May 13, 2010
“Baseball? It's just a game--as simple as a ball and a bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It's a sport, a business, and sometimes even a religion." - Ernie Harwell, The Game for All America, 1955.
There is something certain and steady about the game of baseball. It's not Quantum physics, or is it?
Poet and author Sharon Olds wrote in "This Sporting Life" in 1987, "Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up".
I know what she means. Baseball helps us forget our troubles, but why is that?
Maybe it is the reassurance of the stats that make us love it so much, and as we know, diehard fans love baseball stats, good or bad.
Stats are a sure thing. We can rely on them.
Baseball, according to baseball owner and mastermind Bill Veeck, is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world, and yes, indeed, it could be the stats.
Veeck explains, "If you get three strikes, think about it, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off."
Or when the numbers in your own life are not adding up so well, we would do well to remember the old adage, "Things could be worse. What if your errors were counted and published every day like those of a baseball player."
Now, that puts life in perspective.
There is an opposite to bad baseball stats, however, as Ted Williams once quipped, "Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer."
I like those odds.
In 1970, Mickey Mantle said this about baseball stats: "During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball."
And Norm Cash, legendary Detroit Tiger power hitter and first baseman after his 1,081 st strikeout, noted the same thing happened to him: "Pro-rated at 500 at-bats a year, that means that for two years out of the fourteen I played, I never even touched the ball."
Perhaps it is, in fact, the rhythm of baseball. The repetition, steadiness and the absolute sureness it provides during the summer months that make us love it so much.
After all, it is our national summer pastime, and we watch game after game after game, never tiring of it.
Baseball is always there, and so are its stats.
I am wondering. Is baseball indeed a mystery, something that we cannot comprehend, unlike the stat sheet in front of us?
Even though stats are the lifeblood of baseball, could baseball really be more likely about relativity, or molecular attraction, or theory or timing?
Whatever baseball is, it has a lot to do with the fundamental nature of the universe, the grand scheme of things; or if you will, the idea that things are much different than the world we see.
"More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood," --Thomas Boswell, Inside Sports.
Quantum physics?
