Food for thought
I didn’t get to see any baseball over the weekend (I don’t live under the Curse Of The Bambino, but rather under the Curse Of The No Internet Access), but I did spend quite a bit of time in the company of one of my favourite baseball writers, Thomas Boswell. What I like about Boswell is that there he spends little time on detailed statistical analysis – How Life Imitates The World Series, for example, devotes just two of its thirty-plus chapters to analysis of stats – but instead attempts to step back and write about the bigger picture, even when writing a piece on a particular game or player.
How Life... begins with a chapter entitled ‘The Greatest Game Ever Played’, about the one-game play-off for the 1978 American League East title between the Red Sox and the Yankees. In his analysis of the game, Boswell writes the following, which, I think, perfectly encapsulates not only what I love about baseball, but what I love about this type of baseball writing:
It is a unique quality of baseball that the season ticket holders who see all of a club’s crucial games believe they can also read the minds of the players. Each team’s season is like a traditional nineteenth-century novel, a heaping up of detail and incident about one large family. After 162 chapters of that tome, chapter 163 is riddled with the memories, implications and foreshadowings of the thousands of previous pages. Any play that rises above the trivial sends a wave of emotion into that ocean-sized novel of what has gone before. Since everyone is reading the same vast book, the sense of a collective baseball consciousness can become enormous. With each at-bat, each pitch, there is an almost audible shuffling of mental pages as the pitcher, hitter and catcher all sort through the mass of past information they have on one another.
It’s always struck me that the length of the baseball season – and the fact that we often get to watch players over a period of 10-15 years – means that there is a sense of an ongoing story, punctuated by remarkable events. Independently of Boswell’s piece, I’d often thought of baseball as a kind of permanent soap opera, where we follow characters for years at a time – sometimes they change very little, sometimes they disappear and come back with a new haircut, a new face or a new ballclub. We get to see their ordinary day-to-day lives – those Tuesday-night games in May against the Royals – but we know that we’ll get to see extraordinary things too: a no-hitter, a player hitting for the cycle, 500 career home runs. In recent years baseball has also given us a series of October moments worthy of the best soap-opera cliff-hangers, classic “but surely [insert character’s name here] can’t be the father of my child??!!” moments – impossible playoff wins by the Diamondbacks, the Angels and the Marlins. No other sport has the power to comfort us and enthral us in equal measures.
As I re-read through How Life... I found myself saying wanting to copy out passage after passage because the analysis seemed so spot-on. It’s a tribute to Boswell’s writing that the fact that the pieces deal with games and players from 20 years ago and yet they still ring true today, as if they contain some higher truth that has nothing to do with specific players or events and everything to do with baseball’s own unique space-time continuum.
I could spend all day quoting passages from the book, but I don’t have the time, so I’ll take the easy way out and just recommend that you go read it yourselves.
How Life... begins with a chapter entitled ‘The Greatest Game Ever Played’, about the one-game play-off for the 1978 American League East title between the Red Sox and the Yankees. In his analysis of the game, Boswell writes the following, which, I think, perfectly encapsulates not only what I love about baseball, but what I love about this type of baseball writing:
It is a unique quality of baseball that the season ticket holders who see all of a club’s crucial games believe they can also read the minds of the players. Each team’s season is like a traditional nineteenth-century novel, a heaping up of detail and incident about one large family. After 162 chapters of that tome, chapter 163 is riddled with the memories, implications and foreshadowings of the thousands of previous pages. Any play that rises above the trivial sends a wave of emotion into that ocean-sized novel of what has gone before. Since everyone is reading the same vast book, the sense of a collective baseball consciousness can become enormous. With each at-bat, each pitch, there is an almost audible shuffling of mental pages as the pitcher, hitter and catcher all sort through the mass of past information they have on one another.
It’s always struck me that the length of the baseball season – and the fact that we often get to watch players over a period of 10-15 years – means that there is a sense of an ongoing story, punctuated by remarkable events. Independently of Boswell’s piece, I’d often thought of baseball as a kind of permanent soap opera, where we follow characters for years at a time – sometimes they change very little, sometimes they disappear and come back with a new haircut, a new face or a new ballclub. We get to see their ordinary day-to-day lives – those Tuesday-night games in May against the Royals – but we know that we’ll get to see extraordinary things too: a no-hitter, a player hitting for the cycle, 500 career home runs. In recent years baseball has also given us a series of October moments worthy of the best soap-opera cliff-hangers, classic “but surely [insert character’s name here] can’t be the father of my child??!!” moments – impossible playoff wins by the Diamondbacks, the Angels and the Marlins. No other sport has the power to comfort us and enthral us in equal measures.
As I re-read through How Life... I found myself saying wanting to copy out passage after passage because the analysis seemed so spot-on. It’s a tribute to Boswell’s writing that the fact that the pieces deal with games and players from 20 years ago and yet they still ring true today, as if they contain some higher truth that has nothing to do with specific players or events and everything to do with baseball’s own unique space-time continuum.
I could spend all day quoting passages from the book, but I don’t have the time, so I’ll take the easy way out and just recommend that you go read it yourselves.
posted by Iain at
14:55
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