I finished watching Ken Burns’ Baseball and that gives me an excuse to write about the greatest game in January. But first a word from my life.
On the bus ride home from the supermarket yesterday my phone rang; it was my gastroenterologist. She got the results of my MRI. She wants to move up my next appointment with her from April to ASAP. That’s not a good sign. They didn’t find anything new, my Crohn’s disease is quiescent. What concerns her is the amount of previous damage to my intestines. I could have told her that. When 45 centimeters of my small intestine were removed the surgeon said that it was as bad as he’d ever seen. Of course, that part is gone but damage had been done to the rest in the last 18 years. Thanks to Montefiore excellent IT website I got to see the report on the MRI myself. I couldn’t see the pictures. That was disappointing. I have more than the two hernias the surgeon saw when he examined me. I will eventually have surgery to fix those, I suppose that while he’s in there he’ll fix everything. The GI is going to put me on meds. That’s why she wants to see me. I expected that she would. I was surprised that she thought I didn’t need them after the colonoscope. She had to see for herself the extent of the damage. Don’t worry about me. I’m not sick. I feel fine. This is all just precautionary. I feel good about this. I’m getting things taken care of.
The real exciting news happened when I was shopping; the Stop & Shop now has shaved beef; that means I can make cheesesteaks! Guess what I had for dinner. This as my first cheesesteak in ages. I’m a heretic. I didn’t make it with Cheez-whiz. I used pepper jack. It was so good, one of my favorite meals. I bought the baby potato medley from Trader Joe’s my last visit so I got to have extra good roasted potatoes with it. I know it’s all in my head but blue potatoes are the best.
OK, now for Baseball. Amazon has the complete series including the 10th inning. There are 11 parts, as the 10th inning is broken down into the top and then the bottom of the 10th. We are talking 22 hours of material. Can you imagine a documentary about any other sport where you’d find 22 hours riveting? Where you wish there were more? That is the overriding message of the documentary, that baseball is not just about the present, it’s about the past, present, and the future. No other game has such a sense of history. It’s over a century ago but people still remember Merkle’s Boner. They know the trio of bear cubs, Tinkers, to Evers, to Chance. You don’t have to be a deep fan to know that Cy Young won 511 games. Best way to put that in perspective. Imagine a pitcher winning 30 games 17 years in a row. That would leave him one win short of Denton True Young’s total.
Say, “the Babe” to anyone, not just a baseball fan and they will know you mean, George Herman Ruth. They’ll know he’s the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat. They’ll know what he looks like. They’ll know not only that Ty Cobb batted .367 (really .366) but that he was a bastard. Bobby Thompson’s home run, the “Shot heard round the world” is not just the greatest moment in sports history and the greatest call of a play, it’s a great moment in American history. The Dodgers moved to LA the year I was born, but da Bums forever belong to Brooklyn. I bet you know that the Cincinnati Red Stockings were the first all professional team and that they were founded in 1869, just four years after the Civil War ended. Cooperstown is named for James Fenimore Cooper who lived there but its first association is the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Hall is there because of a lie, Abner Doubleday did NOT invent baseball, he might have never seen a game of baseball. But that’s where the Hall is and they aren’t going to move it to Hoboken where it belongs. That’s fine because baseball is not just history, it’s myth, it’s Jungian archetypes, it’s in the mind of the beholder.
Before there was Martin Luther King, before there was Brown v The Board of Education, before there was Rosa Parks; there was Jackie Robinson fighting hard to not fight back. Showing the world that he was a gentleman, a mensch, and a helluva ballplayer. As much as anyone he willed his teams to win. He stole home 19 times, in his short career, One of only two players to do it as many as 10 times since World War II.
The Red Sox could be the protagonist of a novel. The went from the heights, to the depths, then once more to the heights, never losing the devotion of their fans. The have won 9 world championships, every one in a decade that started with a 0 or a 1. They won 5 between 1903 and 1918, sold Babe Ruth in 1919. Then won none until 2004. They’ve won 4 between 2004 and 2018 and reign now as champions of the world.
Baseball wasn’t perfect, I wish it had gone into Dwight Gooden’s epic 1985 season, and Chris Von der Ahe’s St. Louis Browns of the 1880s. It told the story of the 86 world series from the point of view of the BoSox not the Mets, but it was a no-hitter. That’s good enough. It went out of its way to make the players more human, and in the process made the game more mythic. It’s played and run by flawed human beings yet can exalt our spirit. Baseball makes no presence to moral authority but it can feel like a religion, it can feel like patriotism. In 1969 we learned nothing is impossible, we walked on the moon and the Mets won the World Series.
Ty Cobb was a racist, Ruth a prodigal, and Rose a gambler and liar, and Bonds took steroids but Heracles, Achilles, Sigurd, and Samson, were flawed too. Homer could have written epics about baseball instead of Troy.
Shakespeare would see Bonds as a hero with a fatal flaw.
I love basketball, the City Game, it’s as tied to New York as baseball is to America. But it’s not timeless. It doesn’t live in the past, present, and future. More than anything baseball is about that half second between a pitcher releasing the ball and the batter swinging. All the rest of what happens is set by that half second. It’s the best half second in the world.
Wise Madness 