The weird, enduring magic of baseball

Photo by Alfo Medeiros: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-and-red-baseball-on-green-grass-11807487/

My name is spelled the way it is because my parents have always been big fans of the Toronto Blue Jays. I was destined to be enchanted by baseball.

The older I get, the more enchanted I become. I think of it less as a sport and more of a ritualistic celebration of simpler times. A holdover, like parades and fireworks displays—spectacles that feel like fossils from earlier eras. Admirable, in part, for their antiquated physicality. I enjoy baseball aesthetically, the way some people appreciate ballet, or going to the opera.

It’s been a part of my life for so long that I struggle to explain its intricacies to those to whom it’s foreign. For me, understanding baseball is like understanding how to walk, or how to speak English. It’s just in there. Intrinsic.

As a small child growing up in the early 90s, I didn’t need a reason or adult supervision to go outside and find adventure. That was part of the fabric of existence. Nothing happening indoors? No sweat. Go outside and make shit happen.

Sometimes, I’d find likeminded cronies and with our spare bits of equipment we’d enact aspects of the game. And that’s one of the great things about baseball: It’s a collection of simple tasks, all of which are greatly satisfying. Even, or especially, for a small child.

Tossing a ball back and forth. Running short distances as fast as you can and trying not to get caught. Attempting to hit a moving target as hard as you can with a big stick. Chasing after a quick, small object as it bounces along the ground, or drops out of the sky. Spitting on the ground just because you feel like it.

A child sees baseball, on TV or at the park, and thinks, I want to do that. These are, on some level, irresistible activities.

Some of those children are athletic enough, and gifted enough with the peculiar talents required, that they go on to earn incomprehensible sums of money. But even those rare and fortunate few are still playing a child’s game. We should all be so lucky.

But we aren’t. And so we watch instead. Perhaps we cheer. Perhaps we pass the game down to our own children. Acts of baseball can be performed gently enough for a toddler to enjoy. 

My own son, who has only recently grown out of the toddler stage of his life, has begun to request that we play “baseball” on our trips to the local park. He doesn’t know that what he calls “baseball” is more generally known as playing “catch” (or “catchball,” as it’s called in Japan). But it doesn’t matter. He’s not wrong.

We stand an appropriate (for a four-year-old) distance apart, and I lob the ball at him underhanded. It traces a slow arc in the air, and he claps at it. Most often, the ball hits him in the chest, and he laughs. Or it falls to the ground somewhere near him, and he laughs. Occasionally – maybe one out of every ten tosses – he'll catch it, with an expression on his face that reminds me of a fisherman trying to hoist an ornery marlin out of the water, and a full second later, he’ll hold the ball in the air above him, triumphant.

When it’s his turn to throw, he’ll plant both feet firmly on the grass, roughly shoulder-width apart. Without turning at the waist, he’ll reach his throwing arm back as far as it can go, pause for a moment, and then whip that little arm forward as fast as he can, letting the ball go at the apex of his hand’s trajectory. This sends the ball rocketing directly upward into the air. It usually comes to land directly behind or beside him. Some throws find their way roughly in my direction, and I treasure every one of them.

If works of baseball fiction (a genre I have fondness for) are to be believed, most every baseball player is, on some level, attempting to recapture or respond to the game of catch described above.

Baseball is called an individual sport masquerading as a team sport. I think that’s a beautiful analogy for existing in the world as a human being.

Personally, I haven’t got the kind of body or the single-minded determination required to be a professional baseball player. I gave that dream up somewhere around the age of nine or ten. So I watch the men who didn’t give up on their dreams. Mostly MLB, because it has the aesthetic traditions I grew up with. Sometimes NPB, the Japanese pro league, because it’s what I have easy access to.

The quality of play in the Japanese league is high—athletic and exciting, with less emphasis on power hitting and strikeouts, and more emphasis on putting the ball in play and fielding. These things matter, from a fan perspective. But two things have kept me from embracing NPB completely.

For one, the fan behaviour is a bit too raucous for my liking. It hews closer to European football fandom, with constant musical expressions in support of the home team, regardless of what may be happening on the field at any given time.

But also, some of the ballparks are just plain ugly. Tokyo Dome is cavernous, with weird lighting. Hanshin Koshien Stadium may be a cathedral to high schoolers in Japan, as the site of the annual High School Baseball Championship (a subject which deserves its own post), but its entire infield is a vast, undifferentiated patch of mud.

Yokohama Stadium, sometime in the first inning on July 7, 2022. Photo by me.

I do, however, want to sing the praises of my local ballpark, Yokohama Stadium, home of the perennially mediocre Yokohama BayStars. One of my favourite things to do in the summertime is go to a night game there, slowly sipping beer and watching as night falls over the Kannai skyline. At the opening pitch, it’ll still be bright as day, and usually sweltering. By the time the game is over, you’re pleasantly buzzed, you’ve just spent a few hours chatting lazily with someone whose company you enjoy, a much-needed occasional breeze is blowing through, and the moon is out.

Somewhere in the midst of all this are elite athletes, competing at the highest level. But we all know that cheering for a professional baseball team is just cheering for laundry. That doesn’t matter, though. Whether the home team wins or loses, it’s the rhythms of the game, and the theatre surrounding it, that endure in our hearts.