AN ARTICLE FROM THE BASEBALL
MAGAZINE:NOV.
ONEMOREINNING
What A Wonderful Game Is
Baseball…
What a wonderful game is baseball. What a wonderful
game this is with it’s sunshiny days, ballparks
of all sizes & dimensions, and franks, and
soda, and
beer, &
the crackling sound of
peanuts being shelled, and fresh
cut grass with beads of dew
sparkling
up from it’s tips,
and
venders giving their pitches
and fans stretching out into impossible angles
to reach their food, pigeons
flying, swooping, and swirling around your head, flags with pennant winning
years imprinted on them being whipped back
and forth in the breeze, and
public address announcers telling you who is coming to bat, and scoreboards
that used to tell you score’s by people putting the numbers in by hand
and one’s that now tell you everything with electronic
wizardry, and of course the thrill of watching all those players (the stars
and the toilers in the sun) perform day in and day out.
What a wonderful game is this game of baseball
that has given us Babe Ruth’s
called HR, and Lou Gehrig’s
farewell speech, Merkle’s boner, and Buckner’s incredible error,
and Larsen’s perfect World Series game, and Eddie Gaedel (all
3’2” of him) working a walk against Bob Cain, and Sal
Durante
catching the 61st Hr by Roger Maris,
and
Gionfrido’s catch,
and the immortal homeruns by
Bucky Dent, Kirk Gibson, and Aaron Boone, and Vandy’s two no-hitters,
and Ripken breaking Gehrig’s Iron
man streak, and Pete Gray playing the outfield with just one arm,
and Jim Abbott doing the same
thing but as a pitcher, and Henderson stealing over a thousand bases, and
Slaughter coming all the way home from first base on a single to win the
last game of the World Series for the Cards, and Arron breaking Ruth’s
HR record, and Rogers Hornsby averaging .400 over a five year period, and
having both Eddie Waitkus and Billy Jurgess resume their careers after bring
shot by lovesick fans.
What a wonderful game is baseball with its folklore
and endless stories that attain mythic proportions and in some crazy, jingle
jangle way, we who are fans of the game are part of it as well. The events
live in our hearts and we carry the moments with us forever. But more than
the stories, more than the outer trappings of the game, more than the box
scores or the way the game is covered, there are the ballplayers, the men
who come from everywhere. From rural farms, urban cities, other countries,
big towns, small unheard of areas, highly sophisticated industrial places,
sprawling farmlands, and milling city life spilling over with ethnic diversity
that is mind boggling. They come in all sizes and shapes, colors and temperaments
and they have been around for over 170 plus years now. There have been 16,000
of them and their talents have ranged from mediocre to sublime. We have had
saints and sinners, huckleberries and sharpies, the all knowing, the gamblers,
the womanizers, the street wise know-it-alls and the hicks from god knows
where. The beauty and greatness of the game is that all can play. If you’re
fat or skinny, dumb or bright, quiet or flamboyant, it doesn’t matter,
everyone can get on that field and perform.
We’re lucky. We have their accounts on film
and paper and that tells us all. It tells us how the game has changed and
in many ways how it has not. It tells us what the players were like and is
a mirror of their time.
What a wonderful game is
baseball.
