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.