifted my glove in front of my face to catch it and watched in horror as the ball sailed right over the outstretched leather fingers, plunking down instead smack in the middle of my forehead. A reverse beanball. I was injured before I even made a pitch. Thus ended my baseball career. I didn't make the team.

Fortunately, baseball is also a spectator sport. A statistical playground, it is the game of geeks as much as champions. You can get intimately involved without ever even watching an inning.

Baseball has been a part of me for as l can remember. Probably my first truly life-changing event was when Bill Mazeroski hit the shot heard around Pittsburgh.

I was 12 years old at the time and as much a baseball fanatic as any other boy my age. I had followed the Pirates as they steadily improved in the late 50s and throughout the magical 1960 season. To this day I can recite the starting line-up right down to the numbers they wore. It was the first time the Pirates had appeared in the World Series in over thirty years and the city was tuned in to the point that the radio broadcast of the seventh and deciding game was played over the intercom of my junior high school.

We went to classes that afternoon but did no work, listening instead to the play-by-play, cheering when the Pirates surged ahead, worrying when they fell behind. It was a wild game, like the entire series, with the lead changing hands several times, and when the final dismissal bell rang and the game had not ended, many of us decided to stay at school and listen, so as not to miss a moment of the action.

The Pirates went ahead again in the bottom of the eighth, and we thought it might finally end, but when the Yankees tied it in the top of the ninth, a friend and I decided to run down to a nearby barber shop where we knew we could catch the second half of the inning on TV. We didn't make it.

We were in the middle of Penn Avenue, a normally busy street that was nearly deserted on this day, when a sudden cheer of jubilation rose simultaneously from all of the formerly quiet buildings around us. Sticking our heads in the first storefront we came to we asked, "What happened?"

"Maz hit a home run!" shrieked the man behind the counter. "We won!"

I don't know that my feet touched the cement on the way to the barbershop. Once there, we saw the replay for the first of hundreds of times. Yogi Berra, standing in left field, turning to the wall and watching in dismay as the ball just cleared the ivy over the 406 mark on the brick outfield wall of Forbes Field. Maz waving his hat in the air as he rounded the bases, joined by a jubilant mob of fans who poured onto the field from the stands as he rounded third base, fighting his way through the crowd to touch home plate where he was swallowed by a sea of black and white jerseys (which would have still been black and white even if the TV had been in color).

I think of that day often. Although I wasn't at the ballpark, although I didn't even see or hear the homer live, I feel like I was part of something. I can still hear the spontaneous eruption of joy echoing down the valley of Penn Avenue. It is sort of like the awe I felt years later visiting the Grand Canyon, walking to the edge, momentarily losing my breath in wonder, suddenly feeling frightfully small and alone, yet part of something magnificent and important. Baseball is like that. It is really just a game, but it seems like something more.

Baseball is infinite. It has no limits of time or space. There is no clock. The foul lines extend indefinitely beyond the field of play. Even the outfield wall is only there for convenience. Geometrically, the game is based on triangles, rather than the more traditional rectangles, circles or squares

No other sport is like it:

• Football, for example, is territorial, like miniaturized war. The long spirals and circus catches and nifty runs may dominate the highlight films, but it is really about the blocking and tackling that goes on in the trenches. It's about hitting people. It might as well be boxing.
• The problem with sports like basketball and hockey is that any sport that is played indoors is going to be too constrained and constricted to even hope for universality. This does nothing for basketball's inherent armpit problem. Hockey suffers the added indignity of being played on skates and involves hitting people with sticks.
• Soccer, they say, is the world's most popular and accessible team sport. Despite its territorial nature and the limits of a clock, however creatively manipulated (just what is that thing about adding time at the end?), it has a certain vastness and universality. Still, it seems to inspire more riots than wisdom. (Great game to play, but unless Brandi Chastain strips off her shirt, there's not much to watch. Even in Europe, the huge throngs that show up for games often have to resort to beating on each other to add a little excitement.)

Individual sports don't fare much better:

• Golf possesses a certain boundlessness in space and time that rivals baseball, but I'm not sure you can actually call it a sport. Mark Twain supposedly defined golf as "a good walk spoiled." If I shared his ability to capture the naked truth, this essay would be a lot shorter.
• Net sports (tennis, volleyball, etc.) and their illegitimate siblings, wall sports (handball, racquetball, squash) have some philosophical possibilities. One could see the net as a symbol of the abyss and the goal of the game to see who can avoid falling in. But that's a bit of a stretch and it's kind of tough to be existential when you're wearing polo shirts and shorts.
• If you hunt bear with a pocketknife you might legitimately call hunting a sport (though, one with excessively high stakes). Other than that, it's just arrogance and abuse of power. A good walk in the woods twisted beyond recognition.
• Boxing is done in a square but they call it a ring. It's about hitting people. It might as well be hockey.

No other sport stirs the imagination like baseball. You will never hear a hockey rink or gridiron referred to as a "field of dreams." And baseball inspires far more stories, poems, essays and films than any other game.

My favorite baseball movie is Bull Durham. It is the only one to capture the game's fundamental ontological contradictions -- its timelessness, symbolism, mysticism and simplicity. My wife claims that it is not about baseball at all, but about sex. But she misses the point. Of course, Bull Durham is about sex. It is also about religion and poetry. So is baseball.

A distant relative (my great-grandfather's sister Alice), as a young woman at the turn of the last century, was engaged to be married to a professional baseball player until one day when he told her he had been traded to another team. That's the way it is in baseball. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you get traded. But Alice didn't understand that, and couldn't handle it. She broke off the relationship (although she would later complain to her daughter that it was he who "jilted" her) and ended up marrying a nice, safe, stable insurance salesman. Her daughter says that though their family life was always fine, she always suspected that her mother was not really happy, that she secretly regretted marrying for security instead of for love. So maybe baseball is about risk. About taking chances and following our hearts.

My dad played catch with me a total of once when I was a kid. It was the highlight of my childhood.

A close second was the time he came to my room and told me to turn on the radio. "You've got to hear this," he said. "Harvey Haddix is pitching a perfect game." And though it was a school night, he let me stay up to listen to all 12 innings, the longest perfect game ever pitched, only to hear it ruined in the 13th by an error, an intentional walk to Hank Aaron and one lousy hit that happened to fly over the wall. And perhaps it helped to form my own impressionable values when Aaron stopped at second base and headed for the dugout, the game already over with the runner scoring ahead of him, changing Joe Adcock's homer to a double and freezing the final score at 1-0. As far as I know, Aaron has never said whether he missed the home run call or deliberately stopped out of respect for Haddix's accomplishment. I prefer to believe the latter.

A lot of sportswriters and fans say they don't make them like that anymore, that today's players lack the sportsmanship and integrity and respect for the game that Aaron exemplified. Maybe so. Certainly, modern Major League Baseball is more business than sport. It has come, unfortunately, to be associated with excess and extravagance. Millionaire players. Billionaire owners who have nothing better to do than throw their money around to buy a championship. Steroids, corked bats, juiced balls. Gambling. Pete Rose, Barry Bonds and assorted other scandals have perhaps permanently and hopelessly tarnished one of the last symbols of innocence we had left.

But those things are not what baseball is about. Baseball is about what happens between the lines. Hit the ball, catch the ball, throw the ball. Speed, agility and strength matter to be sure. But also strategy and finesse and superstition and a little bit of magic. Baseball is as much psychological and spiritual as it is physical. Mostly, it's in the timing.

More than anything else, baseball is about hope. The hope that a defensively brilliant but offensively average son of a coal miner can hit a home run to steal a World Championship from the powerhouse Yankees. Or that any skinny kid with a good knuckleball can make the most ominous of hitters look like a fool. Or that a game spoiled by rampant capitalism and self-indulgence can heal itself and once again stand proud as a symbol of the best we can be.

We'll get them next time. Everything is tomorrow. Every season, every game, every inning, every pitch every swing of the bat, every ball speeding towards your head is a new beginning. It's is a game of do-overs. The possibilities, like the foul lines and the clock, go on forever.

Simplicity and enlightenment. Forever and the moment. American Zen. Baseball is all that and none of it. If it were consistent, it wouldn't be fun.

But maybe I think too much. Better to sit quietly doing nothing. While I'm at it, might as check out the game.