Commentary : A Game That Holds Us Tightly in Its Grip

Friends have decided to give our new son every variety of baseball paraphernalia known to the baby industry. He has a tiny warmup jacket (in case it’s blustery as he crawls in from the bullpen). He has his choice of uniforms. If anybody tries to throw an almost weightless styrofoam ball past him, he has an almost weightless styrofoam bat with which to hit it. That is, unless he wants to catch it with his equally weightless glove. Needless to say, he has hats and even a batting helmet with an ear flap.

As you can see, there’s an excellent chance that Russell Boswell, assuming he has a shred of independence in his nature, will grow up to hate baseball.

This would, no doubt, be a fitting piece of poetic justice for his father, who has prolonged his own infancy well beyond the normal limit with the aid of this particular game. However, it would be a shame for the little boy.

Baseball was meant, and still is meant, to be irresponsible, anti-adult, silly, lyric, inexplicable, slightly rebellious and generally disreputable. The ballpark is the place you go to play hooky. When you get there, you scream, yell insults at grown millionaires, knock people aside chasing foul balls and eat nachos until your stomach is so full that you have to switch to ice cream sandwiches.

Edwin Pope, who writes a sports column for the Miami Herald, recalls that when he took his 6-year-old boy to his first pro game, the lad said, “Where do I throw the peanut shells, dad?” To which Pope, with great delight, said, “On the floor, son.”

That’s baseball. Peanut shells on the floor. As much noise as you can make. And who knows what sort of person might sit next to you and yell what outrageous thing. Once, a quarter century ago, I heard a man in RFK Stadium vow that he would swallow an entire sports section if Frank Howard (“Hondo, my hero--you big bum,” he yelled over and over for two hours) hit a home run. Howard did and the man spent the rest of the game slowly tearing the paper into strips and eating them.

They call baseball the summer game, which, to a child, means vacation and laziness and multifarious mischief. When you’re indoctrinated from the cradle that baseball is officially acceptable, what chance have you got? My plan is to start piano lessons early and forbid the throwing of any ball within 100 yards of home. That should set Russell on the noble track of showing his old man that he’ll do just what the dickens he wants to do.

In “Ball Four,” Jim Bouton said he’d spent his life gripping a baseball and only after he retired did he come to realize it’d been the other way around.

Baseball has more grips than Eddie Murray has stances and, whichever way you turn, the game grabs you in a different place. However, one of its most basic but least mentioned holds is that it’s obviously a bunch of foolishness from first to last. The more we belabor serious “issues” in the game, the more the small child in us wants to laugh and run down an upperdeck aisle, imperiling soft drink vendors. For summer fun in my formative years, two friends and I would climb to the top row of RFK with a hand cranked siren and wind it up to such a crescendo that the crowd (usually 3,751) snickered and the rent-a-cops came running to apprehend us.

As well as being many other things, baseball is a wonderful waste of time, a raspberry in the face of authority. The same long division that plagues the grade schooler becomes a joy when it is his hero’s batting average that’s being computed. Arithmetic in pursuit of grades can be done hurriedly on the bus to school. Math for the sake of a batting title must be completed before breakfast and double checked.

One promise of opening day is that every day for the next seven months, the possibility of reckless, feckless escape is as close as the TV button, the radio switch, the morning newspaper, the weekly Sporting News or a trip to the park. There’s baseball, waiting to burn our time as though we’d never age and tempt us to care deeply about a thing so obviously trivial that, minutes after the last pitch, we’re laughing in our beer and knocking the manager.

Even our baseball sorrow is a delicious fakery. Ah, those poor Red Sox fans. To break good china in a true rage, like one loyal Boston fan I know, then have to answer the phone and know it’s a friend calling to mock your misery--yes, that’s the carefree, wait-’til-next-year, better-to-have-loved-and-lost bonding that baseball fans share.

It is with some sorrow that we note the advent of respectability in the game. When men like Peter Ueberroth and Bartlett Giamatti set up shop atop a sport, as a suitable career stop between this presidency and that, it causes anxiety; why can’t we have loveable Happy Chandler or befuddled Bowie Kuhn?

These days, lawyers run rotisserie league teams and “sabermetricians” cross swords with 500-page tomes, debating the exegesis of comically obscure stats. How can the game be dragged back to the state of ramshackle disrepute where it belongs, thrives and merits the love of children?

Much of the spirit of baseball lies with anarchic men like Bill Veeck, who would send a midget to bat, give away a wheelbarrow of money, blow up a scoreboard or say that Kuhn was stiff-necked because he never got over being named after a race track.

The great men of baseball, though we don’t say it too often, tend to eat hot dogs until they are hospitalized or discuss traffic violations with police while kicking the cruiser door. When we scratch the surface of our Ruths, Roses, Weavers and Jacksons, we find appetite and laughter and a wayward nonchalance that would be self-destructive in the lives of most of us.

In short, baseball is brave and scatterdash enough to fascinate a child and fit comfortably among such favorite pursuits as (let’s see if I remember) climbing a condemned water tower or exploring a haunted house.

Those of us who are guilty of scrubbing baseball behind the ears and making it appear a mite more upstanding that it ever could be should appologize and promise not to sin again. For at least a day.