What Baseball Means to Me by Curt Smith

Author:Curt Smith [SMITH, CURT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446556989
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

No big leaguer has hit a fair ball completely out of Yankee Stadium, though Mickey Mantle came closest. Here he extends Don Larsen’s 1956 perfect game.

Exposed in those years to so many Yankee, Giant, and Dodger games, and free of any illusion about my own athletic potential, I had become a dedicated follower well before reaching high school. Among life’s manifold pleasures, the ballpark was a unique experience, not yet diluted by radio or television availability. It glowed for all the trite (but powerful) reasons: green grass, sunshine, hot dogs, echoing sounds, suspense and excitement, unfettered right to scream and yell, and (long before ABC appropriated the phrase) the vicarious thrill of victory and agony of defeat. And on all the many more days of non-attendance, merely finding out what happened could provide that pleasure to my imagination.

No other activity had as direct an effect on one’s daily mood. Your team won, it was a good day; it lost, it was a bad day. Whatever else was going on, that undercurrent of feeling could not be escaped.

By the time I entered college, I knew I would never give up this addiction, and had figured out how to handle it. Whatever I’d do for a living, I would have to spend enormous amounts of time and money on ball games, leaving little room for other enjoyments. But if my gainful employment could be tied to the ball games, there would be plenty of opportunity to do everything else in my nonworking time.

My course to a baseball-writing career was set.

Once I became a professional (after returning from the Army), I outgrew fandom very quickly. Now my job was to understand what I was trying to describe. My fan experience had given me sufficient background on the historical level, but now I had to learn not merely who won, but why, and how, and what were the ball-field (and off-field) realities being lived by the people I wrote about. Rooting became irrelevant (because, among other things, as time went on, some good guy was losing as often as some bad guy was winning); comprehension became paramount.

So I became a serious (but never solemn) “student of the game”—and discovered that this was much more fun, more stimulating, more fascinating, more complex, and more satisfying than mere fandom had ever been.

What, then, does baseball mean to me now and for the last fifty years?

It means what medicine means to a doctor, physics to a physicist, music to a musician, or what any professional field means to those who practice it. Where it fits in American culture, philosophically and psychologically, I leave to those who labor in those areas. For me it’s simply the most intricate, interesting, varied, and self-renewing game I know, and beyond the game on the field itself, its structure, history, and population are equally fascinating.

Each day, as I keep learning a little more about it, I enjoy it more. I can imagine a world without baseball, but can’t imagine wanting to live in one.

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