Camille Mancuso: Chatterbox A summer romance

The summer is almost over, but the warm weather will linger and fall is always wonderful. These two seasons offer us much beauty from our wonderful world, but they offer us other things too.
The summer’s beauty of nature is the planet’s gift to us. The other things of the season are those gifts we give to each other: barbecues; the water activities, which make humans feel amazingly at home; and one of my very favorite summer activities, baseball.
I’m not the historian, the enthusiast, or the knowledgeable fan that my husband is, along with thousands of other people in the national society to which he belongs, but I do love baseball. Moreover, I encourage anyone who wants to, to learn to love it to.
There have been dozens of movies made about baseball: fiction, fictionalized, or documentary. There’s a great line in one of my favorite movies called, “Moneyball.” Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane, general manager of the 2002 Oakland As says, “It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball,” and he’s so right.
While the fans of every sport believe their sport is the greatest, baseball is something else. It’s smooth and inclusive; it invites everyone to enjoy. For those who enjoy the game, even knowing only the basics, just the crack of the bat against the ball creates a certain emotion. The field is expansive, uncrowded. It makes seeing what’s happening easy. It welcomes us. It’s softer and slower than many, but exciting; a split second can change everything, and any second can be historical.
Baseball is where fast-thinking athleticism and Spartan power meet the strength and beauty of dance. With the control of gymnastics and the aerial agility of Baryshnikov, it requires the stealth of all other sports, even the ones for which body pads are required. Its pace and roots may be very pastoral, but there’s little else that’s silky about the grain of its cloth.
“Baseball,” many say, “isn’t a contact sport,” but anyone who has even casually watched it will say, “It isn’t supposed to be a contact sport, but it often becomes one.” There are many components of baseball that will tear skin, break bones, or leave a player concussed, and they aren’t strictly between players. Contact with a flying bat (the wooden kind) –whether whole or shards thereof – or a speeding hardball will deliver a serious jolt to the human body, occasionally on purpose accompanied by that perfect aim.

On a newly constructed baseball diamond, adjacent to the movie set, on a farm in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa, a full-length baseball game was played on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. As they did in the film, the players came out of the cornfield. Personally, that was enough to set me crying, but I’m a real weeper anyway. Still, even those who only see the news clips of this event would be hard-pressed to remain dry-eyed.
The film’s star, Kevin Costner, made the opening speech and some of the film’s other stars were in attendance. What a day it was for the game.
Years ago, comedian George Karlin did an entire stand-up routine on the games of football and baseball. He talked about the grit and phraseology of the two games: the gridiron versus the diamond; punching holes in the defensive line versus getting back home safely; penalties versus errors, and helmets versus caps. It’s very funny, but there’s nothing soft about catching a 98 mph fastball with any body part.
In America, a country we all love yet whose policies we argue over every day, there is also our team to defend and a sport to agree and disagree over. There are those in which we can’t see or follow a puck, find or keep track of a football, or keep up with the exchanges of a basketball. For the rest of us, there is, always, baseball. It’s the only game where the defense is in complete and calculated possession of the ball and where the green expanse of a precision cut field quietly caresses the edges of the sky in that recognizable shape that can only mean Baseball.
Particularly during COVID and quarantine, baseball and its devoted athletes made a valiant effort to maintain consistency, offering us, and the world, a buoy. Its sport and beauty, even with cardboard fans, helped us remember that we were going to be okay.
Yes, it’s hard not to be romantic about baseball. We who love it hope for a long post-season.

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