Never Enough

To the non-fan the grip this season has on me may be hard to comprehend. Baseball is just a sport, after all, played by overpaid jocks; and I'm not much of a sports fan. I haven't watched football with any regularity since young children cratered my Sundays twenty years ago. I only started watching basketball when the Kings came to Sacramento in 1985, and pretty much stopped once they demonstrated what sort of team they were. I like watching soccer for the same reason my grandmother liked watching golf: There's a lot of green.

But baseball is different. It isn't an analog for battle like most goal-oriented sports. It's a graceful and often balletic contest of strategy and skill and luck, full of personality, of long calm stretches, of moments of lightning speed, somehow echoing a gone but not forgotten era when the country lived mostly on farms and in villages and was just beginning to stretch her confident arms across the oceans.

And this year is different. Sports writers universally marvel at the Giants' improbable success with a team of youngsters and rejects suddenly finding their groove at just the right time; and the experience of this motley machine built on the shards of torture echoes in some ways my own season, the year to year uncertain mix of ambivalence and a seeming contentment suddenly shattered by a confluence of unplanned events to reveal a phase never previously experienced, and for all its rough edges, sharp and clear and exhilerating as a wind rising across the ocean. My heart fills for a lifelong dream that might come true -- just two more wins! -- and in so doing also fills with an unspeakable joy for hopes unarticulated but felt, almost seen, like the glow before the dawn.

But for all my pretentious projections, it is still baseball, and we cannot expect more than the unexpected.

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
   -- A. Bartlett Giamatti

I found a gem of a baseball article today, in the Guardian of all places, where English fans of the game speak of it in an English English that is in the rough context of sport a refreshing improvement on American English. Also there's a cute exchange wherein one commenter asks for a translation of the article from baseballese into English and gets this fine cricketish summary:

It was very close for two thirds of the game and then the Texas bowler got very tired, bowled a lot of wides and a lot of hittable stuff, SF scored a lot of runs and it was all over.

That fairly sums it up. Another commenter sends us to a blog post and a handheld video of an impromptu singalong with Steve Perry and the crowd singing "Lights", a tribute to the world's finest city that always tugs at my heart and this time had me just about burbling into my coffee.

While we're at it, some love from New York.

All about the sport that I love like an old friend, and the city that I love like a woman.