No other game or sport defines Americans quite like baseball does. Baseball brings out our greatest human traits: heroism, fallibility, determination and tenacity. It also brings out some of our worst traits, our demons. It's a humbling game, one that can bring a great deal of joy, sadness and anger all in the same inning. It seems like such a strange notion, but not all great baseball players were great men and not all great men were great baseball players. The sandlots and big league stadiums across the country have been permeated with the best humanity has to offer to the worst, and everything in between.
I was always told that it didn't matter if you won or lost, it was how you played the game that counted. There's a lot truth to that, even if it has become overly clichéd as the years have gone by. I've never played baseball at a highly competitive level in high school or college. I stopped playing when I was 16 after a few years in Babe Ruth League. I had tried out twice for the middle school team in Dinwiddie, Va. and didn't make it either time. The second time I tried out, I made it all the way to the last day of cuts. That was joy. After tryouts were over on the last day, Coach Walker (our middle school coach) called me into his office to tell me I hadn't made the team. I was the last one to get cut. That was sadness.
I climbed in the car when my dad came to school to pick me up. I told him what had happened and then let loose a couple of expletives that I had picked up from him over the years and probably had no business saying at 14 years old. That was anger. I had gone from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other. Baseball is important to many people all across America and around the world, but there's more to life. Sometimes, we forget that in the heat of the moment, but that's part of what makes us human. We all need that occasional slap in the face to remind us of our priorities.
Baseball also provides a great deal of laughter and humor, intentional and unintentional. For instance, I'm an Atlanta Braves fan and always have been. My mother is not so much a fan of the team, as she is a fan of Chipper Jones. When Chipper was in his prime back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, my mother would joke with her friends at the hospital where she worked about how good Chipper looked in his baseball uniform, especially his posterior. She and a couple of the other ladies at the hospital joked about putting pictures of him in their lockers (I think a few of them actually did).
I had the opportunity to meet Chipper at a card show in Richmond in December 1999, the year he won the National League's Most Valuable Player (MVP). My mom was with me that day. While we were standing in line, I begged her to not embarrass herself or me when met him. We made it to the table where Chipper was sitting. I got him to autograph a baseball card for me and I shook his hand and congratulated him on winning MVP honors. And what does my mom do? She wishes Chipper a "Merry Christmas." "Really, mom," I said. "That's the best you could do?" After all the times I heard how good he looked and what she was going to say to him when she saw him, all she could muster was, "Merry Christmas." I kid because I care. Love you, mom.
James Earl Jones has a line in "Field of Dreams" where he says, "The one constant through all the years . . . has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, it's a part of our past . . ."
You know what? He's absolutely right. Happiness, sadness, anger, laughter; thank God they are all a part of baseball. It is not only our national pastime, but the quintessential human game.
