The Serenity in a Baseball Diamond

French existentialist Albert Camus described as a hero the sort of person who believes as an atheist, yet lives like a Christian saint. But I have my own definition: any parent who brings the family to a Los Angeles Dodgers home game and keeps everyone in their seats until the last batter has officially been called out.

Admittedly, moms and dads, the overpaid, underachieving, indolently arrogant 1999 Dodgers offered little incentive for you to care or persevere. Nonetheless, with the 2000 season newly underway, on behalf of the kids a measure of caring and perseverance is in order. The well-documented, seemingly unstoppable inclination of Southern California spectators to leave ballparks early is a phenomenon unsuitable for viewing by children.

The always insightful Bill Veeck, the late, former owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox, once said baseball, alone among the major team sports in not being played against a clock, is the only one a fan can truly savor. Slap shots, cross-body blocks and slam dunks have their place in this world, certainly, but along with most of the rest of what passes for culture in the new millennium, they jolt the psyche rather than soothe it.

In our current online era of nonstop facts, figures, e-mail and broadcast commercials, serenity has become a state not all that easy for the average American, young or old, to come by. For half of every year, however, it’s as near as the ballpark. The bleachers are a kind of spiritual safe haven, a decompression zone from which, as innings become a game, and games become a season, even the most philistine fan can feel the performances on the field collaborating to help calm a national nervous system worn raw as a strawberry on a base stealer’s hip and extend a national attention span clipped short as a bang-bang play at the plate.

Teens sipping their soft drinks in the third deck would never express their perceptions like this. But up there, in the cheap seats, they’re absorbing baseball’s fringe benefits all the same.

Though criticized as boring by the irascible and impatient, even the sport’s actionless intervals--between pitches, between pitchers, between innings--work to a kid’s advantage, affording ample opportunity, free from stress, for strategic analysis (“Throw the bum out!”); philosophical inquiry (“Did you see what Piazza did today in New York?”); or just plain kicking back and enjoying the splendor of the environment (“Yo, Frosty Malt! Over here!”).

Ideally, each game young fans attend ought to be allowed to settle into their memory banks formally and fully, so they can learn, early in life, the satisfaction that comes from paying close attention, staying alert and keeping on top of details.

At the ballpark, where there are no instant-replay cameras for the negligent observer to fall back on, kids have to practice watching what’s actually happening more carefully than they watch a TV screen. There’s no remote-control channel selector either, so children are compelled, when the stimuli of their immediate surroundings begin to bore them, to put their own resources to use to refocus, to jack their flagging interest back up again. This trick is known as “using your imagination,” and comes in handy later in life.

If you’re a kid, whether sitting on the field level or the upper deck, you can’t help but want to absorb as much of what’s going on around you as you possibly can: the lore; the lingo; the pageantry; the sense of teamwork and sportsmanship (or lack thereof); the statistics; the geographic concepts brought into focus the first time the announcer uses the term “visitors” (the patriotic impulses set astir--a gentle kind of patriotism, devoid of the defensiveness and martial bravado that characterize the political variety); the incantations of the vendors and fellow fans; the quirks of the players; the Dodger Dogs, the Spicy Dodger Dogs, the peanuts; and even fireworks on occasion, if you’re lucky.

And then, after the game, a chance to drift down to the front row of the box seats, to get a better perspective on the proximity of the mound to home plate (95 mph divided by 60 feet, six inches equals not a whole hell of a lot of time). Scattered pops of stomped-on paper cups echo through the emptying stadium while you talk with whomever the Older Person is who brought you about the events you’ve both just witnessed; the way all of us, as we drift off to sleep each night, ought to review, in our heads, the day we just spent--to make sure we really lived it and didn’t just pass through.

But leave the ballpark early and you’ve cut off any chance for these assets to accrue. As with a prescription for an antibiotic, a baseball game, if abandoned too soon, won’t deliver the salubrious effect it potentially could. In the event some unexpected drama flares up in the game’s later stages, you’d feel like a criminal if your kid missed it; and if the contest goes flat--well, there are spells like that in life, too, that we all learn to endure. The point is, hang in there. There are worse habits to get into than finishing what you start.

Granted, increasing the levels of patience and appreciation in young people might not have anything to do with the reasons players play or team owners sell tickets, but it’s a valuable dimension of the game nonetheless, a plus you don’t pay any extra for.

Besides, who knows? Apathy could work like a virus. What if last year’s Dodgers caught it from their fans? *