Monday March 27, 2023

COMMENTARY: Take Time for Paradise | PUBLICATION

Mar 27, 2023

COMMENTARY: Take Time for Paradise

by: Martin Davis

“It’s not that you have to watch the game; but it’s there if you need it.”

- Tom Boswell

When the late commissioner of Major League Baseball - A. Bartlett Giamatti - wrote his book on America’s Past Time, his title captured more than the game’s brilliance - it described what gives life itself, meaning: “Take Time for Paradise.”

We have too often failed to do that in our age, because we live in a time geared toward entertainment, not paradise.

Entertainment asks nothing of us, save our eyeballs for advertisers. In return we receive a nonstop rush of endorphines. And an endless number of flashing options to tap to ensure the peptides keep flowing: Tik Tok, Twitter, sports betting, the 24-hour news cycles, and binge watching Netflix.

Each is just a form of escapism that gives us respite from life’s difficulties. We all need this from time-to-time. But ultimately, entertainment is like soda. Refreshing in small doses, but addictive and harmful as a steady part of your diet.

Paradise, by contrast, demands our fullest attention. And it doesn’t shelter us from the realities of life. As Giamatti writes of baseball, it:

breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

In embracing that reality, however, we find paradise. For in our games - and especially in baseball - we discover what it means to enjoy our lives, and how we are to live together.

Because to enjoy baseball, one must, to some level, buy in to the game. Not just understanding the rules, or keeping score; but the history and the future of the game and its players.

These become the fabric of shared conversations with our neighbors for the 3 hours we’re together in the ballpark. And these are the subjects that allow us connect to those away from the park whom we’re just getting to know.

Again, Giamatti:

Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious.

The baseball experience, like a religious one, is fleeting. But we don’t simply live for one experience than another as with entertainment. The experience draws us in, and opens our eyes to the beauty of the mundane.

The Hurt That Heals

For the entirety of the second half of the 20th century, fans of the Chicago Cubs knew only the heartbreak that following their beloved team can bring.

“Loveable losers,” the Cubs and their fans were labeled.

But those who laughed at the losers would have given everything for what the Cubs and their fans had - a sense of belonging and an appreciation of time and space too few of us experience. And an identity.

Steve Goodman, a Chicago-born singer-songwriter who died prematurely of cancer at 36, captured the beauty of being a Cub fan in his song - A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.

It tells the story of a man whose last request is to here one last time “that lonesome loser’s tune,” which is the song’s chorus:

Do they still play the blues in Chicago
When baseball season rolls around
When the snow melts away, do the Cubbies still play
In their Ivy-covered burial ground?
When I was a boy they were my pride and joy
But now they only bring fatigue
To the home of the brave, and the land of the free
And the doormat of the National League

What sounds like despair, however, is really grit. And it captures perfectly the spirit of the Windy City.

In my two years there while attending the University of Chicago, I came to appreciate just how hard a town Chicago is to live in. The winters are brutal, the summer too short, and the people themselves suffer from an inferiority complex that’s so pronounced it’s baked into one of Chicago’s nicknames: Second City.

That is, in many ways, the saga of the Cubs. And it’s a saga that binds a city that can be taxing for even the heartiest souls.

Teams and their cities all share this in uniquely wonderful ways. From the outsized glitz and egos of the Yankees and their fans, to the star-infused atmosphere that defines the Dodgers and their always-late-arriving fans; and from the politically incorrect chanting of Braves fans in Atlanta, to the rough-and-tumble world of Phillies baseball in South Philadelphia. These teams capture the characters of their cities, and create a space for its citizens to peacefully co-exist.

Here, too …

Entering their third full season in Fredericksburg, our own Nats are beginning to reflect our region, and bring us together.

It’s too early to say exactly how that’s going to track in the years ahead. It’s a newbon franchise, taking its first steps and creating the memories and legends that today’s fans will talk to future generations about.

“Yes, I saw Strausburg in Fredericksburg. Mixing fastballs and off-speed stuff with a speed differential of some 15 miles per hour, he made the opposing team look silly. And he made a hot Sunday a bit more enjoyable.”

Who knows the memories to come.

And who knows the culture that this team will reflect, and ultimately shape.

Waiting to see, and be a part of, the shape of the team and its city is, well, paradise.

As opening day for the majors rolls around this Thursday, take some time for paradise.

We are all better for it.

(To order tickets, visit here.)

OBSERVED

Look up, look down, look around. One never knows what they’ll see walking down Fredericksburg’s city streets. Friday, of course, was St. Patrick’s Day. But on Sunday, evidence of the city’s Emerald Isle spirit was still on display as the flags of some of Ireland’s cities were on display. A couple of quick calls didn’t surface the leprechaun behind the hoisting. So if you know, or were responsible, let us know.