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