For the past ten years I have been gradually losing my sight, not totally, but steadily, irreversibly. These days I can’t see much in the dark, but I can still make out things in the light, especially if they are right in front of me, and a baseball outing to a day game seemed like a good challenge, an overdue pleasure.
So, on a sparkling afternoon last month I took a field trip with my office mates to watch the Mets battle the Padres for a playoff spot.
At the stadium in Queens, I was reassured by my first glimpse of the field. There is something timeless about a baseball diamond bathed in sunlight. Sure, there’s a pitch clock now and enlarged bases, but the basic pastoral feeling is the one I had as a kid. When you watch a ballgame, the outside world disappears.
What I did not expect, however, was that my experience of the game would be so changed. Since I can no longer follow the ball, which looks like an aspirin and moves too quickly for me to spot, I had to figure out what was going on by tracking the movement of the players, whose bodies I could still distinguish. This isn’t as difficult as you might expect, because it’s all very choreographed when something happens, like a lazy fly ball to center field or a double into the gap in right.
I’ve always been so concentrated on the ball, on winning and losing — on achievement — but now that I can’t see the ball anymore, that all seems less important. What matters even more is the experience itself, the crack of a bat and the fielders springing into action, their sudden turns and well-timed leaps, the runners rounding the bases, someone thrown out at second, someone else coming home, the beauty of bodies in motion, the thrill of art.
From my new perspective, a baseball game looks like a dance piece, which takes rhythm and timing, precision and grace. The field is a clearly marked performance space.
The performance begins with the pitcher. He winds up, cocks the ball, strides forward and whips it to the plate, and the hitter instantly responds — he swings or doesn’t swing; he connects or doesn’t. Say, he slams a hard grounder to the left side of the infield. The third baseman dives to his left and misses, the shortstop goes deep into the hole, stabs the ball, pivots and throws while the runner races up the baseline and the first baseman reaches for the ball. I have seen first basemen who can practically do the splits. The umpire hovers nearby to make the call: an infield hit.
Now the runner dances off first. The right-handed pitcher looks over his shoulder; he turns quickly and tosses to first. Safe. The runner glides off the base again, only this time he takes off when the pitcher throws to the plate. The batter steps forward but doesn’t swing, the catcher gloves the ball and throws all in one motion, the second baseman darts to cover second, the runner slides headfirst into the bag. The fielder tags his hand, and the umpire raises a clenched right fist — it always seems to be his right fist. The runner is out. The third-base coach runs onto the field to protest — it’s almost required — but the call stands. The runner jogs back to the dugout, the infielders toss the pill around and the dance begins again.
When you watch the game this way, it becomes a form of ritual art. There’s a reason the players call the major leagues “The Show.” The outcome is not predetermined, but neither was an experimental dance piece by choreographers like Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. The rules may be old, but a baseball game now looks to me like a fluid piece with a different outcome every night, tragic for one team, comic for the other.
Walt Whitman said that baseball “has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere.” That’s why fans play such a participatory role. There is chatter on the field, but the fans provide the louder soundtrack. I’m not a fan of the music between pitches, the stadium announcer’s telling everyone what to think, the mascot’s clowning for laughs. But true baseball fans are not distracted. Voices shout out, some encouraging, others derogatory. It’s all predictable. Cheers and boos. The hometown crowd rises on home runs and sulks on strikeouts, right on cue.
The Mets were leading 5-1. But I wasn’t concerned with the result. I stood with the crowd for the seventh-inning stretch, a tradition that never gets old. Everyone from my office looked crazily happy — joshing and taking photos and blowing fake horns and singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I could see what was going on, not perfectly, but enough to take in the spectacle. And then my eyesight blurred, not because I was losing my vision, but because I was seeing something that I had missed. I was crying from the intense, fleeting, overwhelming joy of it all.
Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, played Division III baseball at Grinnell College. His most recent book is “My Childhood in Pieces.”
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