Right Wing Nut House

It occurred to me this morning that I have not written a baseball post this year, a happenstance of which I’m sure most of you are profoundly grateful. No matter. I know full well that Americans have fallen out of love with the game and I could care less. For those few of us left who see baseball as more than a game, more than one more endless play for our leisure time dollars, we are charged with a sacred mission; keep alive that love in our breasts until the world is right side up again and baseball is restored to its proper place in the sports firmament.

In this respect, we are like Ray Bradbury’s old ones who, in Fahrenheit 451, memorize a classic to save it from the firemen, lovingly passing the words in the book from one generation to the next, hoping for the day when it will be safe to read Chaucer, Melville, Shakespeare, and Dickinson again. For us baseball fans - older, more conservative generally, and respectful of America’s past - there is the recognition that it is a classic game that achieved it zenith in popularity just as America was making its transition from a pastoral land to an urban industrial place. It was this change that perhaps condemned baseball to eventual decline although it was certainly hastened along by other, more destructive alterations.

Some consider the designated hitter rule to be emblematic of baseball’s self destructive tendencies. I wouldn’t go quite as far as all that. The DH was put in the game at a time when pitcher’s routinely won 20 games with ERA’s under 2.0 and baseball was a much more nuanced game. It is my opinion that owners misdiagnosed the problem back then, believing that the fans were leaving because of the low scoring games. The problem with the game was much more fundamental than that and no amount of tinkering would have prevented baseball from plummeting from the heights it occupied in the 50’s and 60’s.

The fact is, America was changing. And since baseball is a game built on tradition and history, it couldn’t change with the times. We tend to forget that until the NFL broke through in the late 1960’s with TV audiences to rival baseball’s, there was no other game in town - or the nation. Other sports were seen as diversions to mark the time until Spring training began in February. As popular as football is today, it will never capture the heart and soul of the country as baseball did in the decades immediately preceding and immediately after World War II.

No, Baseball couldn’t change. The game itself is draped in tradition, in memory. There is no other game seen through the prism of remembrance quite like baseball. Whether sitting on the back porch in 1950’s and 60’s suburbia listening to the hissing, static filled play-by-play on radio while the fireflies blinked to announce their presence and the sweet smell of Jasmine filled the nostrils with the scent of summer, of family, of a shared passion. Or perhaps in the city you sat on the front stoop with every other house on the block blaring out the call of the game, a broadcast legend conducting a city wide symphony of sound, mothers with babies, fathers with sons, and the young, the old, laughing, talking, arguing, loving. A neighborhood, a community united around a passion so intense that enmities were temporarily forgotten as “the boys” or “the bums” performed extraordinary feats of effortless athleticism with both the workmanlike attitude of the blue collar hero and the pizazz of a circus performer.

Yes, that America existed at one time. And while memory may skew some of the details and gloss over much of the unseemly realities from those times, there is no doubt that baseball for much of the country occupied a privileged position in the hearts and minds of the people. In a time before the total saturation of sports, before ubiquitous replays, before free agency made players into hobos, before steroids turned the players into Frankenstein monsters, before rape trials and murder trials and divorces and scandal after scandal there was the pitcher, the batter, and the lovely dance of strategy and possibility. To bunt or not to bunt. To swing away or hit and run. To pitch out, or put the rotation” play on, or simply to play “straight up.” This was actually part of the national conversation when baseball was king.

But America stands still for no one. Certainly not for a game that used to be known as “The National Pastime.” For that is what one did when a game was in progress; pass the time in other pursuits while the game itself functioned as the background to daily life. While we sat on the porch listening to the game, as a family we would be laughing, joking, carrying on, reading, knitting - all the things that families do together that cements the bonds of love and affection we hold so dear and make life itself fill up with joy and satisfaction. Of course, utter silence would reign when some pivotal point in the game was occurring. But otherwise, baseball was important for what it meant as a shared experience for the family, for the neighborhood, and for the larger community in which we lived.

It is Midsummer here in the Midwest. The corn has surpassed the “elephant’s eye” measurement and is almost ready for the harvest. Soon, little farmer’s stands will start springing up along Route 23 where you can buy corn picked within the hour, along with other crops that are so fresh and crisp you expect them to wiggle out of the paper bag in which the nice old lady or cute young teenage girl carefully packs your purchases. There may be no better meal on planet earth than any barbecued meat and fresh corn on the cob.

The temperature outside is at its usual July apogee, bearing down on 95 degrees with humidity that makes it feel as if a Swedish bath might be preferable. To escape the heat, Native Americans built steam rooms, probably figuring if they were going to be uncomfortably hot and damp, they may as well make a ritual out of it.

But there are some modern inventions that are not to be lightly dismissed. Central air conditioning is a fine example of the practical marrying with the sublime to create a luxury almost everyone can afford. And tonight, as I watch today’s incarnations of baseball heroes (or what passes for heroes in these cynical times), sitting in my air conditioned house, and watching the game on my 57″ HDTV (another good example of genius marrying up with necessity - you don’t know what you missed if you’ve never had an HD TV), I will remember All-Star games past and the now ancient Gods who walked among us; Mantle, Berra, Mays, Williams, Musial. Most of them I saw at the end of their careers. But that didn’t dim their luster or make them any less divine in my eyes.

The fireflies will be out early as they are this time of year. The owl will begin hooting at regular intervals while the as yet unseen hawk will screech out his warning from high above somewhere. Both owl and hawk help control the bunny rabbit population that exploded last year until they were overrunning the place. But nature, in its wisdom and in its need for balance, sent us the old barn owl last August and the hawk not long after. We don’t have a bunny rabbit problem anymore.

This is baseball’s all-star break, one of the hallowed traditions of summer and usually marks the period halfway between Independence Day and Labor Day. The older I get, the sadder I am that summer is half gone and soon - all too soon - the bitter Midwestern winter will arrive and baseball, the owl, the hawk, and everything I am enjoying this night will be but a distant memory.

But as any good baseball fan can assure you - there’s always next year.