Baseball As A Metaphor For Life

My beloved baseball is going through some growing pains, but I do believe it’s all for the better. The steroids scandal has given me plenty of grief, but for a baseball junkie like myself, I can actually find a positive angle in the fact that it has kept fresh stories about baseball on the back pages for me to read. But still, baseball is experiencing a renaissance and people are still going to great lengths to buy tickets. I myself spent a great deal of money to get a partial season ticket plan and even that was hard to come by. By my own personal estimation, it seems that the vast majority of teams are better than they were last season and will remain competitive through much of the 2008 campaign (I’ll give out predictions at the end of spring training).
As a Yankees fan, I suppose it’s easy for me to love baseball not only because of the fact my team always has a very good shot at winning a pennant, but because of the rich history and glory of the franchise. A true baseball fan lives and dies by their team. But that’s what separates a baseball fan from a fan of any other sport. Baseball is a metaphor for life itself.
To “have” a team in baseball is akin to having a nationality. I don’t have any relatives that date back to Revolutionary or even Civil War times in this country, but as an American I adopt that history as my own. Just as my immigrant grandmother who came to this country as a little girl speaks of American history as her own, anybody who puts on the uniform of a team is a part of that team’s history. To go from one team to another (especially by choice via free agency) can be considered an act of treason and can attract the ire of thousands, if not millions, of people.
Baseball has the longest schedule of any professional sport in this country, and quite possibly, the world. Baseball is played nearly every day for six months out of the year. Just as you or I go to work nearly every day, so to, do the baseball players. While football is tough and grueling and they are all certainly blue collar players, look at the story of Mickey Mantle; bandaged up like a mummy probably for 152 of the 162 games in a season, but he showed up and did his job nearly every day. While today players seem to be softer, the schedule is still grinding. Yes, the football players beat each other up all of the time, but they only go to work one day a week. Like many people in this country, including myself, work is seven days a week.
In baseball, as in life, there’s no tie game- (unless it’s the All-Star game a few years ago which outraged enough people for the very reason that it DID end in a tie) there are winners and there are losers. If a game is tied at the end of regulation, the rules don’t change. Why should rules change? In football it’s sudden death and the first team to score wins. In hockey there’s a shootout, but even then the game could end tied. In soccer, well sometimes I think they try to tie the games just so the hooligans don’t kill any more people than they did in regulation, but soccer games end tied up as well. There’s no joy in a tie. What was the purpose of the competition if everybody wins? In just about every other sport, there’s a clock that defines the length of time that the teams get to play. If your team is ahead, you want them to try and run out the clock to try and prevent the other team from coming back. You don’t have that luxury in baseball. In baseball you play until you win whether it takes eight hours, six minutes, and 25 innings (longest MLB game- White Sox vs. Brewers 1984) or if it takes you 51 minutes (shortest MLB game New York Giants vs. Philadelphia Phillies 1919).
In a baseball game anybody can win no matter what the score. Down 11-0 in the second inning, the Cleveland Indians came back to defeat the Seattle Mariners 15-14 in 11 innings. Baseball is the American past time because it embodies the ideals of this country. Hard work and perseverance can defy any odds. If you don’t think it can happen, it’s probably happened on a baseball diamond. I have seen men fly over walls, I have seen men with broken bones hobble up to home plate and win World Series games, I have seen men run so fast they beat to home plate, a fast ball traveling 60 feet six inches at a speed of 90 miles per hour. I have seen small men rise to greatness and great men fall to nothingness. In an age where attention spans are growing shorter, I would find it hard to believe people are still pausing by the thousands to gather for hours at a time to watch grown men play a boy’s game- but it happens 162 times in 30 different ball parks across the country. Baseball is a metaphor for life, because neither can ever be predicted.