by Richard Rosen
My daughter, now 19, bless her heart, started her sporting career out in
front of the house here on our quiet street in Berkeley. I bought her a white
Wiffle Ball, the plastic kind with the holes in it that, if thrown hard enough
with just the right twist of the wrist, will break like a Major League curve
ball, something you were never able to achieve growing up. I also bought her one
of those big fat hollow plastic bats, the kind which you can well miss hitting
the pitched ball on the meat of the barrel, and still make significant contact.
She would stand at the foot of our rather steep driveway (which had the
advantage, on a whiffed cut, that the ball would then easily roll back to the
me, the pitcher), I would stand a few feet away and, for the first few months
at least, lob her the pitches underhanded. We followed the Mickey Mantle
technique of creating a natural switch hitter: when he was a kid he’d take five
cuts right handed and five left, alternating back and forth as his dad and
granddad pitched. So my kid, after a few months, was a natural switcher who,
like the Commerce Comet, made better contact on the right side but had more
power from the left. The house across the street was the target, and before long
she was routinely putting them in the front yard, mammoth blasts when you
consider she was only five.
Then, and I don’t remember how it happened, she joined a soccer team and the
budding baseball career was at an inglorious end. Ever watch a team of
6-year-olds play soccer? It’s a lot like those wildlife pictures from Africa,
showing a leopard chasing after a herd of gnus, the prey running for their lives
packed together like sardines when common sense says, hey let’s split up. Except
of course in the case of the soccer gnus, it was them in a tightly packed, um,
pack chasing down the poor battered ball, while the frustrated coach, who
thought she’d made the concept of field positions perfectly clear in practice,
hollered from the sidelines, hey, split up.
Well, this went on for the next 12 years, until her senior year in B-High, as
the Berkeley high school is aptly known, when she was captain of the girls’
varsity that went undefeated in league play for the third straight year,
outscoring opponents 98-4, and made first team all-league. And oh, did I mention
the club team she played on in the spring and fall, the Mavericks (which oddly
had a logo of a horse on the uni), coached by the head coach of the Ghana female
national team, who spent part of each year in the Bay Area? Are you getting the
picture yet? Soccer all year round, even in the winter when she played indoor at
a converted military hangar on Alameda island, weekend after weekend, month
after month, for 12 weary years without a break.
Now when I was growing up in Sacramento in the late 50s, nobody, as my grandmother
would say, knew from soccer, some weird-o foreign sport; we all played proper
American games like baseball and football. So when my daughter started her
soccer career I had no idea what was happening; it just looked very much like
another boring game, i.e., basketball, two teams back and forth, back and forth, but
without the scoring, in fact, for much of the time, NO scoring. Some people, like
her mother, who also knew nothing about the (cough) sport, eventually cottoned
to it and became a rabid fan, but me personally could never quite get the point,
particularly of a game that didn’t make much use of hands and arms, and kicked
the ball with the INSIDE of the foot, unlike the real NFL kickers I remember
growing up with, like Lou the Toe Groza and my favorite player of all time Paul
Hornung, who used their toes to kick a ball as God the Big Toe in the Sky
intended.
Why do I bring this up? Because my daughter and many of the kids of her
generation, think that BASEBALL is boring. Puh-leese. Baseball is quite possibly
the most perfect game ever invented by the human mind, but its very perfection
makes somewhat demanding, um, demands on the spectators. Oh sure there are
people who go to games only to socialize and work on their tans, but these are
not real baseball fans. Real baseball fans understand that watching a game is
akin to meditation, that it requires a good deal of concentration, which means
it’s beyond the capacities of the average individual. Real fans actually don’t
just watch the game, they’re vicariously playing along with the players, making
decisions on pitch selection, keeping track of pitch counts, guessing along with
the hitter, strategizing with the manager. One common criticism of baseball, as
compared to, say, football, is that it’s too slow. (Heard the one about why
baseball is better than football? Because you can wear the hat backwards).
Friends, that’s exactly the point, baseball HAS TO BE SLOW, it takes time to
make life-and-death choices, to survey the field, to set things up, to move
things around, to stall for a few precious minutes to give the relief a few more
warmups in the pen. No offense here, but people who say baseball is boring are
just revealing their ignorance...about baseball. Tell you what you need to do.
Is there a batting cage in your vicinity? Go there this weekend, pay the
entrance fee, get your bat and helmet, then have the pitch speed adjusted to,
oh, 60 mph, way slower that the slowest pitch any major league pitcher will
throw. Then step up to the plate and take your hacks. I can almost GUARANTEE
that you won’t make ANY contact for the first dozen or so pitches, and maybe not
even beyond. Then go watch Steven Strassburg’s next start and keep an eye on the
radar readings of his pitches. Baseball is boring? Have you seen Robinson Cano
swing a bat? Jose Bautista hit a dinger or make a throw from deep right to third
on the fly? Have you ever watched a no-hitter? Josh Hamilton, Joey Votto, Derek
Jeter, Giancarlo Stanton, that new kid, Bryce Harper? Baseball is boring? Have
you ever watched a, yawn, soccer match?
Brilliant, Richard!
ReplyDelete