“Baseball,” as Michael Chabon observed in McSweeney’s no. 36, is “a game that somehow seems to offer more room, a greater scope than other sports, for the consciousness of failure and defeat—has always been associated, in its own history and my own, with a sense of loss, the idea of the lost arcadia, the last patch of green folded into a pocket of the world of brick and asphalt.” The sport is a dissonant blend of nostalgia and modernity.
On the one hand, as Chabon says, it is a sport stubbornly resistant to change. The unhurried pace, the managers in uniform, the persistence of Fenway and Wrigley, the timeless sound of vendors calling out over the chatter of multitudes—these are all dogged holdouts, boulders in the stream of capital-P Progress, a refuge of familiarity in a world that often feels bent upon making itself unfamiliar from one day to the next.
As George Carlin once put it, the objective of baseball is to go home.
But baseball is also about wiping out the past. It is a sport of endless summers and new beginnings, of hope revived every spring in the unchanging climes of Florida and Arizona. And like all American sports, it’s one of ever-expanding playoffs, of exponential salary increases and lockouts, of sabermetrics and steroids, of stadiums that double as amusement parks, anxious that the game alone isn’t enough to entertain us.
Like one of those Psych 101 drawings that depicts either an old woman or a young girl depending upon your perspective, baseball is both old and new, Roy Hobbes and Billy Beane, the Green Monster as well as whatever they call that Tommy Bahama acid dream out in Miami’s left field. It’s left to the fans to choose which side of the diptych to see.by James Santel
Paris Review – October Surprise; or, How to Follow a Perfect Season, James Santel
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