As with most that love the game of baseball, mine is a complicated relationship with the sport. My love for baseball has only waxed with me into adulthood, it has never waned. But my attention to it goes through all the phases of the moon. In recent years it has hovered somewhere around the new moon.
My time with baseball recently has been limited to highlight reels on social media and the occasional glance at AL and NL standings, and box scores. This current languor has nothing to do with the sad performance of the Colorado Rockies, or the bonehead decision to give the designated hitter a home in the Nation League instead of kicking him out of the American League. My teams have always gone through extended periods in the basement of their respective divisions - here I offer the Atlanta Braves of the 1970's and 80's as an example. And baseball has always made horrendous mistakes regarding baseball's rules of play assuming offense is the primary reason anyone watches the game - the lowering of the mound due particularly to the dominance of Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson springs immediately to mind. What brings me to my current predicament has everything to do with streaming services and how MLB deals with the watching of local teams.
Five years ago, we made the decision to ditch cable TV for streaming content due to the cost and impossible-to-understand "deals" offered by Xfinity. The only downside to streaming was the inability to watch "in market" baseball games unless I streamed a cable provider (thus defeating the purpose). Add to this the Rockies' inability to retain excellent players in favor of always expecting a talented rookie to arise from the minors, and my day-to-day interest in the sport has wavered. How can I be expected without the aid of television to keep up with the ever changing roster and performance of my Rockies when I look at the box scores and read it as "new guy", "Charlie Blackmon", "new guy", "f'n DH", "new guy", "I didn't know he was on the team", "new guy", and "new guy" - and who the heck knows who that pitcher is.
But without fail, during every spiritual low point with baseball, there is a redeeming epiphany that reminds me of the eternal flame within me for America's Pastime. My epiphany-of-the-moment occurred as I was driving past a neighborhood school, Columbia Elementary. Its lot is less than a square city block, so you can imagine the overall size of its playground. As I was passing it, a flash of bright green caught my eye, and I turned to see in one corner of that playground a perfect child-sized baseball diamond was laid out. I drove by it the following week and stopped and took a picture of it. The diamond was pristine. The grass a well-trimmed and vibrant green. The base paths unmarked by footprints. The chalk lines unmarred by baseballs, runners, or base coaches. The mound was perfectly groomed. I had no way to explain the idyllic conditions of this field fenced in along with gangs of 4-foot-tall bringers of chaos.
I went back today to look at it again and take a picture from atop the playground slide. From that vantage point I noticed something that I had not before. Dismounting, I walked over to the edge of the field, near the third base line. The field, the base paths, the mound were all astroturf. The razor straight base lines were painted on and not chalk at all. Learning this, I was not disenchanted in the least. It was after all, a wise choice for the cheering and laughing berserkers that would use it. I couldn't help but stand there, transfixed by this art imitating life, by this art as life. My mind could make out happily screaming children rounding the bases. I could almost hear the cheering of parents and sound of a baseball coming off the bat echoing in the morning's silence. And I smiled when I pictured a teacher, calling the game from behind the plate, throwing up her arms in exasperation, unable to make any sense of the latest inside the park home run and how it drove in more runners than bases.
This is the nature of the game. Fun, laughter, smiles. This is at the heart of baseball for me. It is what made this elementary school field a holy Chapel among the Cathedrals of baseball. There is Yankee Stadium, there is Fenway Park, there is Wrigley Field. But more importantly there are these oases of baseball purity. The places like sand lots, junk yards, inner city streets, and this school where dreams are born and some never die.
I stood there, unable to step onto the artificial grass, unable to interrupt the reverence of the moment. I stood there like Doc Graham unable to cross the first baseline and return to his youthful "Moonlight" Graham self in Field of Dreams because those days were behind him, behind the ghost of him. My playing days ended when I was a child and lost track of my glove. My playing catch days ended when I caught a ball tossed by my college age son with my face in the fading light of day at a neighborhood park. At that point he simply said, "Let's go home." We have never tossed the ball since and I miss it, but it was the right call. I was never any good at baseball.
Columbia Elementary School's field was just another reminder that you don't have to be good at baseball to love it. You don't have to be good at baseball to regard it as mystical. You don't have to be good at baseball to keep it in your prayers and to honor it as America's Pastime.
