Strike Two

If any subject deserves a second entry in my own blog, it’s baseball. We’re getting near my favorite time of year, October. That means baseball playoffs. I get warm feelings just thinking about it. Each year by now I’m partially through a viewing of Ken Burns’ documentary “Baseball,” and true to form I’ve watched about a quarter of it this week. That’s no small feet, since this “movie” is 18 hours long.

My love for baseball is so deep that some of my oldest friends and I can get tearful over it. On the most basic level, even the name is pretty to me. I love the symmetry of the word, with its two parts of four letters, each beginning with the letter B. Life is often about safely making it from one “base” to the next until you’re safely “home.” That’s just the beginning of explaining how similar I find this game to life itself. Several things make the game different from other major sports. Baseball has no time clock; the defense controls the ball; and, unlike other sports where a team can continually go to its best player, in baseball every player gets a turn to hit. And under baseball’s seemingly breezy feel, in which its repetitive rhythms are comforting to me, is the street cred: it’s generally accepted that the single most difficult thing to do in all of sport is to hit a ball that someone is throwing at you as hard as he can. For professionals, “as hard as he can” is close to 100 m.p.h. And just to mix it up, he can also throw it 85 m.p.h. right at your head and make it curve over the plate for a strike.

As I watch the Ken Burns film, with its run through the roughly 160 years of the game’s history, I sit in rapt amazement yet again, as if I’m getting to attend one baseball game after another every few years for more than a century. I just got through one of my favorite parts, or “innings,” of the movie, in which the filmmaker covers a decade at a time. The 1940s saw superstar hitters like Joe DiMaggio, also famous for being one of Marilyn Monroe’s husbands; Ted Williams, who amassed one of the greatest batting records in history despite missing FIVE years in his prime to be a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea; and Jackie Robinson, whose story reached new audiences through the film “42″ released last year, which chronicled his breaking baseball’s color barrier through unspeakable harassment.

But I have just as strong an interest in earlier periods in baseball’s past. I was a pitcher myself, and I’ve always loved learning about such pitchers as Cy Young, Grover Cleveland Alexander (love the name) and Walter Johnson, who I swear is the identical twin of Robin Williams. Another of the game’s greatest pitchers was a guy named Babe Ruth. Everyone has at least heard of Babe Ruth, though even casual baseball fans know him only as a famous home-run hitter. Actually, any argument over who was the greatest baseball ever is utterly worthless because Ruth was one of the game’s best pitchers AND its best hitter for years. As editor Daniel Okrent eloquently said in “Baseball,” to put Ruth’s accomplishments in perspective, it’s ‘as if Beethoven and Cezanne were the same person.”

I often imagine that Babe Ruth is the baseball player I’d have been most like. Though Ruth’s life as an unwanted child who lived mostly in an orphanage couldn’t be more different from mine, once he became famous Ruth lived a life in the spotlight as someone famously flawed but with a heart of gold. Ruth made unheard-of sums for baseball players and gave much of it away, often to perfect strangers. And he held a special place in his heart for children, always giving them the time and attention he never got in his youth. Ruth’s teammates remember how he never refused a moment with a young fan, whether it was signing an autograph or visiting a sick child in the hospital. I guess I just always wanted to believe I would be that nice if I became famous.

Baseball has a unique place among sporting history because the players are not the only ones to gain recognition. The Baseball Hall of Fame, in the magical village of Cooperstown, New York, contains entire wings devoted to baseball writers and broadcasters. Harry Kalas, who spanned most of my first-half century of life as a Phillies broadcaster, is enshrined in the Hall of Fame. In my most fantastic moments of folly, I pictured my 25-year career as a journalist taking a different path. I think of what it may have been like to write about my favorite sport, and eventually earn my own place in the Hall of Fame. But alas.

My own baseball history is immeasurably tied to the Phillies, but there’s so much more. My father built a pitching mound and home plate in our back yard so I could practice. He never refused my request for him to crouch for pitch after pitch, generously calling more strikes than balls to instill confidence in me. Dad also spent many years as my coach. I learned a great deal from him about how to treat people, and of course I enjoyed spending the time with him. My grandparents took me to my first Phillies game in 1972, and that began a connection that lasted for years and literally hundreds more games. We even journeyed to New York, seeing my favorite player, Mike Schmidt, hit a home run as the Phillies beat the Mets. We traveled — actually, took a commercial flight! — to Pittsburgh for a weekend to watch the Pirates play the Cincinnati Reds.

Amid that period, one night stands alone as a supreme stretch of time which fills my heart with warmth and gratitude for how I’ve been blessed. On the evening of October 21, 1980, the Phillies won their first World Series, and I was there with both my father and grandfather. I was just learning about my dad’s own rocky relationship history with my “Pop Pop,” and years later my appreciation of the shared emotion that night blossomed even more. I can hardly put to words the feeling of the three male generations united to witness the event together. But the scene is forever etched my mind. At the long-gone Veterans Stadium, we sat in the right field “picnic area,” a section which was discontinued long before the ballpark was demolished. As the end of the game, and probable celebration, grew near, half the field was ringed with wall-to-wall policemen on horses or holding dogs. And I remember that after Tug McGraw struck out Willie Wilson to end the game and win the championship, we just sat there taking it all in. It may have been 30 minutes but felt like hours. Kind of like the best moments in life.

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