Gods and samurai of baseball

Oct. 28, 2004

Dear Leslie,

The last time the Cardinals took the Red Sox in the World Series, I was in high school and World Series games were still played in the afternoon -- when they were meant to be. In gym class we watched the Series because the coaches wanted to as badly as we did.

Jim Lonborg, the Red Sox's ace, was terrific but not quite as good as St. Louis' Bob Gibson. Gibson reminds you of the guys teams bring in now to throw aspirin tablets past hitters in the 9th inning -- the closers. But Gibson pitched all nine innings of each of the three games he won in that World Series. He was a baseball god.

The Cardinals won that World Series in 1967. They could have used a Gibby this year.

Those were the days when I was still in love with baseball. I played in summer leagues from age 10 until my 18th year. Everything about baseball was fine with me. I came to appreciate its poetry, the breathlessness that awaited each pitch, the perfection of the dimensions of a baseball diamond. If the distance between bases were 92 feet, almost no one would ever beat out an infield hit. If it were 88 feet, infield hits would be commonplace. Ninety feet is just right.

Baseball was heroic. Teams of men with clubs took turn attacking each other. In his biography, the Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh tells how he transformed himself from a mediocre hitter into a fearsome one by undergoing arduous samurai training.

Baseball fans are excited about the possibility of Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's career record of 755 home runs. But Bonds will have to hit 868 homers to match Oh.

Everything was admirable about baseball. Then came the players strike in 1994. Players decided that refusing to play was the only way to get owners to back off their demand to cap salaries.

There went the Montreal Expos' pennant dream. Now they're moving to Washington, D.C. Gone was Matt Williams' attempt to break Babe Ruth's home run record and Tony Gwynn's shot at batting .400. It was if baseball and its traditions didn't matter.

I respect the right of workers to strike. But the baseball players decided a baseball season was expendable. To baseball fans, it was almost as if firefighters had refused to save a family from a burning house until they got a pay increase. Firefighters never would do such a thing. Baseball players did.

The baseball players won, eventually. All are multimillionaires now, and fans fill up the stadiums of the successful teams even though a day at the ballpark now requires a family to make a minor investment.

It reassures me that the Cardinals have some players who, if they weren't so gifted, would be playing baseball in summer leagues just for the fun of it. The Red Sox have some of those kind of players, too.

When someone breaks your heart, forgiving is hard. But you do, eventually, and that makes it possible to fall in love with someone else.

After 10 years, baseball has been harder to forgive. As the rock 'n' roll poet Neil Young sang, "Only love can break your heart."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is the managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.