After reading David B. Hart’s essay on baseball, A Perfect Game, in this month’s issue of FIRST THINGS, I soaked up his idyllic metaphors as I entered Target Field last night to see my beloved Twins take on the hapless Cleveland Indians. Beholding the wonder of the green diamond I was filled with immense gratitude for God’s provision in leading us out of the wilderness of the Metrodome to the promised land of outdoor baseball. No, perhaps it was better than that—like Eden on a sunny summer evening.
Joe Mauer’s chiseled jaw stood tall and proud as the Star Spangled Banner was sung by a local barbershop quartet swelling my Minnesotan heart with pride. Unlike Cleveland’s former narcissistic superstar, our hometown hero is a humble and modest fellow who grew up on the unassuming streets of good ole’ St. Paul. Surely his angelic swing would not result in a 4-6-3 double play tonight! There was much to be thankful for and Hart’s mediations swept over me as if the perfect Platonic Forms were bleeding into the material world from the pitcher’s mound.
And it did not take longer than five innings to be disabused of this frilly nonsense.
One of the things that has always troubled me about the Platonic Forms is that they only seem to be invoked to explain beautiful things. Their changelessness, their perfection, their timelessness are naturally thought to comport with the beautiful. Ugliness is thought to be a distinct feature of the finite world that fails conform to the perfection of the Forms. But it seems just as plausible to imagine Forms of horror, for they leave evidence of their ugliness that goes beyond the mere frailty of nature. Baseball seems to point to this reality.
If Dante had known of baseball he would have included it in one of the many circles hell. Souls under the wrath of God would be subject to watching their home team get two quick outs and the away team drive in four straight runs off of a couple of walks and four singles. We might be tempted to say this somehow fits into the game’s greatness, but there is no evidence to support this banal notion when one observes how this tortured process comes about.
Hart makes many references to the infinite as telling of baseball’s glory, but is he aware that it can be equally telling of its dread? Here is how it goes: Two outs, bottom of the fifth, first pitch, ball one, second pitch ball two, third pitch, ball three, meeting between catcher and pitcher, umpire resumes game, fourth pitch, foul ball, long pause between signals, fifth pitch, foul ball, sixth pitch foul ball, seventh pitch, foul ball, eighth pitch foul ball, ninth pitch foul ball, tenth pitch, single to right-center field. Repeat this process four times; add a walk or two in between. Beholding such monotony gives one a rotten sense of the infinite where hope for one last out comes to symbolize Kierkegaard’s notion of despair; wanting no longer to exist and not being able to do anything about it.
Anyone who has had the displeasure of having to watch this will understand how a stadium can transform from an Edenic paradise to a little shop of horrors. The agony is felt by 40,000 people all at once. Not even listening to a speech by an inept politician can elicit such a unanimous reaction. What we are beholding is foul in all respects, the sheerest form of ugliness one can imagine in the realm of sports. It makes the blood cool and long for the oblong game played in the winter of Minnesota where the ice, wood, and fist prevail.
July 20th, 2010 | 8:36 am | #1
Adding to your momentary distress is the fact that your “beloved Twins” took one on the chin from “the hapless Cleveland Indians”!
By the way, your new park is a beauty!
July 20th, 2010 | 8:48 am | #2
“By the way, your new park is a beauty!”
Holy cow, is it ever.
July 20th, 2010 | 9:37 am | #3
That’s nothing. Really.
If you want to know what doing hard time in the stands is like, try living in Seattle in the pre-Griffey, pre-Kindome-detonation days. That old, Soviet-style multiplex hosted some never-ending innings of iniquity before crowds of less than ten thousand, witnessing last-place lineups of washed-up vets toiling away under the direction of clueless here-today-gone-tomorrow managers.
July 20th, 2010 | 1:46 pm | #4
compared to the twinkie dome, it’s a pretty low bar to crawl over. I can honestly say, the twinkie dome was the worst place I have ever watched a baseball game.
July 20th, 2010 | 7:52 pm | #5
Cooper,
Did you mean “Kingdome”?
I love baseball. And after living in OK, NE, and OH, I feel like I’m always lacking something. At least baseball is a relatively short drive from Columbus.
Baseball was ruined by free agency. Not free moral agency. There is a theological discussion here: Individual agency vs collective agency. But that’s another post.
July 24th, 2010 | 5:56 pm | #6
Just based on the title, I thought this thread was going to be about spitting brown juice and scratching one’s nether parts.
July 26th, 2010 | 8:01 am | #7
[...] essay on baseball, A Perfect Game, Adam Omelianchuk attended a game—and remembered the game is less than perfect than described: There was much to be thankful for and Hart’s mediations swept over me as if the perfect [...]
July 26th, 2010 | 8:22 am | #8
“At least baseball is a relatively short drive from Columbus.”
Last time I checked, you have a team in Columbus. Since when is baseball, even the best of it, defined by the exploitation of MLB?
“Baseball was ruined by free agency. Not free moral agency. There is a theological discussion here: Individual agency vs collective agency. But that’s another post.”
Not meaning to pile on, but there’s just so much wrong with this commentary, Collin. Baseball is tarnished by greed. And if it wasn’t players and agents in the 80′s, it was owners in all the decades before that.
It should be enough for a player to sign a contract with a team. At the end of the contract, if he still possesses baseball skills, signs another. Marvin Miller snookered the owners with limited free agency. Star players demand high salaries when freed of competition from developing prospects.
Let’s get back to that other post on individual versus collective: how do you justify anything other than community ownership?
July 26th, 2010 | 8:34 am | #9
The whole thing reminds me of the baseball number from Ragtime: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtCSCM2Dx7Y
July 26th, 2010 | 7:45 pm | #10
Romans 8:28, Adam. Nearly a century of frustration, humiliation, and ugliness was the backdrop against which the glory that was the 2004 Red Sox, for example, could be appreciated. No ugliness, no dazzling beauty.
That may be the Twins’ problem. They’re the Laodiceans of MLB. (“I wish that you were cold or hot.”) They’re turning into a team that, in its Minnesota way, is usually pretty good — or, like the children of Lake Wobegon, “above average.” The team that caused you so much woe, the Indians: Now there’s ugliness for you. They’re cold, so that when they turn hot and win the World Series again, as they will someday, though the day and the hour only the Father knows, the world will be stunned, and all of Cleveland, or those of us who are still left here, will be taken up in a sort of prototype of the rapture, as we look for and hasten unto the coming of the day of God.
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