Baseball in the 21st century is in the 10th inning. I’ve borrowed this metaphor from the excellent and newly revised Baseball: An Illustrated History. Important here is that the game isn’t over. The future of the game might be in a bit of jeopardy, and things can tend to get a bit precarious (the major league game having suffered a very unpopular labor disruption, and the enduring steroid thing), but late in the game the lights shine even brighter. Then again, another threat to the game of baseball is that it’s sometimes, maybe, at moments… it can be a bit boring.
I remember being at a Raptors game, maybe 10 years ago. The Raptors weren’t able to get anything going and ended up behind by about 30 points late in the game. The event crystallized into a nice and compact anecdote for me when another fan walked by me to leave. In a dejected but partly conciliatory tone, sensing that my brother and I were going to sit there right through to the end, he said to us, “this is worse than baseball.”
Baseball really takes some hard hits. It is frequently maligned as being the most boring of all the major team sports. On one occasion I heard it referred to as the most depressing aspect of our culture. That seems harsh. but baseball can be a pretty big target. On the other hand, baseball gets some lofty praise as well. It’s everything from America’s pastime, to the perfect way to spend a sun-soaked Saturday afternoon. Baseball, in this way, can be a polarizing force. But it’s also an equalizer, as evidenced any weekday evening when you’ve tried to find a free diamond anywhere in the city to rally your softball team for impromptu batting practice. Boring or not, the popularity of baseball on the whole doesn’t really come into question.
The stakes seem even higher too, in regards to this 10th inning talk, when you consider baseball’s storied past. For example, Monday marked 29 years to the day that Cal Ripken began his ‘Cal Riken like’ iron-man streak of consecutive games played. That’s a benchmark respected in any sport.
Enter baseball manager Ozzie Guillen (who was in town Sunday with his Chicago White Sox). Ozzie is no stranger to adding extracurricular drama to the game. I think this kind of thing is good for baseball. He’s a great story, being an energetic and enthusiastic player-turned-manager, and in 2005 became the first Latin American manager to win a world series. He’s also a great character: loudly outspoken, hyperbolic if a little predictable. There might not be any crying in baseball, but there does tend, on occasion, to be a lot of standing around. So it’s good to have some peripheral intrigue creeping in from time to time (and maybe that don’t involve Barry Bonds all the time).
Before the game on Sunday Ozzie lashed out. Not the Chicago White Sox fans he insists —although that’s hard to follow since he blames them for pissing all over the statues of great players (metaphorically?) — but maybe at the institution of baseball itself. Ozzie tells us he’s a man who cares too much, that’s his crime. Very upset about the prospect of perhaps being fired from the job and the team he loves, Ozzie put things into an interesting context by not just bemoaning the lack of any real or loyal memory on the part of fans or the higher powers of the franchise. But by going as far as to say that he wished he didn’t care. He wished he didn’t care about everybody’s opinion, about the general manager’s opinion, about the White Sox at all. But he does. He cares so f***in’ much.
Recently, Ozzie’s been on the offensive about his own players’ lack of in-game production when it’s mattered. He’s been ejected from a game only to get his punishment upgraded to a suspension for taking his act to Twitter while the game was still going on. As the calls mount for his dismissal, I guess Ozzie’s been left to wonder, what about all of his accomplishments? What about all of the good he’s done for the Sox? And make no mistake, he’s on the side of hyperbolic enthusiasm when it comes to baseball. But is there more to it than that? Because Ozzie offers us more than just someone fighting for his job, despite the terrible record he’s got with his Sox already this year. Maybe he’s the living metaphor for the 10th inning. He’s got a past, a present, but he wants a future too. He finds excitement in baseball but seems at ease with letting the longer story of it all play itself out.
As a preamble to their 10th inning analogy, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns offer a brief meditation on John Keats of all people. “Negative capability” was the term Keats used to explain how to stay within a polarity, or within conflicting forces, and how poetry was a way to not process every experience as a problem to solve. Like maybe there is something thoughtful in the pace of baseball, not just in a game, but over history. Maybe Ozzie is what this negative capability means to baseball right now.
Then Toronto went on to crucify Chicago 13-4, and even smashed in a first inning grand slam.
