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BASEBALL,THE TIMELESS SPORT OF SUMMER
Baseball is a summer game ~ meant to be played when the sun is high, the days are long and the heat is stifling. It always seems unnatural being played early in the year ~ almost as if it defies the fresh awakening of spring with its languid promise of the hot, lazy and timeless days of summer: Allen L Roland
Baseball was the sport of my childhood ~ I vividly remember breaking in my first glove and pine tarring my first Louisville Slugger bat ~ these were part of me ~ part of my timeless summer days of baseball in New England and I still cherish those exciting memories
Baseball was eternal youth, innocence and hope ~ it was the time to play the same game that Ted Williams, jolting Joe Dimaggio and Junior Stephens played and I was each one of them, in my own imagination, many times during those timeless summers.
The game was metaphysical in that it transcended time and transported me into realms of imagination, fancy and pure delight that became a creative well to draw from when I later became an adult.
Only the Late Eugene McCarthy, who wrote the Forward to Lawrence Frank's Playing Hardball, The Dynamics of Baseball Folk Speech (1984) seemed to fully understand this timeless sport of summer.
Excerpt:
" Baseball is different from other games. Its strength is inherent, metaphysical. Why? First, because the game has a singular and distinctive relationship to time.
Only baseball, among all games, can be called a "pastime." For baseball is above or outside time. Football, basketball, hockey, soccer games are arbitrarily divided into measured quarters, halves, or periods. They are controlled, even dominated by time. Not so baseball, which either ignores time or dominates it. An inning theoretically can go on forever. The same is true of the game.
Interruptions are generally limited to acts of God, such as darkness or rain, or to cultural, religious and quasi-natural occurrences such as curfew or midnight. . .
Baseball is also played in a unique spatial frame. Other games are restricted to limited, defined areas, rectangular or near rectangular, floors or rinks. Not so baseball. Baseball is played within the lines of a projection from home plate, starting from the point of a 90 degrees and extending to infinity. Were it not for the intervention of fences, buildings, mountains, and other obstacles in space, a baseball traveling within the ultimate projection of the first and third baselines could be fair and fully and infinitely in play.
Baseballs never absolutely go out of bounds. They are either fair or foul; and even foul balls are, within limits, playable and part of the game.
Baseball is distinguished from other games, too in the way in which it is controlled by umpires. An umpire is very different from a referee, a field judge, or a linesman. One occasionally hears the cry "fire the referee" but seldom the cry "kill the referee." That cry is reserved for umpires. Umpires have to be dealt with absolutely, for their power is absolute.
Referees are men called or appointed. Umpires, by contrast, seem to exist in their own right and exercise undelegated power which is not to be reviewed and from which there is no appeal. "
Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2007/04/05.html
Dauntless OpEd columnist Allen L Roland is available for interviews. ( allen@allenroland.com )
Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk radio www.conscioustalk.net
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