The Theater of the Impossible: Baseball as a Free Enterprise Pastime and a Protestant Miracle Play

By Daniel F. McNeill

Mark Twain called baseball "the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteeth-century". This book searches the concrete actions typical of baseball games for the meaning of what they represent. For example, the struggles in a game of individuals against a group of enemies organized to put them out represent the struggles of Americans to succeed in a fiercely competitive capitalistic economy. But baseball combines characteristics of both Christian Protestantism and industrial capitalism. So a home run represents a sudden, unexpected success and at the same time a home run embodies in a game a sudden impossible miraculous redemption. We are a people who worship not just what is possible in life but what is impossible and baseball is our national theater.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 24, 2002
• ISBN: 9781465317391

Daniel F. McNeill

Daniel McNeill teaches Latin in Skaneateles, New York. He is a member of the silent generation that was young during the fifties and early sixties and that failed to find its voice within the cold-war mental and political fixations of the time. He has read widely, studied at six universities, traveled, married, raised two daughters, learned seven foreign languages and written one book.

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Copyright © 1994 by Daniel F. McNeill.

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Contents

Introduction by the Author

PART ONE

THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE BOSTON RED SOX, GAME SIX OF THE 1975 WORLD SERIES

PART TWO

AMERICAN INDIANS, PROTESTANTS AND BUSINESSMEN PLAY THE SAME GAME

PART THREE

THE AESTHETIC NATURE OF THE BASEBALL FAN’S EXPERIENCE

PART FOUR

PERPETUAL BASEBALL

Introduction by the Author

An October afternoon in 1963 a black man got in my taxi. I got tickets to the World Series, he said excitedly. Stay with me now, I got money. I’m goin’ to New York. I gotta get my things. That area of Boston never had enough cabs on Friday afternoons for people who were too poor to run cars and had just got a week’s pay. We drove left a few blocks on Massachusetts Avenue and right on Washington Street to the pawn shop. The man hung over the front seat to my right all the way. You stay with me now. You with me? I’m goin’ to the World Series. Don’t worry. I got money. I’m goin’ to New York. I waited with the meter running at the curb under the elevated railway near the pawn shop. He came out finally with clothes on hangers over his shoulder. He opened the door and arranged the clothes to rest folded over the top of the front seat. Then he hurried off down the sidewalk to the liquor store and came back carrying his bottle in a brown bag. He had a belt and offered me one. I refused smiling. We were off again back up to where we started on Columbus Avenue and then left into a short, dead-end street. He hung over the front seat all the way. This is the greatest day of my life, he said. I’m goin’ to the World Series. He went in a red-brick building and came out after a long wait well-dressed. We were off again to the bus station, to New York, baseball, the World Series, to the universe. I stopped in front of the bus station. He paid me well. And then he was gone.

It was certainly that day that for the first time I realized how deeply baseball touches the soul. A man got his clothes out of hock, bought a bottle, dressed and took a bus to New York as happy as a medieval pilgrim on a journey to a holy place. Baseball touches the soul. The soul. Our soul. The American soul.

PART ONE

THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE BOSTON RED SOX, GAME SIX OF THE 1975 WORLD SERIES

The night sky over Kenmore Square shines with a strange light that is not much less fascinating when we see high in the air the steel poles capped with big electric lamps that radiate a manufactured sunlight over Fenway Park, the home field of the Boston Red Sox. We are in an immense crowd of people walking along together as though in harmony with some secret rhythm that sends out an odd murmur. The loud, blurred sounds of thousands of words speak, without any language that can be understood, about a precise excitement. We are all leaving the same place to go together to a space that calls with a mysterious voice understood by everyone. We have only to follow along. The sidewalk is unable to hold all of us; some must walk in the street that is crammed with cars. We don’t look particularly to see anything significant in the thousands of faces around us because the present business of walking seems so powerfully controlled by a strong desire to discover something absent rather than to seek anything in one another. The crowd has a touch of the nervous energy of buyers and sellers on the floor of a stock exchange who seem deaf to the noise of their own cries and forgetful of themselves because they have so completely surrendered their individual identity to a foreign reality indicated by fluctuating numbers on a board which seem at the same time to delight them and to torment them. But the energy of this crowd is the kind that has left for once the bewitching power of money in order to probe the veins of another kind of magic. The night sky over Fenway Park has no longer any night. We are on our way to a festival where nothing is for sale except the incorporation of ourselves in the eternal business of baseball.

We pass through the 1912 portals of Fenway Park, hand over our tickets, and walk along a ground floor, cement corridor stuffed with a crush of people swarming in different directions. Here we can’t escape faces, it’s the disaster of hundreds of mugs popping in front of one another, accompanied by a loud, absurd cacophony. We are shocked because we have come to experience some wonderful, impossible transcendence and this seems at best a ridiculous parody of elevating emotion, a hell of noisy vulgarity. We feel an empty annoyance because of the psychological weight of being among so many people whose only interest seems to be in being an active part of an unregulated mob. And this wide corridor, which surrounds much of the field below the stands, is not only a huge stomach with hundreds of human bits struggling towards orifices, it is also an avenue of pleasure because at regular intervals we see rows of fans crowded in front of refreshment stands eager to buy beer and hot dogs. However, as we walk along, we get over the shock of the crowd and we find in ourselves finally no antipathy to beer and hot dogs. For why, after all, if the eternal deeds of baseball are the stuff of our circus, should we not have the bread to go along with it? And beer, too! Ah, the blessedness of beer and hot dogs! The beautiful afternoons of summer at a ball game when fans are moved by no other religion than the one that preaches the divine drug of the full, guiltless enjoyment of themselves! And we especially, who pretend to be adept at the deeper meanings of baseball, should have the courage to sympathize with our fellow fans for if they do not know the words to celebrate those balls flying towards the sun on a summer afternoon as a resurrection of something dead, they at least feel the power and are devoted addicts of the experience. This is not the moment, minutes before the start of the sixth game of the World Series, to be miffed because the fans do not know the key to a rite of liberty and religion in the form of a game that was created by Americans over a century ago, nor should we have anything but sympathy for their need to eat and drink down below on the cement before going above. But we are looking for the pure cult itself; we quickly climb a staircase to go directly to the altar.

An immense green field, dominated in the foreground by wide paths of bare earth surrounding the solitary pitcher’s mound, makes a deep impression on us because of the odd contrast between the presence of so much carefully arranged space, inundated by an artificial light, and the thousands and thousands of humans seated compacted together around the edges: without voices, without faces: thousands of eyes fix their look on a beautiful emptiness, on an Elysian field without heroes. We sit squeezed together—the tight seats at Fenway make fans pay a price for seeing a game in a park so old that it is almost already a museum—a few feet past first base and about 40 rows up behind the Boston dugout, on the frontier of a foreign country. At the moment no one in uniform is on the field. Then some players from Boston appear on the field from the dugout near us. We can see rather well the interior of the Cincinnati dugout, beyond the base path between home plate and third base, filled with players in uniforms. The freshly chalked foul line, roughly parallel to the Cincinnati dugout, leads our eye past third base out to the extraordinary feature of Fenway Park, the famous left field wall which is about three times higher than the walls of other major league parks. It holds our attention instead of the players who have begun practicing on the field. The great wall, called the green monster, sets the only boundary around the field behind which there are no seats for spectators. It begins in left field, in the left field corner that it forms with a wall at the edge of seats in foul territory, just three feet to the left of the foul line running to meet it at a point 330 feet from the plate; it continues towards center field in a straight line, reaching in left center field a distance of 370 feet; it ends to the left of dead center field, at a distance of 415 feet, where it forms an oblique angle with a wall of about half its height in front of the center field bleachers. It is 430 feet to the center field bleachers, 395 feet to the two bullpens before the seats in right center field. The low right field wall in front of the spectators is at a substantial distance from the plate—although it does curve in to only 315 feet at the right field foul pole—but the left field wall, at an unusually short distance from the plate, and 37 feet high, is a monster with two heads. It often helps the unjust and harms the just. When a player hits a rising line drive to left with enough power to go over the wall of most major league left fields, at Fenway it bounces high against the wall and quickly back into the hands of the left fielder who can throw it to second base, if he knows how to play well the bounce off the wall, in time to prevent a ball, which should have been a home run, from being even a double, by forcing the hitter to retreat to first base. On the other hand, it helps hitters who hit balls high in the air to left because some of the balls, which would be caught for outs anywhere else, have enough force, although not hit solidly, to sail over the wall at a relatively short distance from the plate.

The murmur of voices outside in the street and the cacophony in the corridor below the stands are now replaced by an energy that is heard distinctly yet has no individual sound, a buzzing of humans: we hear thousands of words and sentences of an overflowing vitality as though puffed up in the air floating nervously on thick, invisible clouds of some vague and heavy anticipation. Boston has won two games, but Cincinnati has won three and can win the championship of the world by winning tonight. No matter what the result tonight, Cincinnati will play again tomorrow, but Boston is playing against its extinction. Behind the plate, among the seats of the first row, we notice a television camera; others are placed near the dugouts and at other locations: more eyes which emphasize the importance of the game by transmitting it to seventy million TV viewers. But the only thing that is truly present now is this enormous, nervous heaviness of a crowd waiting with one eye to see something that is not on the field at this moment. The Boston players are taking their turn at defensive practice: a player, near home plate, hits balls to the infielders, another hits to the outfielders. Both teams have already taken batting practice. The only other practice, the warm-up of the pitchers who will start the game, is going on also, just before the right field stands in the bullpens. A bull, in a pen or not, is a good figure of speech for a pitcher: the pitcher attacks the matador, braving at the plate his own disappearance, with a ball thrown with a terrible force that curves rudely or smoothly, towards the body or away, like the horn of a bull. The crowd wants the practice game to finish so that a game of life and death may begin.

Yet to some fans, if baseball does not seem a solemn drama of life and death, it is at least perhaps as exciting, in their imaginations, as the profits and losses of