Who knew baseball had heartaches?
It's the great American pastime: the crack of the bat, the smack of the glove, the way the dirt flies when those graceful giants steal second base and the crisp team uniforms soiled at the game's end.
It's the guy with a Bud Light cap and dirty cut-off shorts yelling "Cold beer, get your beer," the smell of hotdogs and cotton candy from the nose-bleed seats, the umpire's "strike three!" and the glow in the little boy's eyes when he stacks one fist on top of the other and swings the imaginary bat in his hands and with everything inside of him, hits the game-winning grand-slam because, for those nine innings, he gets to live his dream uninterrupted.
No one will tell him he has to go to college and come home with good grades and a steady paycheck because giving it all up for baseball is not responsible; it's the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, count full, last-minute steal that gives the home team a win and the words of late Cardinal's announcer Jack Buck sounding through the speaker, "That's a winner."
It's baseball, and when we watch it, if only for a moment, we can forget about our jobs and paying bills and the dirty dishes waiting in the sink at home. It's there, above the diamond, a 17-year-old adolescent into punk rock and piercings, realizing for the first time his old man's kinda' cool, and that maybe he even knows a few things about life.
From the royal stands, we forget we are living, because living rarely seems this sweet; when the only conflict is going on beneath us and losing doesn't seem so bad, because they still get paid $7 million a year. Even those who are not self-proclaimed baseball fans can't help but relish in the magic of a crowd of people who could never agree on Democrat or Republican, Budweiser or Coors, iMac or PC, Cubs or Cards, standing together, with the exception of those too inebriated to stand by the seventh-inning stretch to sing "Take me out to the Ballgame" in some sort of off-key harmony.
The kind of harmony - if we could just stop worrying about war and discrimination and government deficit and the University's budget shortfall - we would want for ourselves if for only one glorified flash in our short existence on earth.
Then Cardinal's pitcher Darryl Kile dies in his sleep at age 33. He was so young, we say; it was so tragic. Our much too-short dream has ended and again, for the first time, we realize that yes, baseball has heartaches too; that the gentle giants that look like mere play things in our midst sweat and bleed, love and divorce, live and die.
We all have our troubles, our responsibilities, our ever-widening generation gap, and if we're lucky, we will always have baseball.
Published on 11/17/05; 12:24:44 PM
