"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again."
-Terrence Mann, Field of Dreams
Awakening this morning to news that the Phillies set some sort of home run record against the villainous Astros last night in the City of Brotherly Love.
Five dingers off one pitcher. Wow.
There's some conjecture that the poor pitcher was "tipping", inadvertently doing something that let the Phillies' batters know what pitch was coming.
Maybe. He denies it, and is a gifted enough pitcher to appear as a starter on the mound in the Fall Classic. I kind of doubt he'd make that sort of mistake. Baseball is, however, a game of subtle observation, and it's also possible that Bryce Harper or someone in the Phillies dugout saw some turn of foot or change in posture that signaled a sinker or a curveball were coming.
All the sort of thing that makes baseball a lot of fun. But what called me up short coming into this year's World Series was an article in the WaPo several days ago that pointed out this Series, for the first time in a half century, will include no American born black players:
Earlier in the season, as P and I sat parked in front of the television watching the Braves, I observed that one of the great things about baseball was that it looked so very much like America. You didn't need to weigh 350 pounds to play, or stand nearly seven feet tall. There were white kids from the suburbs like Dansby Swanson, immigrants like Ha-seong Kim from South Korea, and the delightful Michael Harris from East Atlanta. It's the best of America, what we (or at least some of us, judging from the current political winds) wish to see our country become, growing out of a sports relic of what it was.
Or so it seemed. As it turns out, there are fewer and fewer black kids in the United States taking up the game, and that failure at the little league level means less talent rising to the top from neighborhoods that appear loaded with athletically gifted young men, judging from their pipeline relationship with other sports (ever hear of Glades Central High School in Belle Glade? if you're a fan of college football, from Coral Gables to Iowa City, you've seen their alumni in action). These days, when you see a young man of African descent on the mound or stepping out of the dugout in a Major League game, he's most likely from somewhere in the Caribbean, where the game remains a vehicle for escaping poverty and faces no corrosive competition from the other, gladiatorial game we play around here on fall Saturdays and Sundays (and Mondays and Thursdays, thanks to lucrative television contracts).
What's going on here? Perhaps it's the rise of travel ball as pretty much the golden ticket to a college baseball scholarship. If you've not raised boys, you might've missed this development in helicopter parenting. Families blow their savings, and the parents their precious time off, carting their promising pitcher or shortstop around a constellation of ballparks sometimes hundreds of miles away, to play teams stocked with other privileged kids whose parents don't care that their offspring can't place Moliere or explain differential equations but will spend their way to penury to make sure little Caleb or whatever has the right coaches and instructors to perfect that curve ball by the time he's twelve.
And if he blows out the old elbow in the process, there's always Tommy John surgery.
Sometimes the parents don't wait until Junior's ulnar tendon tears, deciding instead to treat it as an elective surgery that might provide a margin for his breaking ball. And that's an option insurance almost certainly will decline to cover.
So, why has the game become so non-diverse, even in its seemingly most diverse moments? An American kid from a poor family can't compete, doesn't have parents with professions that afford the flexibility of travel ball and the liquidity of expensive sports camps and elective surgeries. Better luck next time, young man. You should've picked your parents more wisely.
I missed all this, of course, my boys having inherited my acute lack of hand-eye coordination and athletic prowess. Which makes me pretty grateful, in retrospect.
So I'll likely try to catch part of the game tonight, enjoy the color and the energy and the crowd going wild in Citizens Bank Park--Philly's sports teams always have the most zealous fans, which adds to the spectacle sometimes in not-so-great ways. Just ask the Manning brothers.
But the illusion of what the game represents is gone. A pity.
Time to get ready for a stupid, pointless hearing in a few minutes. A client was a little slow responding to discovery, and the other side filed a motion to compel. We got the documents to them yesterday, something like 27,000 pages of stuff no one in the plaintiff's camp will ever read, and I shot a message to the other lawyer asking if we could forgo the hearing. He declined to respond, probably figuring he'd ask for attorneys' fees for all the wasted effort. He shouldn't get them, I've never seen it happen in twenty-five years of doing this, but this judge and I have a rather rocky relationship, and given the lack of warmth flowing in either direction one never knows. This is the sort of exercise that leaves me pondering when it's time to hang up my own professional bat and glove, sell everything and enjoy what's left of my life. Feeling this way all the time, always under the gun and dealing with the sort of unpleasant folks who seem drawn to the law, is corrosive and ridiculous.
But I'm slipping into a bowtie to engage in the absurd exercise all the same.
댓글