Baseball, the Babe and a beautiful lesson
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for baseball. More than ready.
Hope springs eternal at the old ballyard. I’m reminded of the line in the movie Field of Dreams by the reclusive novelist Terrance Mann, about baseball being the one constant in America.
“America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers,” the Mann character, played by James Earl Jones, says. “It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game…. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.”
I’m not much of a romantic, and to romanticize baseball is the worst. I shudder whenever I hear or read that baseball is a benign, pastoral game distinguished by the need to be “safe” at “home.”
Have you ever faced a big old boy throwing heat, or been clipped by a baseball, or tried to keep your head down on a ball rocketing your way on a concrete-hard infield?
They don’t call it hardball for nothing.
Still, that line about baseball being the one perennial in American life, through good times and bad, gets to me. It gets to me because it seems true and because I want it to be true. Through all the tribulations of national life, baseball has been there, helping to nurse us along, picking us up when we were foot sore and tired.
Can it still play the role? Football is more popular, basketball seems ubiquitous, soccer is on the rise, videos and electronic games are addictive.
We will have to see whether baseball survives the long game, if it remains what it once was: a balm for the soul, a refuge against storms, a place for millions of beleaguered citizens to turn to in times of trouble.
Jane Leavy is the author of baseball biographies of the great southpaw Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle, the Yankee center fielder who thumped American League pitchers for much of the ’50s and ’60s.
Her most recent book is called The Big Fella. It’s about Babe Ruth. Ruth was a prodigy. George Herman Ruth stepped on a major league diamond for the first time as a teenager.
A superb pitcher, Ruth was soon converted to the outfield to take advantage of his prodigious hitting power. He transformed the game and in the process became the most famous American of his time. He remains an incandescent figure on the diamond and in American life. Every season and every game he is there, looming large, shining bright.
Joe DiMaggio? America turns its lonely eyes to you, Babe.
Because a large number of his public utterances were shaped by p.r. hacks, Leavy wasn’t sure, as she dug into the research, she knew who he was. Ruth remained a riddle wrapped in a legend shrouded in a myth until … until she came upon a copy of an old Sports magazine article by veteran journalist Jhan Robbins (not a relative).
On the afternoon of June 25, 1934, Ruth allowed himself to be quizzed by Robbins, then a precocious 14-year-old. As Robbins told the story in 1963, Ruth was standing beside his locker at Yankee Stadium snacking on peanuts and pop when the nervous kid reporter approached.
“Jhan asked what the Babe thought about in the batter’s box … a question no adult writer had ever thought to ask,” Leavy writes in the introduction to her book.
The author sensed, as she read Ruth’s answer, that this was the authentic Babe, the real deal, the god-genius of baseball at last revealing himself.
“Well, you’re all alone out there. You’re expected to belt it,” Ruth imparted. He said his mind became focused as the pitcher started his windup. Every fiber of his considerable being was concentrated on the task at hand.
“The second the pitcher rears back everything goes out of my mind except the ball,” Ruth said. “What I see is the heart of it and that’s what I lean into.”
What an apt and telling lesson for all who wish to excel, in large things as well as small – “Lean into the heart of the ball.” Lean into work. Lean into school. Lean into family. Lean into life.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.