By Rabbi Ben Kamin
OCEANSIDE, California — The Kansas City Royals, those scrappy, come-from-behind non-imperials from the American epicenter of wheat and ice, ended it decisively in Game 6. Like a sudden gust from the plains, they brought it on at their own will, blowing the bemused New York Mets off their own field in a burst of Midwestern lightning and thunder.
Mets ace Matt Harvey, who may have stuck around a little too long, walked off the field like a trampled scarecrow. He and his pitching comrades were flattened by an old-fashioned amalgam of bloop hits, daring base-running, and their teammates’ own unwieldy throws. The summer season ended on a November night in a classic sandlot frenzy.
And now there is no baseball again till after the darkest solstice. We changed our clocks in sync with the one game that has no clock.
It occurred to me, as the Royals dance in Queens: this was the last day of the baseball season and now the grasses of time will again fold under and freeze. The winds will howl away hope till the thaw and buds of next spring. We will robotically pass away the frigid time under the gridiron charges of sinewy pigskin-men in helmets and our own holiday-driven neuroses, till pitchers and catchers and blossoms report and soften our hearts again.
The NBA, with its bling-laden human sequoias, is respectable enough entertainment. Everyone knows that football is a concussion-rocked diversion you watch to pass the long night between the World Series and spring training. Hockey, meanwhile, is some kind of refrigerated rink deal that melts outside of Canada and shamed itself anyway in this republic when it named one of its teams the Mighty Ducks.
Baseball is solar, singular, and remains the only game that celebrates a man’s ability to sacrifice and long for home. In no other sport does a team score with a “squeeze play.” Its rituals, superstitions, susceptibilities to rain and wind even in multimillion dollar stadiums, its men in soft caps—all speak to something deep within the bucolic essence in a way that no hyper-crushed goal line stand or methodical foul shot cycle or zipping puck can possibly replicate.
Baseball is memory and numbers and faces and cards and wood and something your Dad said to you that you never forgot. Light up the stove and let’s talk trades.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author, freelance writer, and blogger at www.spiritbehindthenews.com. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com. Any comments in the space below should include the writer’s full name and city and state of residence, or city and country for non-U.S. residents.