The brine of hot dogs, the tang of cheap beer, the undulating hum of thousands of exchanges, but above all: the enveloping warmth of midday sun. These are what I remember most about my first baseball game, a Mets-Pirates affair at the old Shea Stadium in the summer of 1988, when I was only five.
The result is inconsequential to the memory. The magic was in simply being there, surrounded by people soaking up the daily dramas of America’s first working-class hero: the ballplayer.
For decades, summer in America was synonymous with baseball. It was the yardstick by which generations measured progress – of their city, of their country, but mostly of themselves. It remains the quintessential summertime sport, best taken in the full glare of a sweltering summer sun.
All other major professional sports – soccer and American football chief among them – are played so infrequently that games become events, spectacles that distract from the simple game that fulfills, if somewhat tangentially, our desire as humans for play. Not baseball: five, six, sometimes seven days a week, players clock in at the ballpark in pursuit of workmanlike excellence. How can you not catch a glimpse of your own struggles in their trials?
A day at the ballpark provides many moments for such contemplation: conversation flows, as languid and natural as the action on the field, punctuated by outbursts of elation, frustration, humor, anguish. It is a reflection of the arc of our own lives.
Baseball briefly lost its way trying to appeal to a new America that had rejected it in favor of the annihilation and mayhem of football – a sport that reflects its worst tendencies. Perhaps this accounts for baseball’s slow but undeniable demise: Americans prefer instead to watch our heroes (quite literally, in many cases) destroy themselves in the quest for glory. Better to burn out than to slowly fade away.
I disagree. Baseball is and always will be the one true American pastoral, a lens to the nostalgic vision of America that Americans appear to increasingly pine for. Its backdrop, pacing and enduring narrative are medicine against the nonstop frenzy of the modern day.
