Baseball is forever, even as it rests

The dirty truth of it for those of us who don’t love baseball, but who need baseball, even after a season shortened by pandemic (particularly after a season shortened by pandemic), is we will never be ready for baseball to be over. Because, for those of us who are blessed with the gift of baseball love, baseball never ends. For us, and for lucky people like us, baseball is forever.

Why are we never ready for it to be over, even after all three of our local teams have muddled through losing seasons? Because bad baseball is better than no baseball, and when November comes (look straight ahead) and the nights are suddenly barren we will once again appreciate this unfortunate inevitability.

The stability of knowing there is a game every day and every night and being able to count on it, then, whether consciously or sub-consciously, adjusting your entire day and night around the first pitch provides great comfort, whether you are attending the game, watching it on TV or listening to it on the radio

Baseball is every day. In fact, Earl Weaver, in once telling the Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell not to fret losing track of time during a pregame interview in the dugout that lasted into the playing of the national anthem, said, “This ain’t a football game. We do this every day.”

Baseball is every day, yet it is something new every day. During every baseball game you ever watch you will see something happen that you have never seen before. You see things that continue to provide you with childlike wonder and with goose bumps, no matter how many decades you’ve already been a baseball fan and no matter how late into a lost season that moment may occur.

As each new baseball season approaches, you are filled with great anticipation. When it arrives it lives up to and exceeds your every expectation, yet, as we are reminded every late fall, it passes in the wink of a young girl’s eye.

And when it ends, as it did on Tuesday night when the Los Angeles Dodgers won game 6 of the 2020 World Series, when it shuts down until the next time and the final tastes of what you just witnessed are remembered, you miss it.

Almost as soon as it’s over, you miss it — the day to day of the baseball season ...

It’s the companionship. It’s the companionship of the game you love and the routine you are familiar with that you never look forward to missing. Because it is companionship, particularly a lifetime of companionship, that lives in the heart of all that defines who and what we are.

Those of us who love baseball — those of us who need it — are not surprised. We’ve known all along. But hopefully, the just completed World Series, that still feels as though ended prematurely because one noodlehead manager fell in love with analytics over the game itself, will re-open eyes to others, and help them remember that baseball is the best game going.

Baseball is a far better game than football. As the world champion Dodgers and the American League champion Tampa Bay Rays showed us, even in games now marred by those blasted analytics, there is more action in baseball, there is more drama and suspense, and there is more intrigue.

Until a team runs out of outs, baseball never stops once the first pitch is thrown — not on the field, not between pitches, not in our minds and, certainly, not in our hearts.

The great Earl Weaver: “You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”

Professional football? It’s a television show (#NFLTheTVShow) controlled by a clock that runs for precisely 60 minutes and gives us a mere 11 minutes of action. And it is stretched out over almost four hours of broadcast time.

George Will said at the height of the NFL’s popularity, no less, “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

Yet the violence that so many fans relish is being legislated out, as the NFL continues to take every preventive measure against liability that it can. Of course, what makes the NFL any different in that regard from any other corporation in this litigation-happy day and age?

Oh, wait. There’s no liability in baseball. There’s no liability. As George Carlin so beautifully stated, “In baseball, the object is to go home, and to be safe. I hope I’ll be safe at home; safe at home.”

Each of the six games of this World Series had something of everything. It was high drama at its most unreachable peak. It was fresh, it was exciting, it was painful and excruciating; it was the far reach for unrealized joy, and it was pure mystery seasoned with unthinkable misery. In the actual moments of the actual game, it was baseball in its finest hour.

And it is during this week each year that we turn to the “The Green Fields of the Mind” and the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, who wrote, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops ...”

We feel this melancholy; we felt it immediately and the loneliness of it on Wednesday, the saddest day of the year for a baseball fan. And with an entire winter to constantly ask themselves, “Why the hell did Cash pull Snell?” Rays fans, wherever they may be, will feel it the most and the deepest, as they brace to face what will be their loneliest fall yet.

Even Dodgers fans will feel it. For despite having their long-awaited world championship in hand, a natural sadness surrounds us with the completion of our great projects. Even though the project has been completed with their first world title in 32 years, the saddest words in the King’s English remain, “No game today.”

So, good night, baseball. Rest easy. Thank you again for our summer afternoons and evenings. We’ll miss you, but you’re always with us. See you in the spring.

We hope.

Mike Burke has been writing and covering sports since 1981. Write to him at [email protected], or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @MikeBurkeMDT and @JackYdk. Listen to him, Matt Gilmore and Lydia Savramis on their “You Don’t Know Jack” podcast. Follow “You Don’t Know Jack” on Facebook as well.