A Baseball Afternoon

I love those days at a baseball park where the walls, sky, and shocks of laughs all shake with baseball. 

Lazy afternoon baseball where all the players are most like kids. Kids on a summer day just playing baseball for the pure fun of it.  You can see them out there warming up, tossing to each other, springing, outrunning each other, flipping a ball casually across the field, hitting batting practice shots that jump over the fence, all of this a calculated game of three flies up on the greenest field you’ve ever seen. 

See, there’s something about baseball grass that’s greener than any other grass.  It’s like a giant took a paintbrush to the field and used a shade four times brighter than he was supposed to, but it still looks fine.

And the blue sky is always bluer on those days.  To the crowd contained in their stadium, the sky is a huge ongoing expanse that converges right over the park.  A cloud here and there, standing on the ocean or a skyscraper. 

And the wind teases the flags to fluttering there against the sky.  It’s expansive, an afternoon like that. 

As the crowd flows in and onto their seats and the players play their pre-game and the wind visits, there’s this feeling of potential for such contentment.  The crowd knows it’ll be baseball for hours that seem like days and it’ll all be okay for that time because they can forget everything but baseball. 

I don’t know.  The day just goes and goes at a baseball game, it’s just like in the song, because you know you don’t care if you ever get back.

So the crowd keeps coming in and the players get prepped for everything. The dirt gets pounded by the watering of the grounds crew until it’s this heavenly soft brown duff that sticks just right to everyone’s cleats and pants. 

There’s this relaxed anticipation.  The crowd’s just waiting and sitting and the afternoon slows down to wait for the game to start.  The afternoon stops to see the game, too. 

So the crowd’s full, except for the stragglers coming in late and then this buzz starts to take shape like a cloud over the stadium, a frantic buzz like that of a fly.  These flies are the records of the teams, the expectations of big players, the idea that a hero might save the game and the entire human race from utter collapse with the swing of a bat.

The flies are jabs at the opposing teams and their fans jab right back, and the victor of the game gets jabbing rights for the next day. 

Up in the announcer’s booth, the old men who love baseball and keep loving it their entire lives sit and watch the old thing unfold like every other day. 

The announcers talk like rolling thunder.  The old baseball jargon is their vocabulary, and they don’t just say words, they bellow words deep but bellow them quietly, understated. 

They use the type of words that only have a poetic charisma when they’re used with baseball.  Like shot and sharp and snag, a sharp shot to center snagged by the fielder. 

And I don’t know if there’s anything quite as beautiful as the silhouette of a fielder reaching up and making an impossible catch.  The arcihng of the human body exerting in a flash of a second and the glove extending into blue sky has to be one of the heights of evolution.

And then the Giants crowd exults and gives a throaty yell as one and laughs internally at the disappointed faces of the blue-hatted Dodger fans and the afternoon takes over again and the quiet routine of baseball ensues. 

The sounds of the game start to fuzz and blur around the edges into a mottled symphony of peanut shouters and umpire’s yells and sideways conversations and the occasional beautiful percussive thwack of leather hitting wood and leather hitting leather. 

And the afternoon is kind of spread out over the earth for those few inexplicable moments when your universe is contained in the stadium except you can see the rest of the world peeking into yours, peeking over the sky into this baseball land. 

And the rhythm of baseball pushes on through the afternoon, and the announcers flick words through the symphony and add a triplet over the thwack of the bat and their rhythm goes back to two and its regular drawl. A drawn out word here and there, the pitcher doesn’t throw, he throooows long and lanky like the pitcher himself. 

And the game keeps going and each big play or big hit draws more excitement out of the crowd until it’s boiling out of the stadium. The playful animosity between the fans and teams heightens with each botched call and play; each one elicits jeers of emotion and soon your whole being is invested in this game. 

And you have a wealth of dislike for all the people against your team and they have that same dislike for you. 

So your team is down by one in the bottom of the ninth and you need a rally to get back in the game.  The players charge up to bat and one strike comes and everyone in the crowd screams at every pitch like the world is being tossed in to the plate.

One guy hits a blooper to left but it drops in so you’ve got one on and none out and all you need are some hits, some small ball.  A right-hander pops it up and the center fielder runs in and waves the second baseman off and makes the catch and tosses the ball back to the pitcher.

By now, the franticness of the crowd has been shoved into all the empty spaces in the stadium so there’s no room for anything but the long, skinny shadows that spin out behind the slanting sunlight. 

The Giants' crowd stares transfixed as the batter hammers one up the middle but the pitcher scoops it up and flips it to first and gets the second out and suddenly you’re three strikes away from being shut out. 

Another hit snaps through the dried up infield and onto the outfield expanse and now there are two men on and everyone’s on their feet nervous as hell and waiting for the game and shouting. 

So your guy comes up and fights off a few bad pitches. You've gotta be scrappy like that to win games. The pitcher stares in and the crowd yells and the sun beats down and the ball snaps in and explodes off the bat and the crowd responds with an explosion of its own that shakes the very seats of the stadium.

The ball flies out into the stands and the joy just about swallows the place because you won, you won what feels like the oldest game in the world and suddenly you’re hugging the stranger next to you and the raucous joy finally swells over and out into the world. 

And even though the yahoo sitting behind you wearing the Dodgers hat hates you for winning, you rub it in his face. You’re all united by this great love of baseball and life on a lazy afternoon. 

And all you want to do is watch the baseball, the beauty of baseball on an afternoon that reminds you of being a kid and wanting to be out there yourself with the greats.

Breathing nothing but baseball on and on through the afternoon while a colorful crowd shouts joy down onto the field under the blue sky and calls of 6-4-3 double plays float down onto the glowing green and the afternoon stretches out and away until you can’t remember that there’s anything in the world but the afternoon and baseball.