Baseball returns order with one crack of the bat

By Don Kramer, Northwest Guardian

The major league baseball season has begun.

For those of us who still fume at the ump’s call at first base that enabled the Royals theft of Game 6 in the ’85 World Series from the Cardinals, or analyze, pitch by pitch, Mitch Williams’ sequence that led to Joe Carter‘s walk-off home run to win the ‘93 fall classic, something has been set right in the cosmos.

Some say the game stirs an archetypal sense of rebirth and renewal, echoing universal metaphors that have given meaning to man since the dawn of, well, man.

Despite such high seriousness, it’s a game after all, anachronistic by 21st Century standards. Baseball smacks of 19th Century pastoral gentility, requiring sequential individual skills to score or prevent scoring.

The game’s pace modulates us, slowing our heart rates and tamping our blood pressure in spite of ourselves. George Carlin points out the differences among the fans of America’s two favorite sports: “In baseball, in the stands, there’s kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there’s not too much unpleasantness. In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least 27 times you’re capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.”

Baseball takes us back to simpler times, when our heroes found enough good in the nation to fight and die for it. The game always had a hold on me, ever since Roger Maris hit No. 61 in ’61, but the tie turned mystical when I was assigned overseas.

I was in Munich in ’85 when the Royals stole the I-70 Series. I pulled my wife out of bed to watch Game 7 with me on Armed Forces Network before I left on TDY.

I coached my sons’ baseball teams in frigid Alpine springs and contemplated what constituted American culture. Baseball was as close as I could come.

In ’93 I watched Carter hit his cursed home run while sitting in the American Embassy in Cairo. Two other stalwarts and I were in the canteen at 3 a.m. to catch the Southern European Broadcast feed that I couldn’t get in my apartment. I was on an endless unaccompanied tour based in Egypt, the only time I heard shots fired in anger in my 20-year Army career. I feel a pang of guilt about that every time I contemplate the sacrifices of U.S. Soldiers today.

I think of them huddled around an AFN broadcast of opening day in FOBs across Iraq, danger waiting outside the wire on every patrol.

I remember how important baseball was to me in Germany, Italy, Korea and the Middle East, when I battled homesickness and self-pity.

Then I think of them.

I’m glad they have baseball, a game that allows them, for a time, to come home.