In which my favorite podcast forces me to declare very earnestly some things I hold dear; or, Baseball is not a Distraction

I love Effectively Wild. It’s my favorite podcast, and it helped me get back into baseball after a nearly twenty-year detour away from it. But I’ve got to take issue with something that comes up on the show from time to time, which is the notion of baseball as being a distraction from our mortality. Sam Miller, when he stepped away as co-host (he returned recently), said this:

The point of this entire enterprise is to entertain us with baseball games. The point of it is not to decide who is the best team. The illusion that that is what we’re doing has long been a powerful draw to sports. But it is ultimately not the point. There is no scenario where the universe will care or remember who the best team was out of this collection of collections. It only matters inasmuch as we create this illusion that it matters.If you lose even the illusion, then it becomes problematic. But the point is not to have the illusion: the point is to entertain people and make them forget that we are all dying right in front of each other — that this is just this horrible, rotten slog to rigor mortis, that we are going to lose everybody we know, that we are going to lose everything we have and the only way to distract ourselves is by separating our day into distractions.”

Sure, it sort of doesn’t really matter which team is the best or whatever, but is Miller serious about this notion of “distraction?” I don’t have much patience for today’s brand of “ha-ha, nothing matters, LOL” nihilism – unless it’s truly jokey and surface-level, deployed ironically as a way to do some brush-clearing so we can get to things that really matter. I’m not sure which way Miller is deploying it here, and maybe he’s not even attempting to be nihilistic in a true sense. But of course baseball matters, because people and our stories matter, and because everything matters.

We could get into some kind of existential debate about whether God exists or whether, as Thornton Wilder wrote in Our Town, there is “something way down deep that's eternal about every human being” or whether there is ultimately a kind of intelligibility to all of existence, and whether that is solely inherent in the human mind or somehow transcendently outside of it. I come down on a particular side on those questions, for the most part.

The notion that baseball and the other things we love and find meaning in are “illusions” and “distractions” seems to miss the point. Indeed, “we are all dying in front of teach other” and “we are going to lose everybody we know” and “we are going to lose everything we have.” Yes! It is! We are! But the things we love and invest our time and attention and care into are not “distractions” from those things. We look reality in the eye, and we choose to live. To love baseball, or music, or baking bread, or whatever, is an affirmation of the goodness of the world, an ultimate expression of the worth, the value, the meaning we’re surrounded by, including the ineluctable realities of death and loss.

Even if there is no God, even if the thing about our current lives is that they’re short and this is all there is – that makes every particular little detail just as precious and worthwhile. The bat hitting the ball is satisfying! Existence is improbable! The world is abundant! A weird off-balance throw from third base is a gift! Every human is of infinite and inestimable worth! Willians Astudillo is awesome! A blade of grass is a miracle! Teaching my sons how to bat feels like passing on something unintelligibly good!

Human culture – culture as in to cultivate, to till, to care, to accept what is given, to make it into something, to offer it up and receive it back as something life-giving – is right and good and a joyful thing. Baseball is part of this, and to love it is to stare down the abyss.

Football, though? That’s just dicking around.

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.