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An Ode to Baseball:

For the kids who played stickball against the brick walls of tenement buildings; skyscraper apartment complexes which stretched upward towards the sun,
On the cobblestone streets no different than Rome, peppered with fruitstands, magazine and newspaper salesmen –
When the Red Sox won the World Series on the precipice of a nation at war,
A World War, stretching from sea to sea that brought that same stickball game to the clay and dirt streets of the Caribbean:
It is not war but play; not struggle but strategy;
A diamond upon which camaraderie and teamwork function for the sole purpose of collective victory,
Where players like Lindor are against no one; smile and sign autographs for the young kids –
Knothole gangs and baseball cards, strewn across cement.

For the art of the sport, where joy is the beauty of movement, like Mantle’s swing captured by a camera with a high frame –
Like photography and the lens were created to remember the sculpture of the athletic play,
The all out shortstop’s dive for a line shot grazing the infield grass;
The noonday sun, now barely peeking out from behind the rafters; cigarette smoke and advertisements,
Suits and the shirtless, sundaes and Cracker Jack.

It is a game of images in constant motion, where the summer waits for no one; pitchers’ duels are sweated out in the August heat,
The best against the best,
Where Deadball grit is remembered in an extra innings contest between two starters who refuse to relent.
Eighteen innings, pitch for pitch, dirt for dirt.
Nothing can wrench them from the stalemate but a blooper off the end of the bat by an unnamed player off the bench.
It is games like that that can turn the season; journeymen like this who can transform the arc of ages of the game.

Musial, Williams, Foster, Paige. The history of the game is written in gold;
Remembered and returned perpetually by those who stand by radios, by color television screens;
By news stations at the city’s center, waiting for the recreated play by play on diamond bulletins.
It is a game that is always returned to the child, as bright as the lights can be on the main stage;
It is a game of the child, polished with the iron discipline that creates peaceful, spiritual warriors.
It is a game of great men, like Lou Gehrig and Rube Foster. A game of men whose devotion is to the perfection of the craft and the craft alone.
A game where the will of a man to build a world where all can play equally can create true, enduring opportunity for others.
If Foster had lived to see the legacy of his dream fulfilled, he would have understood –
The gifts granted him were greater gifts –
To create a river flowering where there was once only dried mud and stone.

Baseball remains, through wars, fuhrers, and overturnings of the world. Through technologies, phones, video, and promised trajectories of nations.
It remains because it is true – true beyond all politics, true beyond all dogma.
It remains because it speaks to the fabric of the soul, for the fabric of the soul is in play and play alone. Each diamond watered, honored, remembered, and forgotten like sacred ground.
For baseball is a sacred sport, it is between dirt, mud, and the stars –
Where the spirit of man descends to play in the grass; upon the field of the earth;
Gazing up at the lights of what is possible through athletic transcendence; in the field of the body;
Upon the field of the body alone, the spirit rises.

What remains of baseball is art; it alone is the culture and relic of the living and dying empire.
It lives, breathes; heaves off photography, memories, video. Like currencies, these are the frescoes left to the earth, a civilization buried and recovered in real time.
For baseball is an honored history of learned knowledge and freedom, where political, racial, social, and cultural boundaries are expanded; opened;
The game is honored by progression and the expansion of the will of the human spirit to meet the terrain of what is possible within its bounds.
Ninety feet along the lines. Sixty feet upon the mound; a bump lowered due to the pitching dominance of a man named Bob Gibson. Wars fought to honor the expanse and difference of the human soul to open up the game to integration.
Baseball in Japan, Korea, Cuba, the Dominican. What cultural pastime has spread like this, with such beauty and devotion, with such clean spirit and conscience; with such striving, as the sport of baseball?
Even in its worst hours of segregation and racial violence, men strove to open up its terrain.
Its greatest history is in the moments just now achieving reverence:
The Negro Leagues, the Cuban Leagues. The creation of structures outside of the dominant institutions and narratives which, in turn, created whole worlds of beauty and language.

These are the memories of war, slavery; life on the homestead. The Depression, The Dust Bowl.
Life as a farmer in the American midwest; as a miner in the Northeast; as a factory-worker or poor immigrant in New York City. Baseball was raised from the mud into wood like Fenway and Majestic Park; Rickwood –
Baseball was raised from the mud into wood by working men. It is not the sport of tyrants and magnates, nor is it the sport of the supposed owners. It was spun by farmers like Walter Johnson and Dizzy Dean;
It was spun by immigrants like Gehrig and foster children like Ruth.
This is its legacy – it is the sport of people of the earth – of men who came from circumstances of great import; who rose through those circumstances to become the legends of corn fields just outside of St. Louis in improbable seasons of greatness and victory;
Legends of the broadcast radio and airwaves that brought together people of the world from all backgrounds, races, and nations.
This is the legacy of baseball. It belongs to no one; yet, it is the great unifier.
What remains of it is everything that it has become today. What baseball teaches us is that things are born from innocuous; maybe even narrow becomings. But they rise through the whisper of the world like thunder; gift humanity with things they could scarcely have imagined.
And it all begins with the wonder and joy of a young child, witnessing the theater of the great game –
Hung like a skylight beside a rising moon,
A great coliseum on a hilltop, where violence is converted, translated, and sung
Into peaceful glory.