A Small Thing

BASEBALL.

When I was younger, I remember a man once saying to me, most likely in language much less poetic than my memory of it, that it was no worthwhile thing to play Little League baseball each summer. It was spring, maybe March or the beginning of April, and at eleven years old, I was preparing to wash out of the only sport I ever made much of a pass at. My friends were signing up for the local league and the man - an elder in my church and a Korean War veteran - answered my question about letting the list pass by me unsigned by saying, "It's a small thing to hit, a baseball."

I remember the oddity of that statement: was this a casual observation of my weakness at the game? A commiseration? A statement of resignation, or - perhaps best of all - a scruffy, old-man validation of my own (and perhaps his own) desire for lethargy? It seemed impossible, that an adult of the most statured positions would encourage me to not stick something out or give it the old college try - an anamoly of nature, somehow; a slip-up from a wry, if not ornery, old man too damn close to whatever it is old men are close to to care about the goings-on of a slow, awkward kid.

Still eight months from my twelfth birthday, I took what I thought to be his advice and stayed home for the season. I remember very clearly missing the games, even from my spot on the bench where I usually experienced them. It was something, being a part of that game, I have always understood that. But there were practices and drills and laps that were less missed, and dads and fear and failure. I thought of baseball so much in terms of hot, humid South Carolina afternoons and bees buzzing around the outfields I most often found myself standing so uselessly in. So, it was a trade I took then knowingly and willingly, with not so much a sense of regret as a sense of nostalgia - a hallmark of this particular game for as long as people have played and failed at it, I imagine. After all, it is a small thing to hit, a baseball.

But as I'm sitting here thinking about all this now, writing things down I didn't sit here intending to discuss, the Braves are winding up a game on the television in my office and I keep catching myself drifting off just into the sound of it. For once we're winning, I'm proud to observe, and convincingly: it's the bottom of the eighth and the home team is up 13 to 5, with both Jones boys going deep and this season's hero, Brian McCann, going 1 for 3 with an RBI. I feel good about it, I'm realizing, and not as I might about something I quietly root for, like discounts at the supermarket or the outcome of treasury elections, but in a way that puts a smile on my face even in a room where I know I'm alone. It moves me, baseball does, even at an age growing alarmingly far from the twelve I almost was the last time I turned down the opportunity to play it.

And more, it does this at a time and in a season that couldn't mean less. The Braves are a team I love, at times to an alarming degree. I anticipate the beginning of each season the way you wait for a check to come in the mail: with no patience and a thousand plans for how to spend it. I follow the camp journals and the scouting reports and the injury logs, I plan a handful of evenings when I might be able to make it to Atlanta, and most of all, I expect to win. For a long time, I've only known one kind of disappointment - that of losing thirteen of fourteen times in the playoffs - but it came in such rushing and violent moments of extremity that it almost tempered itself: there is no pain as sharp to a fan of at least this game as that of losing at the very end. Baseball embeds itself in me to such an extent each Spring that I forget each and every season that it is not a constant - and when it is ripped away from me in October, I feel, every time as if for the first time, that I am a fish who has swallowed a hook and been allowed to forget it entirely before a dozing fisherman sets it, now at a point so much deeper than I could have imagined it would go. But done enough times, this pain is more akin to a bandage pulled off in one rush - excruciatingly brief. However, this year I'm remembering something I've been allowed to forget for a long, long time: what its like to know the end is near from almost the beginning. Baseball this season has been five months of living with a dying relative for me; hope and the abandonment of hope, hope and the abandonment of hope. I speak hyperbolically, but only in an effort to put an image up to something that seems irreversibly internalized - something in me is tied to basball not as a hobby or interest or even a love, but as an expression. I think I see this small, strange game as an investment at its most basic level, and maybe what draws me (so closely) to it is knowing that the game - with its rhythm and skill and play - is a knowable, perservering thing. Baseball is what another old man once said it was: above all, a game we can all imagine playing. The simple mechanics of it - hitting, catching, fielding with a glove - these are things we see and understand in their essence immediately. There are no playbooks for it, no apparent call for extreme athleticism, yet almost no other activity produces the same moments of elation and impossibility and amazement that baseball does: a diving catch, a sweeping curveball, the mightiest of deep-fly home runs...and all from something I feel so interminably close to; a myth I drink down readily in exchange for the belief that I also dove once, I also hit a small, round ball well with a bat and could do it still. It is at once distant and close, and I believe we let it blur these lines not because it elevates us as individuals but because it brings the possibility of the incredible so close.

Yet at least for me, this wonder for baseball as a game is irreversibly tied to the same Braves club that just disappeared into the tunnel leading to their lockers across the room from me - a team that has devastated me for five long months with losses and failures and, more than either of those and at once the same as them, warned me from the very beginning that their term here, at least this season, would be a painfully short one.

But here I am, watching again, even hoping again, at this late hour. But I'm smiling agian, too, over the smallest of things: a hit with two outs from a pitcher, a home run in the seventh inning from a player I like in a game decided since the third. Rounding the bases, Andruw Jones stumbled over the toe of his own shoe and fell to a knee, getting back up only to laugh his way home. As he headed back into the dugout, the rest of the team waited at the steps before attacking him with pats on the shoulder and slaps to the helmet, laughing and warning him about the ledge between the field and their seats. It was a small and ridiculous scene, but I laughed out loud with them, sharing, I imagined, in that small, unforeseen moment in a game and a week and a season that seems to already be so definitively settled. It doesn't make the best anecdote, but it connects somehow to that memory of me as an eleven year old. Looking back, I have no regrets about not finishing things out as a baseball player; frankly, I was pretty bad at it, and despite the game's appearances, it's not something anybody can do. It's an awfully thin bat that you've got to hit with, and if you can't handle that part of the game, there's really not much for you - even at eleven. But I do miss being in the dugout when a teammate comes back with a sheepish grin, knowing despite the score that he's going to get it from everybody inside. Games seem so entirely filled with these moments, points in the large gaps in action that are more baseball than the hit and the pitch, I think. It's those things I miss most from being there, but those are also the moments baseball, of all games, most lets us share in from the stands. It isn't entirely a myth, that thought that any of us could be there on the field in starched white uniforms. Like you might expect, there is that sliver of truth still in it, somewhere in between the grounders and pop-outs and double plays. Somewhere in there, a game is being played that doesn't just promise another season, it gives us moments that seem, impossibly, to succeed even in the midst of losing. That was by far the area of the game I was most adept at, at eleven and ever since.

But it's an awfully small thing to hit a baseball.