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Diamond-Shaped Life


That is what I do whenever I can:  I drive across town to watch the Tucson Old Timers play baseball, three times a week, all year long.  I do not make it three times a week, but most of the time I do.  Once I was a member of the team:  now I am an emeritus.  

 "Why," I regularly ask myself, "do I drive for almost an hour, to stare through a cyclone fence three times a week?"  I have not asked the question long enough, or seriously enough, to give really good answers, but I do know these things:

 1)  Baseball is a fine game!  It is not quite as complex as life itself, but it makes a fine analog.  It is a team game.  Nobody can play baseball all alone.  The best baseball player in the world--should he or she suddenly become a member of a team--cannot win a game alone, or for that matter, even play the game alone.  It takes teamwork.  

Baseball is not like rolling a ball down a wooden alley.  It is not like owning a dozen carbon-shafted sticks with wood or iron heads, and playing in a garden with holes in it.  Every time something happens, the circumstances are different:  Is the infield damp?  Is the ball slicing?  Who is playing second this time?  Can the batter run?  Does the cutoff man have an arm?  What's the score?  How many outs are there?

 If you cannot think, you cannot play baseball.  

2)  Nothing is simple:  everything is as complex as life itself.  An ordinary line drive, hit pretty much directly at a fielder, is very likely to seem to sail, or to dive, or to blink out of existence momentarily, and the fielder will discover that his two feet have mysteriously been swapped, and even though seventeen other people are shouting seventeen pieces of advice, none of them register except for the one that says, "Oh, not again!".  

 The pitcher may be just lobbing the ball, with nothing on it but hope and red dust, but you can still miss it by about a foot-and-a-half.  When you are good, and lucky, you can move to your right, pick up a well-hit ball, pick it effortlessly into your throwing hand, and realize that you don't know how many outs there are, or where the runners are, or where the second-baseman is, what it is that somebody--Is it Chico?--is yelling louder than God on Mt. Sinai, and then you realize that first base is a hell of a long ways away; farther than ever before in your whole life:  you can barely see Floyd over there.  Then you trip because your right foot is now on the left side.  And when you get home, you know your wife is going to ask how it was.  Baseball is just like life, but somehow, it doesn't count as much.  
3)  A baseball team is not a gathering of best friends.  Sometimes it gets close to something like that, but almost always, you have to work with both the people you really like, and those who are . . . well, difficult.

The backstop at the ball field is pretty sturdy, but if you sit behind it, you still will hear the most contrary and confounded opinions expressed in public since Hector was a pup.  Dumb stuff!  And wise stuff, too.  Kind stuff.  Funny things.  Some of the players are really good, and some are barely able.  Most are in-between-ordinary.  Baseball, like life itself, takes them all and gives them a chance.  

 So I am not entirely sure why I drive across town a couple of times a week to sit behind a wire fence and watch sixty- and seventy- and eighty-year-olds play baseball.  I believe it has something to do with recognizing that those guys are still alive, playing a game that is something like being alive, and that they know something about what it is to stay alive.  None of them thinks he will live forever.  (Well, OK, maybe one or two, and if not forever, at least a bit longer than Clarence.)  They know that they will quit someday--maybe soon, maybe not so soon--but that, in the meantime, playing baseball is a wonderful way to be alive.  


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