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Take me out to the ballgame... |
Tuesday, June 1, 1999 Baseball (An Imperfect Extended Metaphor) In the beginning, God created the baseball diamond. And the baseball diamond was formless and void, and the spirit of God hovered above the dirt. And God said, "Let there be turf!" And there was turf. And, lo, in the following days, there were also bases, and a pitcher's mound, and a giant scoreboard, and bleachers, and bathroom facilities, and adequate parking outside. And God looked at the baseball diamond, and saw that it was good.
I'm going to skip forward a bit, zooming right past the creation of the first coaching staff, and their eating of the Cracker Jack from the Concession Stand of Knowledge of Balls and Strikes. Instead, let's move ahead to the point where God designated His Chosen Team, and told them of their mission, at the Mound of the Pitcher. It was there that the entire club heard God's commandment: THOU SHALT PLAY BALL! While that certainly seemed all-inclusive, there were clearly details to be worked out. So the manager at the time, Moses, went up to the Mound, and came back with the Rulebook. The Rulebook was long and involved, with Rules to cover all sorts of situations, from ground-rule doubles, to when games could be called off on account of darkness. But some of the basics were as follows:
In addition to the Rulebook, God told Moses a corresponding body of Rules and Interpretation necessary to properly use the Rulebook. So where, for instance, the Rulebook stated the maximum amount of pine tar that could be applied to a baseball bat, the instructions of what to do if a bat was found in mid-game to have had too much pine tar was left to the Oral Lore. And Moses passed this information down to the Umpires who followed him. And the people played ball, hewing carefully to the Rules, given by God. For, lo, God had told them that "If thou playest ball, and keepeth My commandments, then shall ye live. But if thou lay down thy bats, thou shall falleth into iniquity, and a pestilence will fall upon the land, and even the Astroturf shall wither, and thou shalt be utterly cast out," and they hearkened well. So ball they played. And all was well. Furthermore, they understood that while the Rules had to be obeyed to the letter for the Game to count, the Game was more than just Rules. There was a spirit to it, too. A feeling. A code of ethics. It was cheering at the top of your lungs in the bleachers at the bottom of the ninth, when, with two men down, and a man on third, and your team behind by one, the heavy hitter comes up and belts one over the fence. It was tipping your cap at the crowd. It was a hot dog with relish, passed over to your seat by three perfect strangers. It was all of that, and much more. The question "But isn't it too confining? I mean, doesn't having to follow all the Rules make the game boring?" would have been laughed out of the stadium.
Anyway, we'll skip again, past a couple of later groups who followed only the Rulebook, and rejected the Oral Lore, despite internal evidence calling for the latter, as they mostly disappeared over time. We shall skip further, past any number of oppressors who didn't believe in any sort of organized sports, and enacted laws against the playing of baseball, and persecuted anyone who so much as wore a baseball cap. For that matter, we shall skip past a splinter group which changed a number of rules in a significant manner, creating what would become known as cricket, which would ultimately become even more popular than baseball. (I did say this was an imperfect metaphor.) And we shall skip an even later group that claimed that baseball and cricket were nice as far as they went, but that God really wanted people to play softball. The baseballers were happy that people in general had at least started accepting and appreciating sports, even if they were playing different games. But we shall skip all this, as I said, because they are extraneous details thrown in because the author of this piece can't help himself.
We arrive, instead, at the 18th Century, and the Enlightenment. A belief in the power (and paramount importance) of human reason was in the air, and many of our baseball players were no exception. It is absurd to think that God really cares about the infield-fly rule, they declared. Baseball is, after all, only a human construct, which responded to the particular needs of the time in which it was invented. (The Rulebook, of course, wasn't really dictated by God to Moses; indeed, looking through the Rules, one detects the hands of several authors. Clearly, the Rules were cobbled together gradually over the years.) It was the spirit of baseball that was important, they said, not the rules, and there were better, more mature and modern ways of achieving that spirit. It would be utterly inappropriate to keep playing the game in this day and age, they said. And so, they cast off their bats, balls, and gloves, and worked to establish a new response to their own times, about which more later. But it is worth noting that they still claimed to be baseball players; indeed, the only baseball players true to the real spirit of the game.
There was, as is usual in such cases, a counter-counter reaction. This third group agreed that those who followed the rules exactly as written, along with the Oral Lore supposedly passed down from umpire to umpire, stretching all the way back to Moses, were relics of the past. But they did not agree that the Rulebook was a completely human construct, either. Rather, they saw it as a collaboration between God and man. After all, they reasoned, the Umpires always had the power of interpretation. It was they who determined whether a given pitch was a ball or a strike; whether a hit was fair or foul. It was they who decided whether metal bats could be used or not. Thus, since they had always been collaborators of a sort, this collaboration could be expanded, and rules could be adapted, altered, or even discarded, through a popular vote on the matter. They, too, claimed to be the true baseball players; the ones who truly understood the balance between God's Rules and man's application of them, in order to properly play the Game.
We move along in time to the present day, when, unaccountably, those purists playing traditional baseball, with all the Rules and traditions in effect, have failed to disappear, and are still playing the Game the way their ancestors played it, to the best of their ability. And it would seem that those in the other two groups get mightily offended when informed that those in that outdated group don't believe that the new-style players are really playing baseball. Mind you, most of the old-timers agree that the people in the other two groups are, by and large, wonderful, well-meaning individuals, with the same birthright as anybody else descended from the original baseball players. They might even be amenable to the idea that the other groups are playing another game, no less valid than cricket, softball, or countless other sports. But they stubbornly insist on their definition of "baseball" as being the only accurate one for the term. How dare they? But let's be fair here. Perhaps we can agree that the Designated Hitter doesn't fundamentally alter the game, and that the "wild card" is necessary to adapt to our times. But the most modern of the three leagues has decided that batters no longer need to run the bases; that physically throwing a ball isn't required, either; a pitching machine will do just fine, if a ball is even used; that 162 games is excessive, and that one game -- the Fall Classic -- is good enough for most people; and that it's not whether you win, or lose, or how you play the game, but merely the thought that counts. Looking at what remains, one might be forgiven for asking: At what point does the game stop being baseball?
I'd like to point out that, like some of the other entries I anticipate writing in this series, this does not attempt to offer an objective viewpoint, even metaphorically. Nor does the subjective viewpoint represented necessarily reflect my own. Nor do I really know how some of the minor details of the metaphor translate to real life terms, so don't worry if you think you're missing something. Just now, I'm still throwing puzzle pieces out there. Also, I suspect that I swiped the baseball metaphor from someplace else, some time back, but have forgotten the original source. If so, I've greatly expanded and adapted it to fit my own needs.
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