The season opener is here, and when I think of baseball, I think of poetry. That might seem an odd combination, but baseball and poetry have more in common than you think.
First, baseball is literally pastoral. Baseball is played in a big goddamn field. Throw in an occasional sheep, get a shepherd’s crook and you’re a veritable shepherd. After a long winter, the green grass looks nothing short of heaven. (Unless your team plays in a dome, in which case it’s probably purgatory.)
While the view’s a treat, I go for the music of the game. Poetic meter is essentially music, and music is largely math; baseball is almost all math and therefore replete with a music of its own.
But we’re not talking calculus and you certainly don’t need to be a statistician to enjoy it. The math’s simple, intuitive. If you can count to four you’ve got it made. (This is perhaps why children latch onto the game at a young age.)
Like the writing life, baseball is a game defined by failure. In both, if you manage to succeed 25 percent of the time, you’re halfway decent. Get on base 30 percent of the time and you’re a star. If you hit .400, you’re either Ted Williams or Shakespeare.
Baseball’s music is more than just math, though. John Cage has nothing on the ambient noise of a ballgame. At a game, the first thing you hear are the barkers, and the simple iambic of pro-grams pro-grams and cold beer, cold beer, booming out from the stadium and onto the concourse.
Then there’s the graceful physics. For example: The pitcher’s mound is 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate.
In 2011, the average MLB pitcher had a fastball of about 92 mph.
According to our good friends at Google: (60 feet six inches) / (92 mph) = 0.448369565 seconds.
That means you’ve got four-tenths of a second to see the ball, decide to swing, swing, and actually make contact.
When the pitches get faster, you’ve got even less time.
(60 feet six inches) / (96 mph) = 0.4296875 seconds
(60 feet six inches) / (100 mph) = 0.4125 seconds
(60 feet six inches) / (105 mph) = 0.392857143 seconds (only one person, Arlodis Chapman, has thrown about this fast)
But the thing is, hitting a fastball is relatively easy. Believe it or not, most people, if they practiced, could probably hit a 90 mph heater. It’s all about the timing.
That’s the thing, though, once a good pitcher gets in a rhythm he knows exactly what to do. He lulls you to sleep with fastball, fastball, fastball, then there’s a sudden curve, your desperate swing and the walk back to the dugout.
And while you might think I’m simply being metaphorical when I say that baseball and poetry overlap, I mean it literally. Despite its age, baseball makes it new: The bases are drunk instead of loaded, the pitcher throws Uncle Charlie (the curveball) or The Lady Godiva Pitch (the pitch with nothing on it), a fly ball is a dying quail or a can of corn, and a player in the majors is up for a cup of coffee. Then there the innumerable nicknames for each player or manager. A manager who takes his pitchers out at the first sight of trouble is Captain Hook. Then there’s ex-Minnesota Twin Doug Mientkiewicz, who was simply known as “Eye Chart.”
This wordplay goes on and on, and many of these terms come from the players themselves, who certainly aren’t trained writers. After all this is a game full of hayseeds and toughs, kids from Oklahoma or California or Chicago or from the slums of the Dominican Republic or Venezuela.
But as Josef Beuys said, “Jeder Mensch ein Künstler (everyone’s an artist) and perhaps nowhere is that more true than on the ballfield.
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