Rhythm and baseball

As baseball begins its spring stretching, television channels begin breaking out movies like The Natural. It's a movie I've seen a dozen times, yet always find myself sucked in again. Although it's one of the most beautiful movies ever filmed, it's not the usual film ingredients that make me stick. It's the accurate depiction of some of the sport's more subtle rhythms.

Now, I know something about baseball. Lord knows it's not from playing experience. In honesty, I pretty much suck at the game. Still, it's part of me.

When I was a very little kid, my father was a minor leaguer. When I was a high schooler into college, I worked at a major league baseball stadium. Actually it was two jobs, one during the day and another during games. Together, it all left me with just out of toddler to just into adulthood memories that are so deep they sometimes only come when triggered accidentally, like an old song's lyrics which come to you out of the recesses although you haven't heard it in decades. Baseball's rhythms.

I think it's my ability to have those rhythms come on that separates me from my friends who have lost their affection for the game. They've gotten too accustomed to the speed of life now and can't let their heartbeats slow to baseball anymore.

But I still can catch the tap of cleats on concrete walkways as players go to and from dugouts strewn with paper cups. I still know the glove pop and bat crack not of the game itself, but of the special crispness of batting practice when the stadium is empty and the players full of just playing. I can hear post-game locker room chatter that is men behaving like boys. There's the pre-game preparation around the stadium, concession stands being loaded with ice from chugging carts where fans will soon mill. And there's the special sound of paper cups that once held beer and soft drinks clunking together as they're swept up in a cluttered, empty stadium after a game.

All together, they are much more than a multimillion dollar sport with too many drugs to get better or test invincibility, much subtler than egomania, much less regimented than the three hours or so from the national anthem to the eight and a half to nine innings. They are a tune that hasn't altered that much for decades and decades and has a direct tie to dirt fields and paper plates as bases.

It's the real rhythm of baseball. The tune that still has beauty.