Observing US: A column about America, by Marylaine Block originally published by Fox News Online, 1998-2000

#74, February 15, 2000

RITES OF SPRING

by Marylaine Block

Though February is doing its cold and ugly worst, there are harbingers of spring: I reviewed my first baseball novel of the season, the boys of summer are off to Florida and Arizona for spring training, and all is right with the world. Like John Fogerty sang, "We're born again, there's new grass on the field."

I'm sorry for people who don't like baseball, because they will never entirely understand America. It doesn't matter that the Japanese and Cubans and Dominicans play it as well; baseball is our game, American to its core.

It's THE game for eternal optimists. Every year, we put last season's failures behind and start over undefeated, full of hope that, as the New York Daily News proclaimed when the Brooklyn Dodgers finally won the pennant, "This Is Next Year."

Baseball is the ultimate game that "ain't over 'til it's over." Because it has no arbitrary time limits, you can be behind 7-0 in the 8th inning and still honestly believe you can pull it out. You might get bases on balls or hit by pitch, and somebody might bring them home with a double or triple; you might get home runs, or score when the other team's first baseman boots the ball. You might at least tie the thing up and send it into extra innings. Theoretically, there's no reason why the game can't go on into infinity (a notion W.P. Kinsella played with in his wonderful book The Iowa Baseball Confederacy).

It's also a game that balances our most important competing tensions: our need for rules with our love for breaking them, and our love for individual achievement with our need to work together.

Americans love fair play, and while the rest of the world keeps changing the rules on us, in baseball, three strikes are always out, and the bases are always 90 feet apart.

But the outfields, ah, that's where there's room for creative fudging -- there's cozy Wrigley Field where, when the wind is blowing out, even average hitters can send the ball out of the park, and there's the Astrodome with its deep, deep outfields where home runs go to die. Each park gives the home team a little edge, and makes a different kind of player a hero.

Your star performers will, of course, be heroes all the time, but they won't win without all the journeymen players who back them up. The difference between a good pitcher and a great pitcher is often the double play combination that puts the runners out.

In a country that doesn't care much about history, baseball is our historical record, where achievement is lovingly preserved in statistics and awards that tie our present to our past and future. We don't say "there were giants in those days"; we say our fresh young phenoms, "future Hall-of-Famers," will join them.

In our country of immigrants, baseball has been an equal opportunity melting pot that offers men from every imaginable ethnic group a chance at the big time.

In a country made by the aspirations and talents of young men, baseball is a boys' game that some lucky men get to play for a living. It's fathers playing catch with sons. It's boys playing ball on long summer days that seem to stretch into forever and deny that school can ever start again.

Baseball is boys learning to become men: the sweat and gritty determination required to practice a skill over and over until it's mastered, the willingness to wince at pain and keep on going, the refusal to accept defeat.

For fans sitting in the stands, baseball is all those things, and more. It's summer skies and hot sun, green oases in grim gray cities, loyalty to our teams and towns, the pleasurable sense of playing hooky from daily responsibilities.

For fans who think the last words of The Star-Spangled Banner are "Play ball!", baseball is a lifetime compressed into six months: the youthful optimism of the first games of spring, the ripening of competition in the summer, the death of hope or the triumph of our mature skills in the fall. It's mythic. And it's us.

Celebrate it. Baseball is icumen in; lhude sing "Play ball!

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