Baseball’s summer can seem languid and neverending, like the game itself.Stephanie Scarbrough/The Associated Press
“All summer we accumulate the hours. Then autumn comes, and we measure them.”
U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall wrote that. He was a big baseball fan. It gets at something about this game that no other game has.
Baseball is a game of languor, and often boredom. Even if you’re playing it.
It’s the game you put on the radio and walk away from for an hour. It’s a game that can be reconstructed after the fact from a scorecard. This is how I ‘watched’ baseball as a kid – in the agate pages of the sports section.
When I covered it full time, I used to get what I called my baseball stigmata. Around halfway through the season, my elbows would be rubbed raw from propping them on the desk in front of me, laying my chin in one hand and staring blankly at the crowd for long stretches.
Eventually, the elbows would start to open up, and bleed through all my shirts. My dry cleaner looked at me like I was Patrick Bateman.
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For most of its history in Toronto, happy boredom and half-attention have been baseball’s defining features. The team makes the playoffs about a quarter of the time, though more recently. Every once in a while, infrequently, the Jays make a run in the post-season, and then it’s time to measure the hours.
I figure that baseball players are the most sluggish pro athletes for meteorological reasons. You go spend three hours standing intermittently in a wide-open space in August, and see how amped up you are afterward.
Back when the Kansas City Royals had a green carpet laid over concrete in their old field, the ground would become so scorching that players would sometimes sit with their feet in buckets of ice between innings. Regular-season baseball is too hot to get excited.
Every other sport has tweaked its environment to maximize performance. Football is mostly unshielded, but they have giant fans, and oxygen masks, and little tents to hide from your colleagues. Not baseball. You get traded to Texas, you better hope you have blood like a lizard.
The Toronto Blue Jays’ traditional post-victory ice-water showers are a good way to keep cool during the heat of the summer.John E. Sokolowski/Reuters
You’re feeling a little woozy out there? Oh. Poor baby. Maybe you’d like it better if you played in Nantucket? I hear there’s plenty of shade on the bus.
Then fall comes and two things happen simultaneously – the baseball begins to matter, and the conditions adjust in order to make that mattering sustainable.
Would Max Scherzer have screamed and swore at his manager that he wanted to stay in the game in July? No, because people would have begun to suspect he’d lost his marbles. For real, this time.
July? Who cares about getting through the order one more time in July? Also, it is too hot to scream. If you have the energy to scream in July, you’re wasting it. Only October is optimal weather for both baseball and screaming.
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Every sport has a season, but baseball’s the one that got it right. Football ends when it’s snowing. Hockey ends when it’s baking. Basketball is entirely removed from the elements. One lick of rain and basketball is done for the day.
Seattle in October is especially perfect. Cool, verging on cold, with a little breeze coming in off the water. Everyone – on the field, off it, tucked up at home – is wide awake.
Now the same people who’d have been staring at their phones by the fourth inning are up on their feet every time an opposing batter gets a second strike called against him.
Baseball’s a little like chess in that every move is an opportunity for offence. On each of 250 or 300 discrete encounters, the batter may reach base, but he may also ground out. Both put one or the other team one move closer to victory.
The cool of mid-October in Seattle represents the perfect time to play baseball, Cathal Kelly says.Steph Chambers/Getty Images
When it matters, you can live and die on every pitch. You can be up off the couch screaming because a quarter of the ball caught an inch of the strike zone – or the area that some TV broadcaster has determined the zone to be – and the home-plate umpire, that idiot, has missed it. How hard can this be? The ball’s only swirling toward him at hurricane Category 2 speeds.
Like chess, you can work backward. If only they hadn’t thrown this pitch to that guy two batters ago, which the pitcher missed, forcing him to throw a beach ball that put that guy on base just as the guy you should really be afraid of was skulking on the dugout steps.
In autumn, you can go deep with this stuff, and it’s not like watching playoff football and screaming, “Option. OPTION” at the TV in a sad attempt to impress your wife.
It’s never an option, and you don’t know what you’re talking about. But in baseball you do, because baseball works in reverse. You can go back and see where things went off the rails.
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In October, the relentlessness of the baseball schedule becomes a feature, not a bug. This isn’t hockey, where they’re all, ‘Things are getting pretty interesting now. Let’s break for four days so that we can all come back confused.’
Baseball is coming at you every day, with a couple of 24-hour breaks to build suspense. The Blue Jays are balanced on that edge now – it’s either one of the great comebacks in franchise history, or proof that this team’s business plan is bundling numbness and disappointment with WiFi.
As this is being written, Toronto’s forecast for Sunday is rainy. What a shame that ticket-holders won’t be able to enjoy the sweet fear of a rainout, which is keener now. That feeling you get when the tarp comes off and you know there will be baseball, and baseball that means something.
Soon enough, back to nothing. Bart Giamatti, who was not a poet laureate but did spend a lot of time being bored at baseball, put it elegantly: “As soon as the chill rains come, [baseball] stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
Enjoy it now, while we’re together.