Baseball — in glory or defeat — demands of us to be 'worthy of the great DiMaggio'
I teach at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and each time I arrive on campus I pass the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center, and each time I see the bronze statue of Yogi looking up with resolve, a man who won 10 World Series rings and the admiration of a nation, and each time I am reminded of the integrity and magic of our great American pastime.
What kid in America didn’t play stick-ball on our city streets? What kid didn’t swing a wiffle ball bat and slug a home run over the rhododendrons in the suburbs?
When I was a boy home plate sat right at the base of the oak tree. Second base was the large rock surrounded with ivy. Third base was a bald spot in the grass. There is no better place for a kid to be then at home plate on a warm Saturday afternoon just about to hit the World Series game-winning home run while your sister blows a Bazooka gum bubble from her mouth and pounds her glove on the pitchers mound eager to throw her third strike.
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Baseball is about being on a team, playing by the rules, creating elegance in strategy, singing at the seventh-inning stretch and dreaming that we never have to go back to our ordinary lives. Somehow, cracker jacks and peanuts and the glee of being a part of something big at the stadium binds us all in ways that politics can’t.
Baseball: Uniquely, wonderfully American
When my daughter was 12, she fell in love with a new Yankee shortstop, Derek Jeter, and when I told her that Jeter was born right here in our little New Jersey town of Pequannock, in the same hospital where she was born, Karen was hooked forever.
Babe Ruth famously said “Never allow the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.” That's something Americans know intuitively.
My cousin who lives in Belgium said to me more than 30 years ago that he admired the American entrepreneurial spirit. In Europe, he said, if you try and start a business and you fail, it was considered a social embarrassment, but in America, if you started something and it failed people said with admiration, it was great that you tried. Try again. Try something new or something else. Baseball and America are all about stepping up to bat again and again and daring to take that swing.
We all remember the Bud Abbot and Lou Costello comedy routine “Who’s on First.” Costello, the jovial imp of the duo says to serious Abbot. “If you’re the coach, you must know all the players,” and Abbot says of course he knows all the names of the players, and the comedy routine dissolves into a hilarious confusion as Abbot tries to teach Lou: “Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know's on third.”
I know who's on first. We all are, eager to hear the crack of the bat from a teammate, confident we can run to second base in our lives, daring to make it to third base, and seeing our journey’s end with a victory as we charge towards home plate triumphantly with a Little League trophy in our hands or with a sister scowling as she throws a hitter’s pitch right down the middle as we slam that home run out of the ballpark and right into our aching hearts.
The lessons of baseball apply in other challenges as well. In Ernest Hemingway’s "The Old Man and the Sea," the protagonist Santiago is in great pain as he tries to hold onto the lines in order reel in that giant marlin. His hands are cut and bleeding, his strength weakening, but during his battle with his pain he thinks to himself “I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.”
Our lives are filled with pain and sorrow at times, and yet, during the dark shadows of winter, we need to be worthy of the great DiMaggio. And we need to eagerly wait for March 28 and the first national cry of the year: “Play ball.”
Christopher de Vinck is the author of "The Power of the Powerless: A Brother's Legacy of Love" (Crossroad Books).
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Baseball — in glory or defeat — demands of us to be 'worthy of the great DiMaggio'
