What We Learn From Baseball
I've been thinking lately, as baseball season ramps up, about baseball as pedagogy, or maybe as liturgy, or as mystagogy. (And maybe these are all different names of the same thing.) Perhaps because I'm a teacher and next week, I'm about to shift from teaching writing to university students to teaching baseball to Catholic-school second graders, but perhaps, I've been thinking, because baseball itself was how I was initiated into the world, in a lot of ways.
From a sociocultural perspective, one could say baseball was the way I was socialized into a way of being in American society, its culture, media, language, class structure, racial dynamics, etc. Baseball was a game I was taught to love - not explicitly, but by osmosis, the same way I learned to how to pray or what to eat or when to speak. Baseball was just always there, on the television, in the newspaper, in the backyard, at the park. And there were things I learned about how to be in the world from following it: a specialized vocabulary (and by analogy, that there are such things as specialized vocabularies), the vagaries of business and economics (when teams moved, or players were traded, or that damned 1994 lockout that doomed the Montreal Expos' only truly good season), a modicum of hand-eye coordination, some patience, how to relate to other people, what it meant to be on a team, even if that was hard, like if you were one of the weaker players and often ended up in right field.
I learned these things without even trying to learn them, but in a sense, I chose them, too. I was given a love of baseball, and I assented, and it was rewarding. I would do this later with rock music, and to some extent with some of the things I do for a living now -- reading, writing, teaching. These things were given, but I also gave myself to them.
And in giving myself over to a love of baseball, there are other, broader, more intangible things I learned, things that I hope my kids and the kids on our team are learning: what it means to get to know something much bigger than yourself -- to inhabit it, disappear within it and find freedom and purpose. (Again I say: I coach a team of Catholic school kids. I almost pray the analogy won't be lost on them.) The inexplicably good feeling of when a bat hits a ball, when you know you have Done The Thing as well as The Thing can be done. (I still remember, with crystal clarity, the physical feeling of hitting a triple when I was about eleven, the electric jolt through my arms, the barrel of the black Easton bat, the ease with which I rounded second base, the joy of having Done The Thing.) The way teammates can be something like brothers, even if you never had a brother.
There are so many things to learn when you're young, and if you are given something deep and wide and expansive, something that welcomes you, that almost benevolently holds you -- maybe that's the place to do it.