Baseball and Endless Life Trickling On...

Baseball and Endless Life Trickling On...

When you get to my age, which might be "half-way there" or a lot less, there is a bit to reflect on. And, please let me add, there is a bit to look forward to. Maybe another 50 years? Maybe only another 50 days... Or even less.

No guarantees.

Like baseball. There are no guarantees in baseball, as in life.

Well, some things we can be assured of, usually. Balls and strikes, fast runners and power hitters, umpires who try their best and fans who care, or at least show up. Some people are simply klutzes and careless, and many are by definition apathetic and do not care.

Some get paid a lot, some get paid for nothing.

A lot of people play, a lot of people watch. 

There is a lot of baseball going on, all the time. Like life.

Life and things and people that you were not aware of, is going on.

In the North American winter times, this outside sport is played in warmer climes: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, maybe. I am not sure about East Asia, maybe in the south like Taiwan and Okinawa.

Perhaps in the colder winter months of North America there are games going on in other southern climes and continents. Do they play a bit in Australia? New Zealand? South Africa? Argentina, Brazil?

Meanwhile (Stephen Colbert, you devil, get out of my head), they are playing another game with a bat and wickets all over warm places like India and Pakistan, in Africa and parts of the South Pacific, and maybe South America. Cricket.  According to some it is bigger than soccer. I doubt that, always have since suggested in Balkh Province in 2012. 

Soccer is the biggest, futebol. Worldwide, it is those nets that frame things across the countries and villages. Even in China, with the most souls. But baseball may have its in roads there as well...

This baseball thing continues to grow. It is entrenched psychically in the United States, parts of Canada, Mexico, most of the Caribbean. What else can bring us so close to Cuba? Not just the food and music...

Baseball is king of the Caribbean. Too bad the Jamaicans have not embraced it more. Or the Haitians. It would help them, no?

The Summer Pastime has entrenched itself in Japan. To a degree in South Korea and Taiwan.

In Nippon, that great organized group of humanity, the Japanese have perfected parts of it, and their superior athletes, samurai-like, continue to cross to the Mecca of the sport, inserting themselves in World Series regularly. The Fall Classic has become an international event, like it or not. Dozens of countries are now  represented. Come aboard India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Nigeria.

Come learn and ingest the game of humanity. It involves this diamond and ninety degree angles. 9 innings, usually.

True, another sport has overtaken all parts and corners with a hard surface, and some places none: basketball requires less equipment and space, less care. It lends itself to urban landscapes, the 21st century eventuality. But enough of the peach basket game of James Naismith...

We are discussing and contemplating Abner Doubleday's baseball! Russia and Central Asia and the Middle-East: get on board!

Here in the Grand Ole USA we are turning out in droves to see it and play it. My boys finished their seasons before the end of the school year. We should practice some more, they need it.

Today is Bastille Day; we world citizens celebrate different political and social traditions, advances in humanity related to the great French and what they and us became.

There once was a French exchange student in my home in the early 1980s who seemed curious enough to get a baseball bat. This Western Hemisphere abstraction, like to us North Americans the weird paddle of the cricketers... 

This Louisville slugger is overtaking the planet, I say.

We have our summer strong major league teams, 30 strong, then the minors at every level, the independent leagues, and college amateur leagues. They add up into the hundreds across every city and state. We are baseball, that is who the U.S. is still, growing since the late 1800s.

It continues: Dutch and Italians learn it, play it, bridging the oceans and continents. More nations will learn it. Could the great African masses learn its order and beauty? Did the Cubans leave enough behind in Angola?

Life and gravity continue, baseball marches on, that field of dirt, paint, and grass.

Balls and strikes, runs and pitches, and tag outs and slides.

My Washington Nationals have never been to a World Series.

They could this year. Life finds a way.

The never been to the World Series and Seattle Mariners. And my Montreal Expos.

The others that have never won at the highest, "world" level? (Yes, it is an international event now...Koreans, Japanese, South Americans have among the best players, and their fan bases watch all season, especially in October.)

The San Diego Padres, Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Milwaukee Brewers, Colorado Rockies.

Six to go, and then mankind can rest. Forget Cleveland, they have done it. These perennial losers, these forlorn lovers, will have their days in sun.

Humanity trickles on and on; we tend to the fields. We draw new lines in the sand, a father brings his sons and daughters to the diamond in the neighboring park. He tosses and throws, catches and shows them how and perhaps not enough why as to how come this is done.

This is life.

My oldest is now an adult; I did not play enough catch with her. I think I have not done enough with any of my little ones. More with some than others. Never enough. Never enough life, never enough time.

Funny side note, or maybe a sad one: once on a diamond when maybe she was 13 or 14 she pleaded that I not hit it hard at her. I assured her that the ball off my bat would not target her. But it did! She stopped it, but both of us was scared. She vindicated in her voiced fear, me chagrined in my nonchalance. Sorry, mija! I love ya!

We, I, need to toss the ball with my young ones more and not just watch it on television, listen to it on the radio, chronicle it online.  Read about it on my phone, where I track it incessantly and perhaps obsessively. They, my children, deserve more of me in the flesh. The flesh is weak.

Perhaps they, my offspring, my legacies, my children or my surviving wife and siblings and nieces and nephews (and grandchildren?) will see some baseball world series someday in the near or distant future, maybe played in Montreal, or Mexico City, or Santo Domingo or San Juan, or even Seattle or the Capital (D.C), and find that in viewing it they are sharing time with me, their dad, their husband, their uncle, their grandpa.

"Dad would be watching this," says one.

"Dad is watching this [game]," quips another.

"He loved the Expos as a kid."

"Yeah. Go 'Spos! Love ya, Dad!"

My body might be laying to rest in some hidden corner of a memorial in California, or Pennsylvania, or who knows where? So many greats laid rest in Virginia... Kunduz or Angol, some place where some part of me and life was pursued and spent, somewhere where my dreams in some way congealed or came to fruition, a recalled but mostly forgotten place.

Why is Dad buried there?

"Because he remembers losing a soldier there when he was overseas."

"Because he remembers baptizing some people into the Church that he feels like became lost after he left, even when he went back and tried to find and help them years later. He wants their kids to somehow connect that."

"Because he wanted to buried where not so many others are visited frequently, be out of their shadows."

"Because he had a 100 year old veteran uncle who is buried there."

"Because Jennifer's Papa was buried there, and California was as good a place as any seal his legacy to."

"Because his spirit wishes to advance the game of baseball there."

"What?" in unison from the others.

"Yeah, dad thought that his mother Ruth was buried in Odin, Daviess County, to be a pioneer missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with the souls in that forgotten part of southwest Indiana. In a similar way dad thinks that he can pitch the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ to the restless souls around there."

"Wow! South Georgia is so isolated and cold!"

"Right, and it is a historical jumping off point to Antarctica. Dad thinks baseball will fly on the South Pole."

"Dad, what a dreaming Quixotic visionary."

"Yeah." "He even contemplated dividing his body into burial spots on all the southern hemisphere ocean islands, the forgotten ones, and then thought about the Arctic, too, and realized that was not very sane, and too ambitious and vane. It would have taught us some geography, something that he was always trying to do."

"Trying to make the last point, get in the last word."

"Quijote and him had a few things in common."

"Sure, just no Sancho Panza. Only a bunch of of Dulcineas."

Baseball is one of my Dulcineas.

She exists, but I see her through different lenses.

Like the Don Quijote of the Mancha, she is the dream that never ends. Eternal in hope, despite the odds...

Baseball will be played, for fun and battles between the young and old, of all generations, out among the windmills and the endless fields of our consciousnesses...

Look it up. The history is there. Baseball.