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I Don’t Care if I Ever Get Back |
| I love the game of baseball.The sport is not in its heyday.?The National Pastime is arguably the third most popular American sport, behind football and basketball and ahead of that north-of-the-border curiosity, hockey.?Young people, amped on the fast-paced style of modern life and with the attention span of a hummingbird on speed, consider baseball boring.?It lacks the brutality of football and the constant scoring of basketball.??It's mired in scandal involving steroid use, and it's saddled with a plethora of underperforming players with bloated ?and obscene salaries.I don't care.?It's my sport.?I love the stadiums.?They are palaces capable of seating the entire population of small towns.?The playing fields are canvases of emerald green and earthy brown, with pure ivory outlines.?Their layouts are schizoid:?infields plotted with uniform precision, ninety feet between the bases, sixty feet six inches from pitcher's mound to home plate.?Yet the outfields are helter-skelter, walls from eight feet high to thirty-seven, and markings measuring the distance to the plate anywhere from 315 to 385 to 430.?I love the fans, so different in their various cities.? |
| I love the fans, so different in their various cities.?Incredibly loyal in Boston, loud and partisan in New York, knowledgeable and disciplined in their red attire in St. Louis, and casual and detached in Los Angeles.?They come to see and be seen, old men hunched over, recording each pitch in cramped scorecards with wizened, gnawed pencils, kids with team hats and shirts with their hero's name and number, pleading with a player for a pre-game autographed ball.I love the managers, perched like sea captains at the edge of the dugout, minds working furiously, searching for the right tactics to employ.?Old men wearing young men's uniforms, analyzing printouts of how his players fare when facing a left-handed pitcher on artificial turf at night in late-inning pressure situations on the road with cool detachment.?And then, protesting the impassive umpire's call, they kick dirt ?and dance around, screaming in apoplectic splendor as the home crowd shrieks its delight.And I love the players:?black, brown, yellow and white, from Canada and America and Australia; from threadbare lumpy sandlot fields in San Pedro de Macoris, Santo Domingo, to gleaming cathedrals in Osaka and Tokyo.?They run the gamut from short, wiry, speedy good-field-no-hit shortstops to tall, graceful, run-like-a-gazelle centerfielders to first basemen with biceps as big around as your thigh and who can launch a ball a mile, past the ranks and files of gleaming lights and off into the velvet indigo of the night.?Players with names like Joe Smith and Boof Bonser, Yadier Molina and Evan Langoria and Kosuke Fukidome and Chien-Ming Wang.I love the game, whether it's the Yankees and Red Sox in Fenway Park or Carl's Auto and Body Shop Giants against the Pizza Hut Marlins on County Little League Field Number Twelve.?I love sacrifice bunts and ground-rule doubles, back-door sliders and four-seam fastballs, five to four to threes and outfielder assists.I love baseball.? I Don't Care if I Ever Get Back 2008, Kenneth M. Rhodes |
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