From the time of my earliest memories, I have been in love with baseball. In grade school, I watched it every chance I got. I read only baseball books. I played it in the spring, summer, fall, and winter. I collected cards and memorized stats. My friends and I imitated the swings of our favorite players. Baseball was all I wanted, needed, or cared for. Sure, I occasionally cheated on baseball. I'd spend the occasional Sunday afternoon in the park with basketball, or Saturday afternoon in the garage with a guitar, or summer morning on a golf course. But, those and the rest of their kind inevitably proved more flash than substance, and I always went slinking back to a game whose countless merits do not exclude second chances.
There is a fundamental symmetry to the game. Nearly every one of its facets depends upon a multiple of three. There are three strikes to an out, three outs to an inning and nine innings to a game. There are three bases one must safely cross before reaching home to score a run. There are nine fielders and nine batters. Each at-bat exists on a minimum of three players: pitcher, catcher, and batter. The list goes on, and on.
Nevertheless, baseball is a game that most learn in pairs, generally speaking fathers and sons. Sometimes fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, or even (as I was fortunate enough to occasionally experience) grandmothers and grandsons. Still, there is something about baseball that lends itself to fathers to be shared with their sons. Baseball is the only game that exists comfortably both in perpetuity and finality. The game is not over until 27 outs on one side are recorded, but never until then. Within the confines of any given game, any at-bat, there are an infinite number of possible outcomes. Every game, every pitch, holds the possibility of something entirely new. And yet, every game is ultimately the same. There is no running out the clock. There is no punting for field position. There are no fouls to regain possession. There are only outs and an endless number of ways to record them.
This is the fundamental truth about life, which every father wants to reveal to his son. Each day dawns anew, with its own set of opportunities and temptations. Each day contains its own hits, strikeouts, and errors, but your batting average isn't final, your ERA isn't tallied until the final out. And then, you have something tangible to look at and see how you did. Failure against good opponents and success against the mediocre balance themselves out at the end of a season to produce the sum total of your achievement that will exist as long as a crease left in a page left dog-eared, telling everyone who comes after you, I was here and this is my story.
My own father and I used to spend mornings before school playing catch. He would throw the ball over my head, I would track it down over my shoulder and throw it back to him. He would then throw the ball short and I would come charging in, throw the ball back to him and start the process over. As far as I know, we invented this game that I creatively dubbed, "Short and Long." I no doubt grew impatient with him when he wouldn't throw the ball far enough out of my reach to suitably test my limitations. I'm sure I complained not so very rarely that he wasn't making me dive, though, to my recollection, he never responded in anger or even called into question the cleanliness of my school uniform. Instead, he threw the ball a little farther from my grasp, laughing with me when I dove and came up short. There were plenty of opportunities for short words and lost tempers. Opportunities that I'm sure came more frequently and violently as we played catch more rarely and less intently.
My father is alive and well, happy and productive, as is my mother, the bench coach to my father-manager on our little baseball team. They (and their marriage) survived the booby-trapped life of parents with a teenage son testing his limitations beyond ball fields and into cars, girls, and all sorts of more dangerous mischief. I don't play baseball anymore. I don't even play catch with my father. But the game still informs nearly everything we do. Sure, we have found other common interests that include, but are not limited to the works of Samuel Johnson, the music of Bruce Springsteen, and the drinking of dark beers. Still, there is an element of "Short and Long" in every interaction we have, and there will be long after he is gone. Every so often, he and I will have the chance to go to a game together. No matter how many games we go to, I will always feel like the 7-year-old version of myself, helping him record outs on the scorecard, trying to keep up with the subtle nuance of recording each play for inspection as a whole after the completion of the game. Whenever we sit on his back porch, I always think of playing catch deep into summer evenings, swearing that I can still see the ball long after he and I both knew that I couldn't. I know that he thinks of his own father whenever he tells me a story about some long-retired ball player who only a fan would remember. There are hall-of-famers and journeymen, all-stars and flame-outs, but for every game they exist within the same 27-out universe with the same capability of altering its outcome. And as long as there are fathers and sons, there will be someone to record their long-balls and short-falls with the care and precision required by something of utmost importance. And really, what could matter more?
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