John Miller, player/coach of the Brussels Kangaroos and a reporter for a major American newspaper, is back chronicling his team’s 2009 season in his weekly column that will appear every Monday on mister-baseball.com.
The baseball brethren imagine their game full of wisdom. There are life lessons, we say, in all those sequences of 3s, the infield fly rule, the infiniteness of fair territory, balks and walks, homers and domers, foul balls and blown calls.
Why, only today, watching a motorcycle race at my brother-in-law’s place, I noted that his beloved two-wheeled tire sport, while technologically impressive, lacked geographical variety. (Around and around they went.)
It dawned on me that baseball, on the other hand, offers a city (the infield, duh) and a countryside (that other field).
The first has offices (bases), a business center (the mound), crime (stolen bases), cops (umpires), airplanes taking off (homeruns) and a main intersection (home plate).
The second has farms (left, center and right) cows grazing (outfielders) and impenetrable forests (over the fence).
OK, so I wasn’t able to explain that one to my Belgian family.
Such musings, however, are music to my baseball family.
Jeffrey Darrion Siler, a Marylander who’s played for the Merchtem Cats the past few years, wrote me last week after my column about coaching tension-free baseball. He had his own thoughts.
The sport, he wrote, is art. “The field is the players’ canvas. His/her glove and bat are their palettes. The ball, the brush.” Because it is art, “it cannot be WON, nor should it.”
When winning becomes an end in itself, he argued, the playing ends. “Of course I want the little ones to go out there and play their hearts out. Indeed I want exactly that. But there is a difference in how that becomes manifest. Not by brutish slaughter and ego and chest thumping and braggadocio. Through a joyous connection between the Art and the Artist. That Joy comes through PLAYING the game they Love.”
And so we come to marriage. It’s been 23 months today since we promised. Since then, lots of highs, a few lows — like any relationship, job or, well, baseball season.
Here’s what my lovely and I have learned:
In the same way that winning itself cannot be the goal, marital happiness cannot be an end in itself. It is only by not trying to force it that it happens. It is only by not getting frustrated when it’s not there that it gets there. It is only by accepting the situation at hand that you can find the humility and inner peace needed for joy and play, for radiating outward the spirit that makes winning possible.
Escape the tension, win 3 out of 5. Get angry when things don’t go your way, lose 3 out of 5. The margin is thin, and depends on the approach, not the players.
What are your favorite baseball speeches comparing the game to Buddhism, politics or a box of chocolates? Tell it to oldworldpastime@gmail.com
Oh, what a great analogy! The city and the country…
Also resonates with the whole idea of baseball being a little oasis of green in the big city, a little piece of country in the metropolis.