by Richard Rosen
As every baseball fan knows, there’s not one but actually two calendars that map and track the days of each year. Of course there’s your slightly off-kilter Gregorian calendar. Why the old year doesn’t end and the New Year begin at the winter solstice as it properly should, when the Sun "stands still" (sol, sun + stit, to stand) in the sky to signal a significant change in the environmental light, which everywhere and for all times represents a similar change or rebirth in consciousness, our "inner light", is beyond me. Then the seasons with their solstices and equinoxes would logically begin on the first days of a month, spring on April 1, summer on July 1, and fall on October 1.
Well, I’m not here to reform this calendar; it’s been tried many times before with zero success. What I am here to talk about is the second calendar, the calendar that organizes the Baseball Year (BY), and which for simplicity we’ll call the Baseball Calendar. Unlike the Gregorian New Year, which depressingly begins in the dead of winter (except out here in the Bay Area, where there is no winter, where in fact there are no seasons, every day the high is between 62 and 71, the low never dipping below 55), the BY New Year begins with Spring Training, usually sometime around the end of February when the pitchers and catchers report to Florida or Arizona. And unlike the Gregorian New Year which, once the juvenile antics of New Year’s Eve have died out, everything reverts to exactly the way it was in the old year, the baseball New Year is all about new beginnings. Sure, we know deep down in the magnus baseballis centrum, hard-wired into the chassis of our brains, the big money teams will likely end up near the top (unless one of them is really really stupid and hires Bob Valentine as their manager), and the Kansas City’s and Houston’s of the world will end up deep in a hole looking up. But somehow the true baseball fan manages to ignore what he knows is the truth and, watching his patched together team of rejects and has-beens and untried rookies tear up the Grapefruit League, heroically wills himself to believe that such success will carry over to the season. Which it even might for a month, so that his team in first place after 30 games becomes the "big story" and the subject of much intense professional analysis, until the first 7 game losing streak, then the 3-20 stretch that sends them plummeting like boulder dropped from an airplane to their accustomed place in the pecking order, dead last. But still. As they say: hope SPRINGS eternal in the human breast.
Summer arrives in July at the All-Star break. Of course nowadays the game itself is a joke; it became so as soon as the vote was turned over to the "fans." Allowing "fans" to vote for the participants in the game is like allowing kindergartners to vote for the best nuclear physicists; the kids know about as much about the scientists’ work as the average "fan" knows about baseball. If this isn’t bad enough, the travesty is multiplied many times by letting the "fans" stuff the ballot boxes. But worst of all is the rule that mandates every team must have a representative. Look, it’s not that complicated. The beat writers, the guys that follow the teams and watch them play every single day, or even maybe a non-partisan panel of ex-players, maybe headed by all the living Hall-of-Famers (except Bill Mazeroski, there’s NO forgiveness for 1960), they vote and chose the 25 best guys from each league, period.
Anyway, Fall arrives in September, which is why I’m writing this now right on the cusp of the new season. Actually I might get some arguments here, after all the World Series in October is the FALL Classic. But no, for old-line baseball fans, Fall is marked by the famous lengthening shadow at Yankee Stadium, when in the late afternoon, the pitcher stood on the mound in bright sunlight and the hitter at the plate in the dark shadow, slowly creeping across the infield, of the venerable stadium’s stands. I can still see Whitey winding up and - well, yes, the old stadium is long gone, and I’m not even sure if they built the new one with its own shadow, but nevertheless, for me, Fall begins in September, when the Bombers of the 50s and early 60s relentlessly wore down the opposition, which wilted under that intense pressure like so many lilies left out in the sun without water.
Winter then starts, BOOM, the minute the World Series, that shameful shell of its former glorious self, ends. There’s a scene in The Producers when Kenneth Mars, playing an exiled Nazi in New York City, spits out the name "Churchill" with such venom that the audience for a moment is taken aback, until he follows with the punch line: Now Hitler, there was a painter ... one afternoon, TWO coats. But that’s how I feel about the wild card. Just as there’s no crying in baseball, so should there be no wild card. Two leagues, no divisions, one team from each league, the winners of the most games play each other, best of 7, simple. THAT’S the World Series. Ah well, times change and with them we, however reluctantly. And so here’s wishing you a Happy Fall.
No comments:
Post a Comment