The Hope Of Opening Day

“Repetition within immutable lines and rules – baseball is counterpoint: stability vying with volatility, tradition with the quest for a new edge, ancient rhythms and ever-new blood- an oft-told tale, repeated in every game a season, season after season.”
– Bart Giamatti

Opening Day in baseball is here, and it goes without saying, for any true baseball fan it remains the true start to summer, and a moment filled with the most overwhelming, and mostly irrational, feelings of hope that one feels regarding just about anything else in life. No matter how bad your team was last season, and still figures to be once again, humans, inherently and consistently choose to ignore the obvious, blinding us from the cold, harsh realities of the situation, and show up excitedly to watch the first pitch. Baseball in this way symbolizes what is at both of best and often times worst feature: our innate desire to romanticize and create a personalized narrative of our lives, even if it means we have to lie to ourselves to do so.

It is for this reason that, each year, at around this time, I make a point to re-read two of my favorite pieces of writing, the late commissioner of the sport, Bart Giamatti’s pieces “The Green Fields Of My Mind” and “The Story of Baseball- You Can Go Home Again.” These titles seem a bit contrived at first, like a bad John Fogerty track or Mitch Albom novel. Yet as an all too passionate sports fan, especially New York Met fan (tragically), my Dad introduced these articles, published excerpts from Giamatti’s books, and since then I have always returned to them. They are like old friends, perfect companions, to both inspire and temper the sort of hope all fans of baseball inevitably feel at the start of a long season.

Baseball is a rebirth. It is the start of summer, and it is youthful in every sense. Each season takes the form of the life, and the start, not ironically in the spring, is similar to the changes in nature: born in the spring, when hope is at its highest, and carries us through the long hot days of summer, maturing and experiencing inevitable high and low points, and then, unless you have defeated the overwhelming odds, dies, just as autumn beings and the cold picks up, when we need it most. This happens, (mostly, lockouts not included) like clockwork. Life is not always certain, but the season will always start again, and follow the same uncertain path and even more uncertain conclusion. That is why baseball is seemingly the only sport that we take true solace in, during times of national or international crisis. The fact that it carries on, regardless of disaster, gives us a link to a certain normalcy that otherwise might seem ridiculous given a certain moment.

Baseball is a religious experience for the fans. What exactly is the great difference between a baseball stadium and some sort of cathedral or temple? Both exist to house a group of people who believe in something greater than themselves, a shrine people take pilgrimages to in order to feel some sort of communal relationship with total strangers around them. Fans are essentially just people who strive to be a part of a larger, ‘imagined community’ so that they can feel like they belong, and experience depression and elation together, in the same building, often only moments apart. How often can we experience the deepest and most painful of emotions and know that nearly every other person around you is feeling the same thing? The rituals we have in watching games, hoping that our idiosyncratic series of jinxes or movements might somehow make a difference, is strikingly similar to religious thought.

In order to accept ant kind of religious system, there needs to be a sort of hope or belief system that allows people to make a leap of faith to choose to believe something outside of themselves with an ending that is uncertain. Pascal described this as a 50/50 wager, no more or less, that all our hopes and beliefs and ritual will account for something in the end. Embracing a team is just like that. We invest hours and hours of emotion, watching games that often seem endless, debating the most arcane statistics with friends and relatives, with the statistically small, yet enduring hope that we will eventually be rewarded. This is in fact the driving force for fans of any sport. It is not 50-50, but it is at least something. It is the possible promotion after years of hard work, the possibility of a lifelong marriage at the start of dating. That is why we get so upset when players use P.E.D’s for contract years or choose not to run out a fly ball. We expect the same draining level of passion from our teams’ players that we put into rooting for the game ourselves, even though we have no real hope of impacting the outcome of a game and they have all the chance to.

Furthermore, baseball is a game constructed to help us play out and realize our most idealistic, and unrealistic, vision of how our lives work out in reality. The game idealizes our supposed cyclical journey through life to reach comfort by enforcing strict rules demanding that all action and progress must be contained within a semblance fair ground, guarded by foul lines that technically stretch into infinity. Going further with that concept of the infinite, baseball is also not coincidently the only American sport I know of that can technically last forever. No outside forces can set a time limit or induce a certain result: the outcome is solely and completely dictated by the merit of the efforts of each player.

In reality, naïve hopes and wishes like these are proven each day to be impossible. Often times, it is those people who take the shortcuts, operating in the grey area outside the realm of fairness and law that succeed at an unthinkable level. In life, whether we are religious or not, we need to hold ourselves to some made up ethical or moral code to keep us within the fair points of those foul lines, or else we would all simply spin out of control, with the temptation to do otherwise simply too great. We still like to think, or at least hope, that as there is in baseball, in life there exists some sort of umpire to call out those who break the loose code of legal and ethical morals we have constructed.

Baseball is also more intricately intertwined with an even deeper understanding of the purpose and meaning of life. In baseball, reaching home is the entire objective of the game, its why we play and its why we watch. It’s tantalizingly close objective, yet also an incredibly difficult feat to accomplish. The path to get there is set out by the rules of the game, and in a way, following the base paths can be viewed as an allegory for following an uncertain path in life. In life, we are met with an onslaught of setbacks and difficulties, distractions that only serve to accentuate those very difficulties. Baseball too, is a system designed to severely restrain your freedom. On your path around the bases a player is filled with temptations, stealing a base for instance, or rules that impede natural, and excessive, progress such as having to tagging up or being slowed by a ground rule double. One must pass all these obstacles, all while making sure not to skip any of the bases along the way, in order to finally return home.

If baseball can be described in one simple way, Giamatti says, it is “The story of going home after having left home; the story of how difficult it is to find the origins one so deeply needs to find. It is the literary mode called Romance.” He further defines his concept of ‘home’ as such:

“Home is a concept, not a place; it is a state of mind where self-definition stars; it is origins – the mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original, perhaps like others, especially those loved ones, but discrete, distinct not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it ever were to occur, would happen.”

Perhaps in a way that makes the sport an all too idealized version of life. As Thomas Wolfe once famously said, one can never truly ever go home again. And Giamatti concedes as much, stating that in life, not baseball, “to go home may be impossible but it is often a driving necessity, or at least a compelling dream.” Yet baseball, as Giamatti also recognizes, is the only sport I know that introduces a loaded term like home into the field of play, and that must say something about the psyche of the American people, who all feel a paternal sort of ownership over the game despite how international it has become in recent years.

Most importantly, however, baseball is family. It is the one great thread that connects generations. Attending a baseball game is about the associations more than anything else. It is a game and experience of sense memories and the personal associations we have with it. Americans associate with the game as a national pastime because of its undeniable roots to our history. For a country so young, it is the game that has existed for nearly 200 years. And most of all, we associate it with those who introduced us or taught us the game: our parents. Growing up and playing catch at such young ages is perhaps the most primitive and egalitarian form of conversation we will ever hope to have with our parents. The memories we have of the game are often not based in actualities or fact, but in how our personal histories intertwine with those memories.

Family bonds are formed over stories and memories, and baseball specifically is a game that seems to be designed with a sort of storytelling in mind. Each game and each inning lingers on, and in between the blanks it is expected that the fans, the mothers and daughters or fathers and sons, fill in the blanks. This kind of banter, often mindless but also deeply personal or historical, is only possible in a game like baseball. In one of my favorite films, Field of Dreams, James Earle Jones describes the reasons for going out to the ballpark as a way to escape the lack of peace in the real word, and a longing for the past. Fathers take their sons to games so that their children can have the opportunity to sit where they sat when they were children and cheered where they sat when they cheered their own heroes of the past. Once again, it is cyclical, just like life. I was always allowed to skip school for opening day, just as my parents had when they were younger, and that shared guilty experience of breaking the rules for something as juvenile as a meaningless game in April bonds us together. I sincerely hope that one day, I can let my own kid skip a day of school to share the same experience with me.

This is all, for lack of a better word or keener intellect, really silly stuff. Personally, I have always detested the tendency for intellectuals to insert an excessive amount of psychoanalytical babble to anything, especially something as benign and fun as going to a game of baseball. Yet, here I am, writing four pages comparing baseball not only to a religion, but also analogous to the meaning of life and family in its entirety. Still, there must be a rational explanation for the utter irrationality of fans relationship with sports, and American’s with baseball specifically.

I am a lifelong and long suffering Mets fan, and the past three years for me have been historically hard to handle. On the field, we as fans have witness the greatest collapse in the history of the sport, causing us to miss the playoffs, and then years followed by smaller collapses or odd injuries and even odder plays that has led me to be convinced there is some sort of karmic curse on the franchise. Furthering this notion, just this off-season came the news that the team and its owners were broke, robbed blindly (or, allegedly, not so blindly) by Bernie Madoff, the man who operated his entire life outside the sanctity and comforts of the foul lines. Despite all of this evidence to the contrary, I still became giddy with the start of Pitchers and Catchers earlier this year. I found myself intently following the feel good stories of the spring, hoping, quite unreasonably, that Player X might finally stay healthy through 162 games this year, or Player Y might finally realize his potential, and give at least 20 quality starts.

Is any of this likely? Probably not. It is possible, though. And just as in life, I chose to hang onto that thinnest thread of possible good because it’s the only thing I could. For this reason, and many others, I found myself rushing home a few weeks ago, skipping my last class of the day, in order to catch the opening pitch of the new season. The Mets of course, were nearly no-hit and lost in a typically feeble fashion. But I was happy: I had once again skipped school for a righteous cause, and I was once again irrationally optimistic when I had no right to be on my 22nd Opening Day.