June 15, 2012--Making History
One reason why baseball is my favorite sport is because so much of it is about making history.
Case in point--just two days ago, Matt Cain of the San Francisco Giants pitched the first perfect game in the team's history. After 129 years, the first perfect game.
Through those years, the Giants, who originated in New York City and played in the Polo Grounds, had some of the game's greatest pitchers on their roster. Hall of Famers such as Joe McGinnity, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Carl Hubbell, and Juan Marichal. They pitched a few no-hitters, but none of them ever pitched a perfect game.
Then along comes this kid and does something that not even Christy Mathewson, who pitched for the New York Giants for 16 years accomplished--Cain retired 27 men in a row and not one of them got to first base through an error or in any other way.
Go figure.
But that's the point--go figure.
Baseball teaches many lessons and has even penetrated our language--the aforementioned "getting to first base" is one of our American idioms. And baseball is also very much about history. That is not true for any other sport. They're about the here and now. Yes, stats are kept in basketball (how many assists a player makes, how many triple-doubles) and in ice hockey (how many "hat tricks" a hockey player accumulates in a life time or how many shutouts a goalie manages to pull off), but a great deal about baseball is keeping close track of its history--teams history and of course the achievements (and mess-ups) of individual players.
For every hero (Matt Cain now joins that roster--there have been only 22 perfect games in all of baseball history, including only one in a World Series game) there is a "goat"--a player who screws up big time: the Brooklyn Dodgers Ralph Branca who threw the pitch to Bobby Thomson that he hit out of the park for a walk-off three-run home run that propelled the Giants to the 1951 pennant; Bill Buchner, the Boston Red Sox first basemen who let a softly-hit ball trickle through his legs for an error in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series that allowed the improbable New York Mets to get to and win the decisive seventh game.
Baseball history, sometimes real life history, is waiting to be made on the diamond; and sometimes it happens in an out-of-the-way place and is accomplished by an unexpected person.
By Jackie Robinson, for example, who in 1947 became the first Negro to be allowed to play Major League baseball. For the Brooklyn Dodgers in an out-of-the-way, rickety band-box of a ballpark--Ebbets Field.
And, as they say, the rest is history. Which again is the point.
Case in point--just two days ago, Matt Cain of the San Francisco Giants pitched the first perfect game in the team's history. After 129 years, the first perfect game.
Through those years, the Giants, who originated in New York City and played in the Polo Grounds, had some of the game's greatest pitchers on their roster. Hall of Famers such as Joe McGinnity, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Carl Hubbell, and Juan Marichal. They pitched a few no-hitters, but none of them ever pitched a perfect game.
Then along comes this kid and does something that not even Christy Mathewson, who pitched for the New York Giants for 16 years accomplished--Cain retired 27 men in a row and not one of them got to first base through an error or in any other way.
Go figure.
But that's the point--go figure.
Baseball teaches many lessons and has even penetrated our language--the aforementioned "getting to first base" is one of our American idioms. And baseball is also very much about history. That is not true for any other sport. They're about the here and now. Yes, stats are kept in basketball (how many assists a player makes, how many triple-doubles) and in ice hockey (how many "hat tricks" a hockey player accumulates in a life time or how many shutouts a goalie manages to pull off), but a great deal about baseball is keeping close track of its history--teams history and of course the achievements (and mess-ups) of individual players.
For every hero (Matt Cain now joins that roster--there have been only 22 perfect games in all of baseball history, including only one in a World Series game) there is a "goat"--a player who screws up big time: the Brooklyn Dodgers Ralph Branca who threw the pitch to Bobby Thomson that he hit out of the park for a walk-off three-run home run that propelled the Giants to the 1951 pennant; Bill Buchner, the Boston Red Sox first basemen who let a softly-hit ball trickle through his legs for an error in the sixth game of the 1986 World Series that allowed the improbable New York Mets to get to and win the decisive seventh game.
Baseball history, sometimes real life history, is waiting to be made on the diamond; and sometimes it happens in an out-of-the-way place and is accomplished by an unexpected person.
By Jackie Robinson, for example, who in 1947 became the first Negro to be allowed to play Major League baseball. For the Brooklyn Dodgers in an out-of-the-way, rickety band-box of a ballpark--Ebbets Field.
And, as they say, the rest is history. Which again is the point.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:11 AM
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