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“No time like October...” I love to (mostly) ignore baseball all year and then follow the playoffs religiously. I’m writing this week’s list of 10 while listening to a game, in fact…
“It 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 evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” That’s the opening of “The Green Fields of the Mind,” collected in the slim, wonderful volume A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti. Highly recommended if you like thinking about America, baseball, and The Odyssey.
One of my favorite artists, Saul Steinberg, “believed that in order to understand America you had to study baseball.” In 1955, LIFE magazine ran a feature of his baseball drawings called “Steinberg at the Bat.” Steinberg, a Romanian immigrant, was initially bewildered by the game: “I couldn’t figure out how a big crowd of primitive, simple people would sit down on their seats and watch no action…” (He sounds like my kids!)
“They never kept score, they never chose sides, they never even really stopped playing the game. It just went on forever. Every day they picked up where they left off the day before. It was like an endless dream game…” The Sandlot was a big pizza night hit in our house, as was the original Bad News Bears.
Blackout poems from the sports section. (Related: Baseball Card Vandals.)
“I had a friend who was an old baseball player…” Every time the Brewers win, they play Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” because manager Pat Murphy is big fan. I like that song a lot, but as our friend Steven Hyden explains, like other songs on Born in the U.S.A., there’s a lot more to it — it’s a sad song that sounds happy: “People hear that song at baseball games, and they think, ’Oh, what a nice song about nostalgia.’ And then you dig deeper, look at the lyric sheet and it’s like, he’s talking about how depressing it is to end up on a barstool and talking about how great your life used to be. It’s a song against nostalgia, not endorsing nostalgia.”
The word “nostalgia” combines the Greek words nostos (“homecoming”) and algos (“pain”). Here’s Giamatti again: “Baseball is about going home, and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need. It tells us how good home is. Its wisdom says you can go home again but that you cannot stay. The journey must always start once more…”
In Don’t Call It Art, I quote actor Bill Murray talking about baseball: “If you can stay light, and stay loose, and stay relaxed, you can play at the very highest level—as a baseball player or a human being.”
