O captain! My captain!

eath. Taxes. And the New York Yankees. Three things I can pencil in every year.

When asked why I like baseball, a game some complain is too slow, is boring, doesn't have enough action, I allude to Bart Giamatti's essay, "The Green Fields of the Mind":

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

And:

"Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight."

More than any other sport, baseball mirrors our lives in its dailyness and in its grueling schedule. We wake up, go to work and return home in the same way baseball players run out to their positions inning after inning, day after day and return home afterward. More than any other sport, the fans can identify with the players' long season and not only wish them success, but survival through one year to the next. The game's parallel existence mirrors our own continued existence.

Fans of all baseball teams are free to claim this parallel. Few fans, though, can make a claim for immortality through their teams. Every year teams such as the Cubs, the Red Sox and the Yankees stay in the same location and wear the same uniforms they extend their lives past the lengths of our own. And in the same vein as "you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy to not get eaten", anything older than you or your direct memory is that much closer to immortality.

A few years ago Brian Cashman, the general manager of the Yankees said, and I'm paraphrasing, "Our fans count on the Yankees on a daily basis." I understood that to mean a few things. First, no matter how crappy our day, the Yankees will end it well. Second, no matter how unfair the day, the Yankees will play the game the right way and in winning, will (in a very small and personal way) level the scales of justice. Third, no matter how tempting the short cut, the high standard of the Yankees  -and their subsequent success - will give us something to emulate.

Cashman spoke of the entire franchise, but he could have been speaking about just one player: Derek Sanderson Jeter.

The Captain injured his ankle last night and it seems he will miss the rest of the playoffs. Saying he will be missed is an understatement. I refuse to write his eulogy today: That's like making his Yankeeography in 2002 (which they did) as there's more to come.

Some may argue that the Yankees and their fans have hit Giamatti's "stop." Even Whitman's poem, "O Captain! My Captain!" does not end well for its leader. Nor did it for Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society who also invoked Uncle Walt. But rather than sulk in loss, Keating's students atop desks picked up the mantle of captain, each of their own ship.

No, the game continues. And last I checked, the Stadium is still in the Bronx and the Yankees still wear pinstripes. Jeter will play another day. The Yankees will play today.

Seeing-Eye Single

ormer baseball commissioner and Yale professor Bart Giamatti once wrote in his essay, "The Green Fields of the Mind":

Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.

The last couple seasons I've indulged in baseball the way some indulge in drink adopting the quotidian schedule of my team and its players in lieu of my own. This past summer, though, I started to chart a different course. No, I did not stop following or playing baseball. That's heresy. Rather, I started started writing a collection of baseball short stories.

Why spend the off-season doing what I did every off-season (Reading DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall, watching The Bad News Bears and waiting for pitchers and catchers to report) when I could create my own?

That's part of the reason for the collection. In truth, I find that I only write about something when I find there to be something seriously off-kilter about it. I wrote Any Color You Want in 2007-08 because I thought it priceless that the U.S. continued to send Peace Corps volunteers out into the world, but that we couldn't take care of ourselves (and wouldn't take help from others). I wrote Hooey Savvy because despite all the talk about the financial crises, people are still afraid or uncertain about how to talk about money, never mind teach kids about it.

So what's out of whack about baseball? Like any religion or family, baseball has its traditions. Whether we know the origins of those traditions is another matter. Whether we follow those traditions is yet another. Those are two angles I look at.

Otherwise, the language, history, and culture of baseball lends well to stretching out metaphors. Once upon a time writers used symbols and metaphors to avoid political persecution. Today, it seems, symbols and metaphors (indirect speech) are the spoonfuls of honey that we coat our crushed up pills in. I can rewrite E.B. White's essay Here Is New York and deride the quaint 18 inches of privacy of his extinct city (to a chorus of Bronx cheers) or I can write a comedy about a ten year-old blogger of a minor league team who is called out by the players (to a chuckle or two) and make the same point. I prefer the haha route.

Plus, I'd like to have the book have its own corresponding set of baseball cards for all the characters in it. If nothing else, that'll force me to focus on giving my characters detail.

In my previous work, I've swung for the fences with big ideas. This is more of a seeing-eye single before I go back to the home run derby later this year.

Progress Update: The fourth draft of my kids book on financial education, Hooey Savvy, is done. And yes, it is more memorable than it was a draft ago. 27 stories, 80 plus songs, 120 pages. I've passed it on to some teachers and folks who know far more about economics than I for their feedback. Now I need to read up on the competition. I'd also like to hit the road to conduct interviews in areas with average low credit scores to learn what failed and what education is or isn't doing to remedy the situation.