Baseball!*

 

God Bless America, the World Series is on! It's been a year since we learned that Juan Soto became the first player to make an error on his birthday in the World Series since Atlanta shortstop Rafael Belliard in 1995. And this is not the sort of baseball statistic that is likely ever to gain an asterisk: the next time it happens, it will be every bit as newsworthy.

Statistics gain asterisks when it is felt some sort of exception should be noted in order to keep the players' egos in check. For instance, Modern Player A might technically have surpassed Beloved Yesteryear Player B in home runs scored in a season, but will gain an asterisk if he got to play more games than B or if it was determined that he got more yolk in his egg as an embryo.

At any rate, 2020 is, as you may have observed elsewhere, not a normal year. And so it's generally agreed that virtually any notable achievement that occurs this year should have the hell asterisked out of it. Just lean on that key, scribes. Because, in deference to our plague, we're getting only sixty games out of the teams this season instead of the standard 162. They were thinking of not playing any at all, but by mid-summer they realized the steroid use alone would probably have a prophylactic effect, and it was over-delicate to worry too much about players that hawk loogies and twiddle their nuts all day long anyway. Something else was going to get them. And so a cardboard audience was propped up in the stands in July and the season got underway. For the World Series itself, a smattering of living fans was invited to load up their face masks with Cracker Jax like blinkered donkeys and bray their hearts out.

The sixty-game season is not, however, unprecedented.

It last happened in 1878. Although, really, that was before baseball began. It was Protobaseball. It was a baseball homunculus to the strapping lad with the tight buns baseball became a few years later. Pitcher Tommy Bond won forty games out of that sixty, a spectacular achievement by any measure, but he* had* some* advantages.* The pitching mound was only three-quarters the current distance from home plate. And he threw underhand, even though he was not technically considered a lesbian at the time. Overhand pitching wasn't allowed until 1884, and that's been the convention ever since, although it's not against the rules to pitch underhand even to this day. In fact, someone pitched a perfect game underhand in 1922, but no one has attempted it since, because of the lesbian thing.

Tommy Bonds was on the Boston Red Caps team. The current Boston team was founded in 1901 and named Red Sox in 1908. Previously they had been the Boston Red Stockings but it was deemed prudent to shorten it so it could fit in a standard newspaper headline, an innovation that had already doomed the original Boston Red Fishnet And Garters. Similar adjustments had to be made for the New York Knickerbockers, the Bloomington Bloomers, and the Scranton Panty Shields.

At any rate baseball has remained pretty much the same since it was perfected early in the last century. Nobody really knows where it came from. Some Brit weighed in that it evolved from the game "Rounders," which is similar in some respects, but after you run from first to second to third, you have to make it to fourth base, which is nowhere near home. It's like out near the concession stand. There was enough contention over the provenance of baseball that a commission was appointed to determine who invented the sport; finally in 1903 it concluded it was developed by Union General Abner Doubleday, who fired the first shot in Fort Sumter and famously fought at Gettysburg, but died unaware of having invented baseball, in spite of the fact that a Colorado mining engineer shwore he was there when it happened.

The point is, though, it was not British. That's the main thing. It's the best dang game in the whole whole world, and we all hope it's back to normal for the 2021 season, when we'll be welcoming the post-COVID expansion clubs the Austin Asterisks and the Fort Worth Phlegm. Play Ball!

Heavens To Murrgatroyd

I think it can be safely said, now that the Red Sox are in the World Series, that God is involved in sports once again, but it's hard to hold his attention for long. Nevertheless efforts to engage him continue to be made on the playing field.

Gestures change with the times and it's hard to keep up. We're starting to see the end of the double-fist-bump on the heart, which is good, because I'm always worried it signals palpitations. That's a general salutation anyway, not directed toward the Almighty so much as one's fans. But it's nice and short, and the shorter you keep these demonstrations, the less likely the game will be delayed. Experienced practitioners can whip out a sign of the cross between the wind-up and the first pitch. It signifies that the batter is from the Dominican Republic.

You don't see a lot of genuflecting on the field, though. This should be left to catchers, who have springs for knees. Again, it is important to speed up the gesture and not linger overlong with one knee on the ground, lest the player be mistaken for a black man with an opinion, which is something black men are not licensed to have in this country. If you're at all arthritic you shouldn't even try.

We do not have a surfeit of Muslim baseball players and it's just as well. There's no way to speed up the prayerful position, even if it occurs naturally during a slide into second base, inasmuch as the player would then have to ascertain which way is west and point his heinie in that direction. It's a tough call in a domed stadium.

I do think we are achieving the ultimate efficiencies in God-acknowledgment with the current fad of looking skyward while pointing one index finger straight up. The message being sent here is something along the lines of "glory be to God on high," which is certainly how I would feel if I ever landed on first base with a solid hit. (My usual reaction is "holy shit," actually, but that's close.) So far God has not seen fit to install me on base except on a fielder's choice and that's not the kind of thing people like to give God credit for; not disease or hurricanes or dropped pop flies either, although I would imagine he's equally responsible for those.

The specificity of the direction is interesting. For many people, God has an actual address, and it is almost universally assumed, at least by Christians, to be located "up." If a baseball player hits a triple and points somewhere over the horizon, everyone in the stands would turn and look in case there was an incoming asteroid or something. If you think about it, if all the Christians in the world pointed up at the same time, the whole globe would be bristling with fingers going every which way. Which makes sense, if God is indeed everywhere.

For behold, the kingdom of God is within you, or so I recall from my early training, though nobody wants their baseball heroes pointing at themselves even though they made a spectacular play and have worked hard to hone their skills for years and years. It's just not done. But many ascribe to the notion that if God exists, he exists in each of us, and so it might be nice to level a finger at your teammates, especially if one of them just winged you the ball from a rolling horizontal position just exactly where you'd need it to tag the runner. There's no better explanation for a play like that but that God is directing things from the vicinity of that person's chest. Go ahead and point.

As long as he's not a Yankee.