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Borrowed from a page of a friend of a friend... The best bit of Orioles/baseball prose
I've read in a while... No matter how many heartbreaks Cal, Mike, Brady, BJ, and
the rest of the glorious orange and black put me through this year, I still want
to go play in the Yard :) By Stephen Hunter BALTIMORE, April 3 –– We have been warned. Baseball is too serious to be left to the fans. Baseball scholar Jules Tygiel, in his new book "Past Time: Baseball as History," writes with disdain of "ethereal, rhapsodic celebrations of baseball and its special essence." Of course! It's so obvious! Who would go to a baseball game in search of the ethereal, the rhapsodic, the special essence? If I want essence, I'll send in Western science. Baseball is entirely too important for such matters. It is arithmetic for professionals, culture for anthropologists, class structure for sociologists, data for statisticians, text for punditry. It is, therefore, above irony, beyond poetry, exiled from feeling and, last of all, far removed from that dreadful indulgence of the masses, you know, that terrible goofy thing called . . . fun. But the odd thing is that the 46,902 people here today in the great new-old construct called Oriole Park at Camden Yards, under a sky that surprises all with its marbleized streaks of blue that occasionally permit the sunlight to splash through, seem not to agree with Mr. Tygiel. Why, they sit in a cathedral of color, seething flesh and communal celebration, and everywhere you look they seem to be in a rapture, an ecstasy of possibility, a release from the quotidian. What can these fools possibly see? Can
it be that they look at the field and see an oddly resonant, uniquely American
arrangement of color and texture? I love it when, after the subterranean
sensation of entering the dark chutes and ladders of the stadium, you step out
of the tunnel at last and experience the
true space of the place, its vastness, its splurge of freedom, its distance and
angles. The green of that grass, so shockingly pure--would that make anyone
think of prairies, endless and bountiful? And the dirt of the infield, is that
plowed land, worked hard by men under a grueling sun? And the bricks that
encompass any good ballpark, but especially this good ballpark--there seems to
be a dam of red brick just over the right-field fence, keeping reality out, but
it's just the warehouse--aren't they in some way suggestive of the energy and
strength that built the cities? What is that heard singing in the background,
not the Or possibly these fools have been reading a poet named A. Bartlett Giamatti, who was also a university president of note and a baseball exec late in his life, who wrote perhaps the world's most beautiful paragraph on baseball. In his rhythms he captured all of the sport's grace and purity, its special, almost geometric beauty, while at the same time he caught its ultimate sadness and the realization that even if you win it all, victory is only temporary: "Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and the evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone." But today--the day of beginning again--the inevitable heartbreak of that lonely fall is a long way away. Anything is possible. Mike Mussina may win 30 this year, with an ERA of 0.08 as the Orioles clinch by late July and run a streak in the postseason of 12 straight victories. Sure. It could happen. I mean now--that is, after a high-kitsch pregame celebration that seemed to celebrate orange balloons, fireworks, a tuxedoed choir and only incidentally the game itself--Mussina has just set down the first three Cleveland Indians he's faced, so the world is mud-luscious with possibility. In fact with one down in the bottom of the first, the famous bugle charge is unleashed for the first time, calling the still largely unseated, unsettled fans to battle but annoying the sourpusses of the press box, until a foul ball, off Delino DeShields's bat but presumably aimed by an angry god, scatters them with a nervous titter (it actually lands three feet from where I'm typing, the closest a foul ball has come to me since 1959 at Wrigley Field in Chicago, but I was so busy up there trying to remember if e.e. cummings put a hyphen in "mud-luscious," I didn't have time to panic). And if the theme of the day is possibility, who says miracles can't still happen in our secular age? The Orioles actually score the first run. Then there comes another miraculous moment: The bat blurs, there's the crack of the wood shivering through the leather and twine mesh of the ball, and it traces a long trajectory toward deep right. I love the drama of flight and interception, the geometry of trying to track deflection on a rapidly moving object, small and treacherous and hard. An O backs up, fear radiating from every fiber of his body as he approaches the wall, trying to decipher the code of flight against the possibility of a hard collision with that wall. It all takes place in less than a second and he leaps and snares the missile just as it seems to bid the field adieu. Good heavens, that's Albert Belle! A great Brady Anderson-like leap from Albert Belle? Yes. Strange, but true. Alas, comes the top of the third and Travis Fryman whacks a Mussina 2-0 pitch (how do I know it's a 2-0 pitch? Am I Tom Boswell? Far, far from it. The answer is, up here in writerland they tell you stuff like this all the time) deep to center where it sails beyond human reach and disappoints everyone. But it also titillates everyone, for now we have a tie game, which is to say that the true essence of baseball, which so annoys the thinkers, at last reveals itself. The tying home run is what is called in literature a "complication." The plot thickens. For that is the essence of baseball: narrative. It's one big complex story written by young men with billion-dollar talents, egos the size of the warehouse and the self-awareness of guppies. Each pitch is a line, each at-bat a poem. An inning is a short story, three innings a novella, nine a modest but enterprising thriller. A season is a very fine novel; a pennant race reaches Dostoevski's level. What great characters, too. A prince named Ripken, a rich Ottoman emperor named Angelos, an Othello named Belle, a princeling named Anderson, an old squire named Murray, a Lancelot named Surhoff, a crippled yeoman named Clark, a general named Hargrove. And this is why we sit, in the sun, as today, or alone at home, in our underwear with a beer with much more important things to do that will never get done, and so what? We want to see how the story ends. We want to see the plot twists, the reversals, the small tragedies, the big humiliations, the nobility, the ignobility, the stupidity, the grandeur, as told by the greatest storyteller of them all, the one who can't be beat, that master known as real life. That sublime literary critic Yogi alone among them all got it right when he noted sagely, "In baseball, you don't know nothing." And you don't. Ain't it cool? Another complication: On a 1-1 pitch, Kenny Lofton skies a high tater that just barely tickles its way into the stands over B.J. Surhoff's leap. The plot thickens again. Them O's have exactly 12 more outs to avenge this sadness. Can they do it? And still another complication, of a more personal nature. Boswell gives me some sunflower seeds. Baseball men, he tells me, are big on sunflower seeds. I am far too phony to admit I have no idea what to do with sunflower seeds. I gobble them manfully. Arrrgh! Whatever you do, you don't chew the things. My mouth fills with shell flecks, like pieces of hard corn, large granules of salt, Fritos made from teak. It's horrible. I wait till he's not looking and flee to the men's room, where I spew seed frags for about 10 minutes, then knock down Diet Coke No. 5 for the day (they're free up here!). In the bottom of the seventh, we're looking for a hero, with two on and two out, DeShields hitting. And we find one. Unfortunately he works for them. DeShields puffs a soft liner that seems crazed on catching that dead zone too deep for the shortstop yet too shallow for the left fielder. But Omar Vizquel has other ideas. I love this part of baseball, too. Shortstop Vizquel launches himself from the earth and seems to hang suspended for quite a while. He's like a man at true repose in midair, unhurried, a cartoon character who hasn't noticed gravity yet. But it's all a trick, another drama of interception. Somehow as he falls, the top three millimeters of his glove snare DeShields's dying quail; he has it, tumbles, rolls and comes back to his feet. That's the ball he squeezes like a lover in his hand. (Yes, I know instant replay in slow-mo ended the "poetic" school of sportswriting for all time, and you all saw this great play leventy-leven times tonight, but I'll never sit in this row again, so I think I'll have some fun.) The charge sounds again. Alas, Mussina's magic has deserted him, those other fellows pummel a flurry of hits this way and that, and we're now down by three with but two more frames to go. The plot hasn't thickened, it's sickened. Today there will be no miracles. It all ends 3 hours 7 minutes after it begins, that is, 54 outs later, and for me five free hot dogs, five free Diet Cokes and 27 free sunflower seeds later. It ends not with a whimper and not with a bang but just the faintest whisper of thrill: a long fly out to center with a man on, and in the twilight, the sun has come out in a particularly orange, end-of-day glow as if to please my literary conceit, and frame that last official act, the purest, saddest act of the game if you happen to be on the losing end. He catches it. It might be called ball, interrupted. The story has begun, and now it's 1/162nd finished. © 2000 The Washington Post Company |