Twice in the past week, I have had men from other lands (France, Scotland) tell me that they don’t understand baseball. The Scot said (as the Brits always do) that the game is just “rounders, with arbitrary rules.” The Frenchman was concerned with “the big deal” about the game. Perhaps in each case, the man was displaying the stereotypical characteristics of the natives of his land: the pragmatic Scot curious about how the game is engineered, the philosophical Frenchman wondering how a slow-moving sport can inspire such devotion. To each, displaying good old American hubris, I promised to explain.

Which, of course, I can’t.

For the Scot, nearly anyone other than I would be a better instructor of the rules because I was never taught the rules; I just soaked them in out of the St. Louis ether, as I did pollen, humidity, and an appreciation of rivers and fried ravioli. This method of comprehension was occasionally haphazard and, in the case of innings, outright incorrect. As a child, I assumed that an inning began at the bottom and worked its way to the top; that was, after all, how the rest of the world operated. My Scot friend would be much better off, say, with Wikipedia, which explains: “The visiting team always bats first in each inning, and the visitors' turn at bat is often called the top of the inning, derived from the position of the visiting team at the top line of a baseball line score.”

I might have an easier time with the Frenchman, who is a photographer, and thus understands drama, light, positioning, stance, negative space, flow. All of these things are important in baseball.

For the purposes of this post, I looked up Louis Armstrong’s famous quote about jazz, another indigenous American art form, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” I wasn’t planning to rely on this slogan or to use it to respond to these earnest inquiring Europeans, to do so would be lazy and dismissive, if not rude. But while at the website, I found a host of other Armstrong quotes which apply, oh so well, to baseball players as well as jazz musicians:

“We all do `do, re, mi’ but you have got to find the other notes yourself.”

“What we play is life.”

“If ya ain’t got it in ya, ya can’t blow it out.”

and

“Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.”

So yes, I can get fancy and compare baseball to jazz, to the soul of America, I can harken any number of poets, writers and historians to provide pithy tributes, but all this would be about as effective as expecting a manual on sex education to convey the experience of actual sex.

Michel, Paul – you must watch the game. I will watch it with you; I will be the Virgil to your Dante, and perhaps you will understand the game on some level. But to really get it, I guess, you have to have grown up with it. It’s more than a game, it’s a tradition, it’s a family narrative.

Recently my brother blackberryed play-by-play my brother provided, in real time, to his fellow Little League parents who could not be present at a recent tournament game. It would probably come across as baffling nonsense to the European uninitiated, but to me it is as beautiful as the transcript of Vin Scully's play-by-play of the last inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game.

Labels: American art form, Baseball, baseball in families, jazz, Vin Scully

posted by Elizabeth at 10:57 AM   0 Comments

My dear friend Chris (of "Chris and Kris and Hyperhedonism") who works for a certain government agency because of his certain expertise, forwarded me the below correspondence. (BTW, Chris, because of his special government knowledge, tells me that NOAA stands for National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency or something along those lines. When the National Weather Service warning of severe weather crawls across the bottom of your screen while you're trying to watch Jon Stewart? The National Weather Service's dad is NOAA. But don't tell your friends you know this. It's not that it's a secret, it's just one of those things you shouldn't really know if you want to maintain your image as one too hip to know things like this.)

The amusing email:

Dear NOAA Employee,

This week I asked my brother, who is a SCIENTIST, why what happened in Myanmar (formerly Burma) is referred to as a "cyclone" while what happened in New Orleans (formerly New Orleans) is referred to as a "hurricane." My brother, although he is a SCIENTIST, initially gave me a somewhat incorrect answer involving the northern and the southern hemisphere and wind currents going clockwise and counter-clockwise and all that sort of thing that always makes my attention drift away. I thought if it was the same sort of weather pattern and the only difference was hemisphere, there was no need to create a whole new word for it; they could have just said "norricane" and "surricane."

My brother and I then questioned how an Iowa basketball team and a minor-league baseball team based in Brooklyn, New York, could be called the Cyclones when they are in the wrong HEMISPHERE. My brother suggested that the Iowa team be renamed "The Tornados" while I offered the "Race Riots" as an appropriate name for the Brooklyn team, since race riots are the type of disaster that occurs most often in that borough. Despite the reasonable explanation of my suggestion, my brother emailed back, "Nice comment, Don!" which means he thought my comment was racist and is a private family reference to my father, but you don't want to hear about that.

ANYWAY, NOAA Employee, after this bit of sibling banter, my brother changed course (a metaphor you will appreciate!) and thought maybe the hurricane/cyclone issue had something to do with an east/west division of the globe, rather than a north/south one. In other words, even though he is a SCIENTIST, and always harping on accuracy, he did not know for sure! In my hour of need, I turned to the NOAA website, and learned the accurate terminology for all manner of windstorms occurring on coastlines! I promptly cut and pasted this information (I hope the govt doesn't mind!) and sent it not only to my brother, who was grateful for the information, but to all kinds of my friends, who have not yet emailed back yet to tell me if they were. Grateful, I mean.

Some of my friends seem to think I am odd for insisting on knowing why things are called what they are called. Isn't that funny? I would think everyone would want to know that. For example, if you lived in a place called Silver Spring, wouldn't you want to know if there was a spring, and if it was silver? I f you lived in a town that had a street called Steinway, wouldn't you like to know that that was because the street ended at the Steinway Piano Factory, the last remaining piano factory in New York City, which was once home to 86 piano factories?

Maybe you would not.

But I think you would, NOAA Employee.

Yours very truly,

A Devoted Taxpaer

Labels: Baseball

posted by Elizabeth at 11:18 PM   0 Comments