June 8, 2010--Past Perfect

Even people who hate baseball, especially those who can't sit still for it, who find it anachronistic and boring, have some awareness that something strange and disturbing happened last week when Detroit Tigers' pitcher Armando Galarraga lost his chance to become only the 21st man in all of history to pitch a perfect game because, on what would have been the 27th and final out, the first base umpire, Jim Joyce, blew the call on a not-so-close play and called the runner safe when even without instant TV replay it was clear to those sitting a mile away in the bleachers that he was out.

A perfect game is one in which 27 batters come to the plate and 27 in a row are retired, with none of them reaching first base by any means whatsoever--by making a hit, receiving a base on balls (a walk), or getting on base by someone on the pitcher's team making an error. Or, as in the case in point, by an umpire blowing a call. Even that destroys the possibility of perfection.

That egregious call the other day on the potential last out has unleashed a chorus of demands to use instant replay in baseball as they now do in football, basketball, and hockey. To review close, bang-bang plays.

A few, me very much included, are totally opposed to this notion.

Yes, there is the technology to do it, but there is the technology to do a lot of things that we opt to ignore. For example, some feel that setting off a small atomic bomb buried in the floor of the Gulf of Mexico could cauterize the breach in the wellhead and thereby stop the gushing leak. We choose not to try that. We probably could begin to clone humans as we do farm animals, we have the technology to do that, but as a society we find this repellent and do not allow it.

These admittedly are hyper-examples as compared to something as seemingly trivial as a game. One in which men in funny outfits play a boy's (and girl's) game.

But perhaps the comparisons are more appropriate than one might think.

Have you wondered why baseball has motivated significant writers to turn attention to it? John Updike, for example, about the great Ted Williams last game, his final at bat, when he hit a home run, in "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," who wrote:

For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.

Never, not even after that farewell home run, did Williams tip his hat to the cheering fans. Gods do not answer letters.

Pretty good stuff.

To Updike, to me, and many millions of other Americans, mainly boys listening to the game in the middle of the night on the radio when our parents thought we were asleep, baseball was not just a game but about life. It was teaching us subliminal lessons.

Before we knew the concept, it stood as a metaphor for what is possible and what inevitably spoils everything. Like Williams' last hurrah back on August 26, 1960, and last week's ruined perfect game. The 60s full of promise; our era fraught with peril and imperfection. Metaphors.

Writing in Sundays New York Times, another decent writer, Bruce Weber, got more of it right. He wrote:

That reality [the umpire's botched call], in fact, should tell us something about the nature of baseball, which is the least programmatic, the least technological of games. It doesn't even have a clock. The fields have widely varying shapes and sizes, and the primary battleground between offense and defense--i.e., the strike zone--is a box of air with dimensions that have proven impossible to specify. There's a lot less science in baseball, a lot more art, than in any sport you can name. . . . It's an irnony that only in baseball do there exisit perfect games.

Not having a clock is a big part of baseball's metaphoric appeal. Especially in our speeded-up age. To quote another great thinker, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, this means that it "Isn't over till it's over." One more metaphor; but this one with a few extra layers because even without a clock it still will be over. But in the meantime, play ball!