Baseball, Bums and Bliss

"I like to look down on a field of green and white, a summertime land of Oz, a place to dream. I've never been unhappy in a ballpark."
Jim Murray, LA Times

Spring...the season of new beginnings. The heck with daffodils waking and poking thru the ground, I'm focused more on bats coming out of hibernation and poking hits thru the infield. Yep, I'm packing my bags for a long weekend in Clearwater. Spring training baseball and sunshine. For me, there is nothing that evokes spring better than the sound of a wood bat hitting the rawhide and the smell of fresh grass intertwined with the aroma of popcorn. It has been said that whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball. Those who know yours truly, say the same about me. When it comes to baseball, I know more than the average Joe (with apologies to my husband who altho is a "Joe" is by no means "average"). I have more than once caught an unsuspecting man by surprise with my baseball savvy. This is due in part to my above-average "non-Joe" of a dad.

If there is one consistent in my life, where I can totally concentrate on the here and now and block everything else life throws my way, it is a baseball game. Nine innings of total bliss where the clock is obsolete, and I am completely honed in and focused. The perfect combination of individualism and team work, the attributes that define America also define it's homegrown sport. Baseball is forever linked in my mind to childhood, to a blue transistor radio, and to collecting the entire 1971 Phillies starting line up in photos with each fill-up at the local Sunoco station (it was a happy day when dad finally brought home 1st baseman Deron Johnson's picture for me to tape up on my bedroom wall). It is also linked eternally to the sentiment "those bums", which I would hear my dad spit out everytime the Phillies blew a game....which apparently was the entire decade of the 1970's!

I find it quite funny, in a cosmic sense, that my dad was "blessed" with a family of three DAUGHTERS! I am talking about a former ballplayer himself who was never able to play a game of catch with a son, debate the pros and cons of the designated hitter, discuss the art of calling pitches, the beauty of a perfectly timed double play, the folly of a suicide squeeze, teach his son how to keep an official score card or how to break in a catcher's mitt. I'm sure he thought the love of the game would be unrequited by his girls. I never even played ANY sport. The only thing I could catch was a fire baton...albeit in a minuscule outfit while wearing knee high white boots. Come to think of it, my dad should have appreciated the fact that no outfielder could catch a fly ball under similar circumstances with such finesse!

But come to love the game I did. It is probably only within the last couple of years I have been able to identify the reasons WHY I love the game and make the connection to my dad. Dad was a police officer and later a District Justice. Growing up, his world was black and white with very few shades of grey to link the two extremes. You were either wrong..or you were right (I was usually wrong, by the way). I have been accused of the same color-blindness by my own kids. In reality, he was a perfect ump in disguise as my dad. The authority and decisiveness he would use to make his calls on my actions might as well have been "you're OUTTA here!" ejections from the game. And just like you never show up an ump on the field by arguing calls...the same went for my dad once he made a call, lest I be benched indefinetely.

Just like my dad, baseball is a thing of beauty due to it's precise and honest nature. It's a dramatic game, a thinking man's game played out under strict guidelines and confines with clear decisions. Baseball encompasses everything that life does. Crime and punishment, cause and effect, motive and result, ying and yang. If life were only as simple and easy as strike or ball, fair or foul, safe or out, black or white. There is an easiness of order that I find comforting. No matter how complex or complicated my life might be at a given moment, I can count on baseball to be a calm oasis and a place to re-focus. I view my dad in the same light. Funny how it can take a long time to realize something that is so obvious. Baseball is a sport of fathers and sons.....and the occasional lucky daughter.

Don't Blink,
K