The time occupied by a baseball game consists mainly of intervals between the short periods when the ball is in play. You might think the description of the play would pack in a lot of excitement, but it's just the reverse - conventional, routine, stylized. "Swing and a miss, strike one." "There's a short hopper to the third baseman." "That'll drop in for a base hit." All of the interest in baseball commentary occurs in observations of the larger context. "He's eight for twenty with runners in scoring position on the western leg of this road trip." "Clem's hit for extra bases in six double-headers this year, always in the second game." "His dad played shortstop for a year with Pawtucket in Triple A, stole twenty-two bases and hit for the cycle twice - both times on the road." These waves of statistics would scarcely be credited at all outside baseball, but inside baseball they break calmly onto the shores of the telecast. "That's quite an accomplishment, Jim," his partner will say. "Eight Triple A players have hit for the cycle twice in a season, but the only other man to do it twice on the road was Baldy Ames for the Diggers in 1903. And Baldy didn't steal anything like twenty-two bases." "That's for sure, Ron," laughs Jim, and the wave subsides back into the baseball ocean as another arrives to replace it.
Baseball is hot summer afternoons talking over the past while the present slowly unfolds one pitch at a time and passes into the Great Record - "That's three in the books now," says Ron. He and Jim watch from the shade where it's relaxed and cool and statistical, and they provide a quiet, continuous and smooth accompaniment - "That catches the inside corner for oh-and-two. Andy's one for three this afternoon, and he's hit safely in all but one of the last ten games." "And the A's are seven-for-ten in that stretch, Jim." Baseball commentary is like afternoon jazz - unhurried, nonchalant, and confident. There's a measured pace, an easy deliberateness, a gracious sharing of the narrative. Baseball commentary has elegant, time-taking southern manners.
The game itself seems designed to promote a calm acceptance of all outcomes and to discourage lopsided enthusiasm for favorites. The best team wins six games out of ten; the worst team wins four. In a three-game series, the odds are good that the better team won't win all three, and the odds aren't bad that the better team will lose two. Don't worry if your team doesn't win today, even if they blow a six-run lead in the ninth inning; history shows that it happens all the time. "So the Reds stage a two-out rally to prevent the sweep and they'll head into a home stand against the Braves, while the Dodgers move east for a three-game series with the Mets." Everything is fine with the teams, and the same is true with the individual players. A player with a really good batting average will fail to reach base seven times in ten, so don't worry if a player you particularly like went hitless today, or even yesterday and today. "After a fast start in April, Johnny's tailed off to .260 in the first two weeks of May." "And in May last year, Ron, he went on an eighteen-game tear with a .390 average and eleven home runs." It's all completely normal, even reassuring. You might really like Andy or Johnny or Clem, but there's something to be said for the Brewers' new centerfielder or the catcher the Twins just brought up from Triple A.
You like some teams better than others - maybe you have a single favorite - but your favorite might be a long way out of the running before the season's very old, so you take an interest in other teams as well. Most other fans have it the same way; it isn't their team's year either. But the Phillies have been playing some pretty exciting baseball, and wouldn't it be great to see them in a World Series. And the Royals just might catch the Tigers. Baseball asks for and repays a certain generosity in its fans. It's a bit like a pot-luck supper. I might be a White Sox fan, but I can remember fondly what the Giants did, or how good the middle of the Pirates' order was, and I am already on familiar terms with every team - the Cards, the Jays, the Tribe. Baseball is roomy, friendly and informal. You can sit in one chair for a while, but you don't have to stay in it. Come and sit over here and help me cheer on my Orioles. "That'll retire the side, but Badger's two-run blast ties it up and we'll go to the bottom of the fourth and the top of the Yankees' order."
Every sport enjoys its own history, but history is especially important to baseball and the sense of belonging that it facilitates. The roster of teams in both leagues has been stable for periods undreamed-of in other sports. From 1900 to 1952 there were eight teams in the National League. Four of them even stayed in the same cities and kept the same names (and if you've read this far, you might know who they are). In the American League the same eight teams played in the same eight cities from 1902 until 1954; the only changes were to their names. It's true that between the two leagues they've expanded to thirty teams now, but even so, only four AL teams and six NL teams have been enfranchised in the last fifty years. As Ron might point out, of the twenty teams that are older than fifty years, fifteen are older than a hundred. So when your favorite falls out of the running, the alternates you have available offer lots of tradition you can be part of. It's odds-on that the teams still in the race at the end of the season will include some venerable organizations, and you're welcome to ride along. Pick up on the Cardinals, you get Stan Musial and Dizzy Dean, Bob Gibson and Rogers Hornsby. Watch the Tigers and think about Al Kaline and Ty Cobb, Denny McLain and Hank Greenberg. As I write this, the Red Sox and the Dodgers are about to meet in the World Series; the last time it happened, Babe Ruth pitched for the Sox.
Baseball isn't measured in units that apply anywhere else; it's like English currency used to be. Two farthings make a halfpenny, twelve pence in a bob. We're not half-way through the season - we're at the all-star break. Three strikes and you're out, four balls to the walk, and sixty feet six inches from the mound to the plate. Four bases to the run, ninety feet in each, and three outs to the inning. Hold the runner on one and two, but hit and run if it's two and one. It's a one-six-three double play. One's out, the play's at third; two are gone, the play's at first. And that brings up a point some people find puzzling, the constant obvious commentary by the players on the field - it's even more routine than the play-by-play. "Two down," says the shortstop across to the second baseman. "Two out," the second baseman shouts to the right fielder with two fingers in the air. "Two away, play's at any bag," he responds to notify the center fielder. It goes around the field like an oath that every player is obliged to take.
The reason they're doing it is that baseball depends so crucially on the configuration of the game when the ball next goes into play. Think of hockey for a minute. When the play is stopped and then started again, not much has changed. The face-off might be in the other end; one team might now be playing short-handed. But what to do when the puck drops remains very much the same. Football is one step closer to baseball. When the play starts again, it's now second and two, or third and long, and the play is conditioned by the parameters; but again, the situation is obvious to everyone. With baseball, the number of possible configurations is huge, and not recognizing a configuration can be costly. Even the most seasoned fan regularly sees plays that he can't remember seeing before. It's not always obvious, even to the players, what the best response is to a given event, so they plan ahead, and they do it aloud.
The large number of possible configurations in baseball also ensures a massive fund of stories, a mythology where every piece of lore is unique. Again, the contrast with the ordinary is striking. Read the history of a team, or a season, or a player, and most of it is blasé. Someone is always grounding into an inning-ending double play, or scoring the runner with a long drive into the corner; every game can seem almost the same. But how often do you see an infield pop-up that might land foul, where the first baseman stumbles into the first-base runner, who takes second when the ball lands fair and bounces foul, forcing the runner at second to head for third, where he is thrown out? The umpires themselves talked and talked, and then the managers were brought in. It looked for all the world as if the umpires were trying to broker a deal, and the shrugs from the managers seemed to say, "I can live with that - you okay with it?" And people are still talking about a game between the Giants and the Cubs more than a century ago. With the score tied and runners on first and third in the bottom of the ninth, the Giants batter hit a single that was enough to score the runner from third to win the game. The runner on first celebrated but neglected to run to second. After quite a struggle, including having to retrieve the ball from the stands where the Giants had deliberately thrown it when they realized what was going on, the Cubs got the ball to second base and the runner was called out. Since it was a force out, the run didn't count.
Baseball is at once overwhelmingly regular, and yet astonishingly various, and the language of baseball reflects that. You can follow a game on the radio without paying very careful attention, and then be amazed at every story the commentators slip in. You can get the drift of the season just by looking at the standings and statistics in the paper, and yet when you watch a game you'll see something you've never seen before. Every time Clem beats out a bunt for a base hit, he's doing anew what Ricky Henderson and Lou Brock and Maury Wills did before him. They all belong together, and if you forget, Ron or Jim will be there with an entertaining reminder. "The ball dribbled loose, and John McGraw picked it up and heaved it into right field, and the runner got all the way to third." "And after the umpire and McGraw went nose to nose and McGraw kicked dirt on the umpire, the umpire kicked dirt on McGraw before he ejected him."
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