The timeless game

It's not often that one gets to sort of relive one's past, to take a step back, to look again at one's younger days. You can go home, and home isn't home any more. You can return to a place you did business and employees have changed or they've gone. Even friends don't stay the same.

But baseball (or it's feminine cousin softball), ah, baseball stays the same.

Remember the wonderful speech in my favorite movie of all time, Field of Dreams? "The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray, it reminds us of all that once was good, and could be again."

My best time of my life, truly, was playing baseball in the summer. Sleeping late, wind blowing strong at night with the windows open and the honey suckle dripping deep into the night. Then baseball. Games. There is very little I know like I know baseball. Truly. And the best friends you ever have, according to Stephen King, are the ones you have when you are 12.

Things repeated themselves when I coached my daughters in softball. Both girls were All-Stars. Our lives were dominated by summers on the softball field. I loved taking what I knew and watching the girls learn and play.

Then watching and reporting on games for newspapers, sitting in a press box or in a folding chair and simply watching and sometimes even commenting on games. Games. Always games.

Then last night, I felt as if I back in time. My grandson, Gabe, was playing in an All-Star tournament on the West Bank. Just like it used to be. He played well, with two hits, a couple RBI, four stolen bases and a really good smart play on the infield. It was very much like watching Shanna, his mother, play.

And I was taken back. Taken back by the cool breeze blowing late into the night. Taken back by the shouts and even some anger from the crowd that twisted and flowed with every call of the umpire. Taken back by sitting in a folding chair behind the fence. Taken back by a slide into a base, or a mistake by a coach, or a dribbling ball in front of the plate and a catcher jumping out the make a play. Taken back.

Reliving one's past.

Now, nothing stays the same. Nothing. But baseball, oh, baseball passes from grandson to daughter to grandson to great grandson and beyond. Equipment, that short new bag that holds two bats and a couple of bottle waters and an exceptionally nice helmet, oh, that changes. But baseball, check two, go one; two outs; take then easy out; hit to the right side with no outs and a runner on second; baseball stays the same.

I know of nothing that has changed less. Though the designated hitter still needs to go away, though the splitter and the cutter are recent innovative pitches, it's still 90 feet. It's still bat on ball. It's still glove to the ground. I suspect it will always be.

But beyond all that, it is about relationships formed and lived out at a ball field. Oh, parents can go a bit nuts. Travel teams and such might just be the sign of the apocalypse, but it's still stealing bases and hitting cut offs and such.

Some of life's best quotes are about baseball. I choose two.

Tom Clark says that "I'm convinced that every boy, in his heart, would rather steal second base than an automobile."

Then A. Bartlett Giammati, once commissioner of baseball, wrote, "It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in 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 alone."

It is baseball, It is timeless. And every once in a while one gets to be absorbed in it.