LETTERS FROM HOME: INVASION OF CREATURES WHO DON'T LOVE BASEBALL

April 21, 1994

Dear Frisco,

I am living among people from outer space.

My first clue was the lack of baseball fans. At dinner parties, grown men who teach high school chemistry (probably as simple as nursery rhymes to aliens) or own farm and garden supply companies (the better to splice rhododendron and sheep genes) blithely mention how boring they find the sport, as if they studied it in high school on Orion and didn't quite pick up on the nuances, the balletic poetry of 18 players balanced on a diamond, the unearthly symmetry that always gives a shortstop just enough time to throw out a runner, the way the game contracts, expands and bends time with the pinball speed of a double play, the manager's glacial walk to the mound, the swan dive of a forkball.

They don't get it. Obviously, as kids they didn't read Chip Hilton and Bronc Burnett books or listen to Harry Caray's reassuring voice urging on a Cardinal rally over the radio. They didn't leap on their bikes every single summer morning to start a pickup game at the playground, or play hotbox in the back yard with the day's fading light, or just play catch with a wall if no one was around. They don't know the meaning of the word "IgotitIgotitIgotit." They know only of Cooperstown, as we know only of Mecca.

Other explanations for their lack of love for baseball might be plausible, but keep your mind open to the ET theory for a moment.

By the way, I note with great anticipation that one of the most memorable movies of childhood, "It Happens Every Spring," is now available on video. It's about a professor (Ray Milland) who creates a potion that repels wood, making a loaded-up baseball unhittable and turning the unathletic pedagogue into the strikeout king of the major leagues.

It never occurred to me as a kid that the professor was doing anything illegal or unethical. The movie fulfilled the fantasies of every 70-pound weakling who dreamed of athletic glory and believed in magic, even if in the `50s it was summoned from a test tube.

Lots of glee.

But what happens to you and me every spring doesn't to most of the people I know here. DC plays catch with me and said she was charmed that I wanted to spend one of our honeymoon nights at Candlestick Park. But if asked to pick Mickey Mantle out of a lineup she'd choose the guy who looks most like a Mickey. She might get it right at that.

The folks here are more excited about the annual Reggae on the River festival coming at the end of the summer than about the beginning of the baseball season. Now, think Caribbean, Bermuda Triangle, ganga (the number one local crop and certainly fuel for traveling the space-time continuum). Starting to fit together.

Perhaps the most gravitous evidence that extraterrestrials have landed is that I met one named Liane. She has a store in a nearby town where she sells crystals and jewelry and metaphysical books. She also channels someone named Mourzi, who calls the Pleiades star system home. Liane says she is from the Pleiades, too, and came to Earth to help humans make the transformation into the Fourth Dimension.

I talked to the editor of a local magazine about writing the Liane and Mourzi story, but she said they're "too far out." Thing is, Liane's message isn't all that weird. She simply says the human race has evolved to the point where we're on the verge of attaining much more conscious knowledge about who we are and why we're here. According to my understanding, the Fourth Dimension is something like sitting in an interactive movie theater, only the movie is your life and you can see how it's created.

Mourzi is calling on everyone who's seeking this higher consciousness to join with their "spirit families" and learn "to live and love in oneness with each other and the Earth." Who could object to that?

It's these guys who don't care for baseball I'm suspicious of.

Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian. He is currently on a leave of absence and living in Garberville, Calif.