Time to Pitch the First Metaphors

As surely as the dewy green buds of hope have pushed back the somber shades of winter and the swallows filled the air over Capistrano with the inspiring flitter-flap of their lusty wings, so too have the boys of summer dashed onto newly mown fields of dreams across America. Once again a soulful cry has been heard across the land: “Plaaaaaaaaaaaaay poet!”

From New York to Oakland, Boston to San Diego, rhapsodies waft through the air like the aroma of peanuts and crackerjack.

“Baseball is America,” The Times’ Jim Murray wrote Monday. “Baseball is human . . . baseball is caring. Baseball is involvement . . . Baseball is for life . . . Baseball is loyalty . . . Baseball is humility. Baseball is apple pie, cotton candy, harvest moons and I-don’t-care-if-I-never-get-back.”

In the Daily News, columnist Ron Rapoport said that “ . . . Baseball tells us where we are and where we have been . . . Baseball is a fairly accurate societal mirror. It is a decent textbook as well.” And that after warning us that he has “never been a romantic about baseball.”

Baseball has been good to American writers, and once a year on opening day, each and every one of them seems compelled to pay tribute to the national pastime.

Novelists, playwrights, political commentators, and journalists for obscure trade publications all eagerly twist baseball into every conceivable shape of national metaphor. Even a few sports writers overcame their seething resentment at being denied real spring training junkets and came through, their hardball instincts becoming as soft and fuzzy as Rod McKuen observing a newborn lamb.

“Some of us,” George Vecsey wrote in the New York Times, “had called the owners and the players names that were not very nice: knucklenoses, lunkheads, clodhoppers, dunderheads, boors, knaves, dummies, jokers and clowns.

“Now we are in the embarrassing position of returning to baseball on our hands and knees. Oh thank you, you wonderful people, for giving us back our game.”

“Babies will be born at Beth Israel Hospital,” Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe wrote. “Kids from Simmons and MIT will blow their monthly allowance at Tower Records. Steel wheels will screech as Green Line cars roll into Boyleston Station.

“And in the middle of all this, Boston’s venerable hardball museum today will play host to the first major league baseball game of 1990.”

The National prefered to pay tribute with a full-page color photograph of a young boy, baseball cap over his heart, glove under his arm, looking up reverentially with the words of the Star Spangled Banner inscribed on the sky above his head.

Even Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard University evolutionary biologist, was unable to constrain the basic genetic instinct to ruminate upon the implications of the sport. In a commentary titled “Confessions of a New York Yankees Fan” on page one of the Boston Globe, Gould wrote: “Some folks insist that old Jake Ruppert first put the Yankees in pinstriped suits in order to make their hottest (and heaviest) property, an ex-Boston pitcher named Ruth, appear slimmer. But the metaphorical implications for a team of such unexampled wealth and success soon supplanted any original intention: Pinstripes equal arrogance, particularly in the eternal drama, now recycling on this belated Opening Day, of Yankee domination and Red Sox disappointment.”

In 1954, Jacques Barzun wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game . . . “

Barzun might have amended that to read: “The rules and realities of saluting opening day.”

What he’d learn is that we remain a nation of romantics, governed by a deep reverence for fresh starts. Come August, you can call the home town star’s mother a bum and no one will hold it against you. But when you write about Opening Day, leave your cynicism in the dugout and let lyricism be your guide.