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A Ballgame

It was not a very exciting baseball game that I saw at Fenway Park on August 16. The Yankees had come, and scored the first run in the first inning. They had two runs in the second, and three in the third, so that it was little comfort to the Sox fans when they failed to keep the pattern up in the fourth, bringing home only one man instead of four—the score already was 7-1. By the close of the seventh inning, weary fans had started to trickle out of the park, time went flat, and even the booing for Alex Rodriguez's fresh crimes had subsided into a clammy, humid clarity where everything seemed seen on television with a resolution too high to let you relax.

I think as a kid this scene would have depressed me, and I would have felt indignantly bored and put upon by the whole excursion. I didn't grow up in a family where baseball was watched or talked about (though I've recently learned that my older brother can still name the 1977 lineup of the New York Yankees at a hat-drop). Within my small person, I didn't have the sense of what made sports interesting, and it would take me a long time to figure it out. My first significant exposure to baseball must have happened when I was in high school in 2004 because my friend Tanya’s devotion to Manny Ramirez bordered pleasantly on bizarre obsession. The Red Sox would win the World Series that year, for the first time since Harry Frazee sold a player called Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees to finance his Broadway production of No, No, Nanette in 1919. There was a curse on the Red Sox, I learned.

It was going to be reversed.

With this, the sense of history and frissons that surrounded baseball in 2004 drew my attention, though I had only a vague idea what was going on. Still, I watched the games with Tanya and her parents, all eating casserole out of white dishes, hunched around a desktop computer in their dining room when the game wasn't on the regular TV stations. That the father was a grave Presbyterian minister somehow gave depth to the New England flavor of this scene: I remember once he came straight in from performing an exorcism. Reverse the curse. I had some excited sense (this was in New York State) that watching the Red Sox was something like practicing a secret religion.

 

Baseball is probably the most important performance tradition in America. If one is interested in "physical theater," only stupidity will keep her away from baseball

 

Boston is a real sports town. People have died in riots here to celebrate the winning of games. We have a one hundred and one year old ballpark, the oldest in America, crouching like a dragon in the middle of the city. And in August, when the universities are wilted by vacation and heat sends the uppity arts to Europe or the woods, baseball is the best show in town.

a baseball field
Fenway Park. Photo by Werner Kunz

If you are a fan, you do not need convincing about this, and you know without needing to be told that a damn good time can be had at a ballgame. The folks who are slow on the uptake tend to be people like me, who experienced the early development of an automatic cringe about spectator sports, suspecting them of a plastic mainstream-flavor and an overgrown commercialism around a central theme that is boring and repetitive, reminiscent of things we were forced to do at summer camp when we would rather read a book. This is a shame: baseball is probably the most important performance tradition in America. If one is interested in "physical theater," only stupidity will keep her away from baseball, though it might be mistaken for taste. The kind of focus the game demands of its players is eminently recognizable, what Anne Bogart calls satz, or the universal readiness of actors. Even if you are rusty on the rules, this quality engages for itself, and fascinates while you begin to understand.

Like drama, baseball changes time and space. In many sports the action is dictated by the clock. In baseball, the motion of balls and players in the diamond dictates. Innings collapse or expand over chronometric time according to events, based on dramatic principles that are the formal rules, and how the players manage to use or misuse them while moving counter-clockwise around the diamond. Space is similarly broken: we cheer when a ball leaves the field completely, extending the game into what might as well be infinite space from the vertex of attention at home plate. We glorify the individual player who whacked it out of the park. Everybody cheers at the instant; the true connoisseur is attentive to the minute adjustments that predict the hit.

In other sports, two teams might struggle for dominance over a marked-out space and a marked-out time, each trying to reach a goal in the other's end-zone with breaks in play forced by the escape of a ball from the regularized field. But in baseball the players take turns reformulating space and time, using play to form them into sluggish strings of errors or gripping tension studded with astonishing plays. Even the ballparks are not quite uniform beyond the diamond: Fenway in particular is crowned with its irregularity.

"The patterns of baseball," writes Roger Angell, "for all the game's tautness and neatness, are never regular. Who can predict the winner and shape of today's game? Will it be a brisk, neat two-hour shutout? A languid, error-filled 12-3 laugher? A riveting, three-hour, fourteen-inning deadlock? What other sport produces these manic swings?"

And so, the pace in baseball is alternately a meditation and a flash, with attention pricking on a central drama between the pitcher and the batter, while allowing for unbelievable performances (Willie Mays comes twirling to mind) in the field. The kind of experience that can occur within the game, if you are awake to it, is at least as varied as what can happen in most narrative drama and raises the transfer of energy with an object to its perfection. At certain moments the exhilaration is much greater than most theater: not only has nothing been scripted, the laws of physics and statistics seem to take sides with the hero, whoever he manages to be. Theater audiences know well enough the electricity of great performance. What we may not be accustomed to are its manifestations fully clothed in a leather skin, soaring into the air and out into the world at large with an enormous smack of noise. Baseball has this to offer.

It also offers boredom, disappointment, and the long season. I began this essay with snips of autobiography: watching baseball is bound to call up memories for people who have long family traditions with the sport, as well as those who don't. Either way, the game maps itself onto life. Its presence is like spring, a constant presence whether imaginary or viewed, dipping from background to foreground, inviting attention or inattention, offering history and scandal as orientation.

The long arcs of players' careers stretch personalities across the contours of team loyalty, defining decades at a time, similar to the way we experience long relationships to our families and friends. Though, ultimately, just as artificial as the characters in a play, we see these personae through hardship and bad behavior and old age. We see them perform badly, and notice their mistakes. Even the stars only have a few golden chances; these can be botched, and are. Their successes are spectacular; in the best, their will consistent.

"Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out," said John Updike in his famous essay about Ted Williams, "Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art."

To engage with baseball involves the knowledge that any particular game could go the way of the one I watched on August 16: without drama where we might like it, with sinking falls off of moments of suspense. He who expects Henry IV, part 2 might well see Waiting for Godot. We cast Alex Rodriguez as a villain only to watch him take up Papi Ortiz' line drive in the eighth inning for a smoothly executed double play that closed up the last chances for a win. The summer night came down without redemption.  And there will be another game tomorrow.

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The pitcher's duel, the come-from-behind win in the bottom of the ninth, that long fly ball caroming off the foul pole to stay in play, the well turned double play and the unassisted triple play and the sacrifice. Oh, how I love the sacrifice. All of them - and more - such wonderful tropes, when applied to the many scenes playing out in our lives. Even to the casual fan and to those for whom the Fall Classic is all the length of their season these have meaning. The high drama of a blown call cueing the entrance of the Manager. The Grand Guignol of the struck batsman and the bench clearing brawl. The farce that is the error. Baseball is a performance like no other.

"It may not be your theater, but it's theater for somebody, somewhere..." Bill Sampson, All About Eve

Thanks for a wonderful essay, Allison.

Hi Allison. Great to read your piece here. Email me if you like at [email protected]. We are actually in the planning stages for a large-scale performance with a MLB team- would love to hear more thoughts on baseball as contemporary performance! All the best, Allison Orr/Choreographer in Austin, TX.

Allison, great article! I love baseball as a narrative. And the language of baseball rhetoric provides for great story telling. As a huge baseball fan in St. Louis, I, however, have a painful memory of 2004. :-)
It's funny... you guys reverse your curse on our field, then we demolish that stadium...