On What Slow Baseball Could Be

Men tell stories to their sons, loving and being loved.  Baseball is fathers and sons.Baseball is the generations, looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls, cricket and rounders, and the games the Iroquois played in Connecticut before the English came. Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age, and death. This diamond encloses what we are.  — Donald Hall

The so-called "Slow Food" movement has three tenets: "good, clean, and fair":

GOOD: a fresh and flavorsome seasonal diet that satisfies the senses and is part of our local culture;

CLEAN: food production and consumption that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health;

FAIR: accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for small-scale producers.

Lately, I'm thinking a lot about baseball, and where I live, and who I want to be, and what I want to teach my sons. Today I sat down with my computer, my oldest son, (who is almost six), and a piece of paper and a couple of pencils. We made a map of all the professional baseball teams in the Pacific Northwest. There are twenty-three of them, in five leagues. Whatever Slow Baseball is (which, I know, goes without saying -- a truism so true it's like the opposite of an oxymoron), it will be about baseball, fathers and sons, place, and the attempt to cultivate a life that is, somehow, good, clean, and fair. And also about some really silly-sounding baseball teams, including a team called the Pickles.