Picking up the signs: baseball, football and other worlds - Column

Christian Century, Dec 7, 1994 by David Heim

WITH A LITTLE prompting I could expound at length on the deep emotional resonances of sports. I could speak, for example, of how, through long and intimate familiarity, I feel implicated in the fate of the Boston Red Sox. I could describe how from grade school to graduate school, from northern Vermont to southern Connecticut, the sounds of Red Sox broadcasts wafted out of car radios and summer cottages: the fortunes of the Sox hovered in the background of life like a long-term romance, varied in intensity, suffused in expectancy. I could mention cruelly sharp memories of a fall afternoon in 1978 when Carl Yastrzemski came to the plate with two outs and the tying runs on base in the bottom of the ninth in the one-game playoff against the Yankees. Overmatched against Goose Gossage, the aging Yaz lofted a weak foul to Nettles at third, and the tavern in New Haven erupted with hated Yankee fans, and my friends and I walked home in ignominy, burdened by the knowledge that Yastrzemski, again denied a championship, was too old to get another chance.

I could go on in increasingly lyrical terms, but I've become wary of such impulses after watching Ken Burns's TV documentary Baseball on PBS. The narrator's sonorous celebrations of the game, and the rapturous philosophizing and reminiscing engaged in by the various writers, editors and celebrities that Burns interviewed, quickly got cloying. Less talk, more replays, urged the baseball fans in my house. Was Burns so cynical as to think our attachment to the game required the imprimatur of people like George Will, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Billy Crystal?

It's not that baseball isn't profound or worth celebrating but that, as with food and sex, talking about it is not always the best way to register one's appreciation. Two currently popular ways of reflecting on sports strike me as especially decadent.

The first is seeing a game as an enactment of mythic, quasi-religious themes (like "going home"). This often takes the form of unearthing buried metaphors and then getting mesmerized by them, as happens in this passage by the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, the literary scholar turned university president turned baseball commissioner: "In baseball, the journey begins at home, negotiates the twists and turns at first, and often founders far out at the edges of the ordered world at rocky second--the farthest point from home ... and when it is given one to round third, a long journey seemingly over, the end in sight, then the hunger for home, the drive to rejoin one's earlier self and one's fellows is a pressing, growing screaming in the blood" (Take Time for Paradise).

Reading this, one is most aware of all the ways that baseball does not resemble real journeys with real hazards. Giamatti is merely indulging in a clever but misleading conceit--what we might call, borrowing a term from the biblical scholars, the "anagogic" or spiritual interpretation of baseball. Those who appreciate the "plain sense" rightly regard such interpretations the way they view analogical readings of scripture: as hermeneutically fanciful and spiritually dubious.

A second sign of decadence is the tendency to focus not on the details and mechanics of the game but on its emotional byproducts--such as how you felt watching Carlton Fisk's home run in the '75 World Series, or how through your son's love of baseball you feel connected to your father. In The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape advises Wormwood to get people thinking about how they feel when they pray, since it will take their minds off God. The devil is similarly at work urging sports fans to celebrate their feelings rather than the reality which gives rise to them. Hearing people emote about baseball is like hearing people describe how they feel after taking communion: it seems dangerously beside the point.

It's not only the baseball literati who exult in feelings these days. Every player interviewed on a postgame show is bound to be asked, "How did it feel when you [hit the home run, muffed the ground ball, recovered the fumble]?" This question may reflect mass media's reliance on the lowest common denominator: we all have feelings. In any case, the question is stupefyingly obtuse and, far from being the "sensitive" question it seems, displays a maddening insensitivity to the player and the game. Any fan who's been paying attention already knows perfectly well how the player feels: the range of feeling is embedded in the drama of the game and crystallized in the development of each situation. How much more respectful of the deeper mysteries of the game are those broadcasters who ask, "So what did he throw ya--the slider?"

In various ways we try to make sports useful. We want them to provide lessons for life, metaphors of some larger reality, stimulants for the emotions. Sports encompass all those things, but the danger in concentrating on them is that we trespass on the true mystery and the source of fascination: sports are fundamentally useless. They have no larger point or meaning. There is no point to hitting a baseball, or to tossing a basketball through a hoop--no point beyond the fact that it is intrinsically enjoyable, satisfying and beautiful. Work is not accomplished, mouths are not fed, the world is not improved, but we want to do these things anyway.