19 February 2013 –
This blog entry is
important. Some will ignore, some will roll their eyes, and others
simply will not understand. No matter. The greatest game
that the world has ever been blessed with is baseball. In real ways,
life imitates baseball.
In 1960, I was watching
the Saturday Game of the Week on television. We did not get a color
television for another seven years, so I was watching black and white
baseball. I was sitting in the big arm chair in the front room at
610 Broadway, Helena, Montana, watching the Boston Red Sox play the Washington
Senators. Curt Gowdy, I learned later, was the long-time voice of
the BOSOX, and he was announcing the game with that distinctive voice that all
old baseball fans recognize. The camera panned the field, the right
field bleachers, and the famous Green Monster wall in left field. It
was a sold-out game that Saturday, the crowd was noisy, and the little boy in
the big arm chair was mesmerized by the spectacle. So this is real
baseball, I remember thinking. This ball field was much grander than
the gravel playground of Central Grade School, which we called the
Battlefield. So, this Fenway Park is a real baseball park. Neato,
I thought. A real place with real things happening.
I remember watching a
tall, somewhat skinny guy walk to the plate, tap the ground with his bat, take
a practice swing from the left side, and take his stance. He
ignored the first pitch as if it were not worth his effort. On the
second pitch, he pulled a screaming line drive into right field that bounced
only once on the warning track before it hit the wall and bounced directly back
toward the right fielder. The hit was hit so hard that the right
fielder barely had time to react. He caught the ball off the wall
and threw it to the second baseman, who was at the edge of the grass where he
was supposed to be, waiting to take the throw. After catching the
ball, the second baseman spun quickly around toward first base in time to see
the batter make his short, confident turn around first and then return to the
bag, like he had done it a thousand times before. The batter was
the immortal Ted Williams in his last year of play. I learned later
that he broke into the league in 1939, hit .406 in 1941, spent nearly five
years in the prime of his playing career as a Marine fighter pilot in WWII and
Korea, and won his last batting title at the age of 38, far older than anyone
thought possible. He was the greatest hitter to ever play the game,
and I saw him hit. So smooth, so powerful, so fast a bat. Even
as a little, uneducated boy, I knew I was watching somebody remarkable.
That late morning in
Helena, two time zones earlier than Boston, a veritable world away from the
real action, my body underwent a chemical change. I saw Fenway Park
on that small, black and white screen, and I immediately bonded with it. I
saw Ted Williams swing a perfect bat, and I immediately became a Red Sox fan,
for the rest of my life. I devoured the game, its statistics, its
traditions, its unmatched symmetry, pace, flow, and elegance. Nothing
is as sweet as the sound of a fastball smacking a catcher’s mitt or the sound
of a 34 ounce, carefully crafted ash bat hitting a fastball into the gap
between left and center field. Nothing is as balanced as history
marked by the numbers of the game. Sixty homers by Babe Ruth in
1927. Sixty-one homers by Roger Maris in 1961. Thirty-one
games won by Denny McLain in 1968. Three hundred eighty-three
strikeouts by Nolan Ryan in 1973. One hundred ninety runs batted in
by Hack Wilson in 1930. The numbers matter because they calibrate
the game as numbers do not do in any other game. They are beautiful
in themselves because they remind the fan of human failures, triumphs, and the
excitement of the competition. They are sacred to the game.
Therefore, those players
who have taken performance enhancing drugs to hit the ball a little farther, to
throw a little harder, to recover a bit faster in order to play a day game
after a night game, to improve their statistics, are not worthy of the gifts
God gave them to begin with. Their numbers are meaningless, except
to remind true fans that these cheats should never be associated with the game
again, ever. They should never be considered for the Hall of Fame,
and their names should never be mentioned as worthy of respect. Never. I
will forgive them as men, but never as ball players. The little boy
in me, sitting in the big arm chair so many years ago, knows that I am
right. The little boy in every true fan knows that I am right.
By the way, Spring
Training starts soon, and my Red Sox are coming back!
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