|
|
"Buy Me Some Peanuts and Canteloupe..."
|
|
|
|
|
During the 1934 World Series, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Joe "Ducky Wucky" Medwick (Yes, Virginia, there really was a Hall of Fame ballplayer nicknamed "Ducky Wucky," and a mean sumbitch he was too) slid spikes high into the third-baseman of the Detroit Tigers. When Medwick went out to left field in the next inning, the Detroit fans pelted him with produce: fruits, vegetables, the occasional anvil. Medwick had to be removed from the game for his own safety. "I knew why they threw it," he said later. "What I couldn't figure out is why they brought it to the park in the first place."
This tale captures baseball in a nutshell. Baseball is not a sport. It's a generator of anecdotes and an observer of the human condition. The games are played just to keep the stories coming. That's why the players don't wear helmets; so you can see who you're talking about.
In this world of constantly changing hairstyles, baseball's sometimes languid pacing seems as if it belongs to an earlier era. In fact, it does. The game as we know it grew up in the Civil War camps, where a lot of idle soldiers had a lot of time to kill. Today, when society has completely surrendered to the forces of Taylorism, egg-timer sports basketball, football, and hockey are more in touch with the popular zeitgeist.
Never mind that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports; take that for granted if you must. Treasure instead the stories — not the treacly "Field of Dreams"-style glorifications or "the game is designed to break your heart" poesy of the late Bart Giamatti — but the earthy Ducky Medwick kind, the same Ducky who, upon meeting the Pope during World War II, said, "Your holiness, I'm Joseph Medwick. I too used to be a Cardinal."
When you carve everything else away, what you have left is a mirror reflection of who we are. Sometimes the mirror shows off our flaws, as in 1919, when the Black Sox infamously threw the World Series for gamblers, and put the final nail in the coffin of that corrupt age that came to be known, ironically, as the Progressive Era. It also began the process of rewriting America's native naïveté into cynicism. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Great Gatsby" of the man who orchestrated the crime: "It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people — with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe." (Old habits die hard — Fitzgerald's contemporary Ernest Hemingway would write "Have faith in the Yankees, my son" in "The Old Man and the Sea.") At other times, the mirror flatters us: Jackie Robinson came to the majors in 1947, a full seven years before Brown Vs. Board of Ed began desegregating the rest of country.
So when next you're watching a game and the batter steps out of the box for what seems like an eternity, remember that baseball isn't timed because every story has to find its own length. Remember too, that it's not about a sport. It's about people, and we're the people in question, so it's about us. And what are we about? We're about bringing raw produce to a World Series game.
Steven Goldman is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Yankees Magazine. Although he loves baseball, he draws the line at being called "Ducky Wucky."
|
|
|
