Good evening! I hope you all had excellent winter holidays. After a brief break of my own, here is a piece fully intended to proselytize, or at the very least, to beckon you towards the madness that is America’s Pastime.
Baseball is storytelling. On an unseasonably warm Thursday afternoon in March of this year, the strangest game America has invented will begin in earnest. On that first day alone, the stories will start. They may go a little something like this. First, a 200-pound man with no discernible athletic contour to his body steps up to a raised dirt mound. He flings a 100-mph fastball, faster than you can blink – that white ball spins like a planet. A tan, squint-eyed man about the height of your average tree slices the air with his club. This club is so surprisingly heavy, that when batters toss it to children in the seats, they buckle and blink under its weight. Behind that weight, all the batter catches is air, and he masticates, growls, frowns into the distance. The ball has slapped into the glove of a crouching, armored man, and the black-clad general behind him has punched the air screaming STRRRRIKE ONE! This is my lucky bat, the batter fumes, chewing hard at his gum. He touches both his sleeves, taps the bat twice in the box, and taps it once on his helmet – he once saw his favorite player do something similar as a teenager, and it’s stuck ever since. He knows it’s stupid, to hinge success on luck rather than his own ability, but it works, and it’s only about as stupid as some other players’ rituals.
Now the armored catcher calls for a knuckleball, throwing down a code of numbers so maddening in its inscrutability that the pitcher spits, takes off his cap, and studies the inside of it with near-academic rigor. (NB: The knuckleball, once a mainstay of mid-2010s pitchers like R.A. Dickey and Steven Wright, has become virtually extinct in today’s game. This is one longing fan’s attempt to manifest its return.) He enters his stance and magically, his unwieldy frame does not interfere with the lightning bolt that sings from his hand. Because in that moment, the pitcher is Zeus, crafting something murderous and divine from an inanimate thing. The white globe no longer spins– this knuckleball is the moon, showing us the same pockmarked face every night even as it sails down its orbit, wiggling along its predestined curve. But the batter, his cleats burrowing a hole into the dirt, his bat swirling the air above his head, his ass a-twerk, is smirking. He has paid attention during the endless hours of pitching film that is part of his pre-game routine. He knows what pitch is coming.
An almighty crack, and the ball is driven to the left in such a neat, hard line that some young girl watching in the stands, new to baseball and its beauty, suddenly understands why they call it a line drive. The batter sprints to the first diamond white base, a great roar rising around him. The stadium lights brighten, the grass in the outfield trembles. The ball is caught by an outfielder in left field bent at the knees – but then fumbled! The roar pitches up. A cricket fan watching at home crinkles his nose. He feels the familiar feelings – disdain for this overlong, unathletic, deeply American game, and comfort that he has chosen the correct sport to support – for how can someone hold a glove the size of a bucket and let a ball the size of an apple slip through? But the batter has sprouted wings at his heels – he rounds second base, his helmet flying off, stadium lights diamonding a mop of sun-bleached hair. The outfielder has recovered – thin-lipped and quick, he flicks up the ball and throws it to the third baseman with an intelligence and accuracy that belies his earlier clumsiness, his mistake from a second ago. It will be a difficult highlight for him to watch later, and now the batter is flying to third base.
The roar deepens, booms, jangles the ground and the air with untenable, unimaginable electricity. Pinstripes begin to bloom in rows as fans stand up from their seats, emerging like so many wide-eyed meerkats. Flags with two navy blue initials so famous they now signify the city itself wave frantically in the air. A group of young male fans who will travel from upstate to the Bronx almost every weekend until October slosh their beer and yell bloody murder. A father gesticulates wildly as his young son observes him – the boy is already building an inchoate system of beliefs about sport, family, New York City and the unfairness inherent to human life. For better or worse, he will one day imprint all of this onto his own offspring. Like a tender marionette jerked into life by an angel in the outfield, he joins everyone in making a sweeping circular motion toward third base – go, go, go! And! The batter slides to third base in a hurricane of red dust, but the waiting third baseman, his foot firmly on the base, goes into a full split and catches the ball just in time. OUT! The third base umpire raises a closed fist and the noise summits with an OOOH and breaks. Hands cradle every head in the stadium, but they drop to applaud this swaggering set of pinstripes, this brave Yankee, this man who is still somehow chewing cud as he enters his dugout to the consoling back-thumps of his teammates.
It was just a moment of fear, of panic, supplies the outfielder who fumbled the catch, his heart hammering. It won’t happen again. He is from one of the Dakotas, and it is only his second start with this San Francisco team. He turned twenty-three last week without his parents, in a cramped hotel room surrounded by six other triple-A players also living on $500 a week, before he was called up to play in the big leagues. I’ll work harder, and do better next time, he thinks. Peace resumes. The group of fans from upstate grin with possibility as they buy more beer, the father rubs his son’s back and promises a home run. The atmosphere is alert, hopeful. There is a new Yankee batter in the box, swinging his hips in a circle, oddly squat and square-jawed, lips pursed. The San Francisco pitcher spits, takes off his cap, studies it. And for the next hour, the game will move like molasses, featuring pitches just a bit outside the strike zone, countless swings and misses, useless jogs to first base and exactly zero home runs. Players will lollygag up and down the field…
… curse in Spanish then laugh, then summon the entire team for a secret meeting at the mound, their moving mouths shielded by those enormous gloves…
For a few precious moments however, it was like a wave cresting and crashing on a beach, a series of human movements so natural and elemental that life itself, with all its despair, forced hands, fortuitous timing, and second chances, is reflected back to us. An easy pop-up is fumbled. Someone steals a base. Oh, there is nothing like good baserunning. The threat of a no-hitter blankets the stands in delicious silence. Or some rookie will hit a home run with the bases loaded (this event has a deliciously disrespectful name - a grand slam.) When you see a double play, or even a triple play…
… for the first time, mankind becomes a fine piece of wind-up machinery operated by the universe, with powerful arms that catch and throw with such finesse, that you imagine golden gears and springs of metal ribbon inhabiting those arms, not animal muscle. Just watch Aaron Judge hit, and Jacob DeGrom pitch. And watch Shohei Ohtani do both. Watch Trea Turner slide into a base, and Tim Anderson send a walk-off home run into an Iowa cornfield (I will allow that this was a momentary slip on the part of the Yankees).
All of these stories, and they’re only from last year. The stories from this 200-year-old game can (and does) fill libraries. Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson making and breaking legendary records in the Negro Leagues. Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire undermining their superlative single-season home run records with allegations of steroid use. José Fernández and Tyler Skaggs burning so hard and bright that their life-threads snap too early. Because of these stories, the game persists, past the bench-clearing brawls, the sign-stealing scandals, past the overfunded administration and its underpaid players. Through it all, a simple game born out of sticks and balls and bred in New York itself, is unrelenting in its magic. Somewhere in America, someone is playing baseball. And a young girl in the stands is watching, slack-jawed, in love. Baseball is storytelling.
The New York Yankees will play their Opening Day game on March 30th, 2023, at 1:05 pm ET against the San Francisco Giants.