I’m about to go to sleep, yes, at three AM, and this thought, however outrageous, occurs to me: baseball endures because the human spirit endures.
***
In the last forty-eight hours, as a baseball fan, we have seen the full course of human emotion.
We have seen the build up, and the jubilation as we inched closer to yet more perfection, in what is beginning to look like Year of the Pitcher, Part II.
We had shock, disbelief and anger as video showed us what should have been, and tradition battled back with what is.
We had, yesterday morning tears in our eyes as we watched Jim Joyce who had tears in his.
Yet, when Armando Galarraga smiled his wry, endearing smile, the type of smile that can make you like a guy even though you know absolutely nothing about him and still call him Andres out loud, we smiled.
***
I’ve said it before and it’s worth repeating.
Baseball is a sport about hope.
It’s about optimism (with apologies to the North Side of Chicago), about the knowledge that if the Mets and the Red Sox can win World Series, if Cliff Lee can be in the minors one year and win the Cy Young the next, if AJ Burnett can walk 9 and still pitch a no hitter, if Josh Hamilton can happen, if Rick Ankiel can happen, then surely, too, this can happen.
Surely, too, then, anything is possible.
***
So we hoped that we’d get a chance to see it, the third perfect game in a season, the second in four days, something wholly unprecedented in the history of a game so long it’s origins are not definitively known.
We hoped we’d get to see it, and in essence, the replays show that we did.
Then the call was blown, our hopes were crushed, and we were reminded about how imperfect the game can still be, designed, as A. Bartlett Giamatti said, to break your heart.
***
Yet the Coda here is perhaps more telling than the story.
We saw Galarraga take the lineup card to Joyce; Galarraga smiling, Joyce in tears and the fans applauding.
If it happened in a Hollywood film, we’d call it trite and cliche and unreal, but here it was, real as the computer or mobile screen on which you are reading this.
***
This game will find another way to make us smile, to make us angry, to shock us, to make us tear, to make us feel, to make us forgive.
As long as we remain human, the game will toy with our emotions, as it has done for generations, and yet these are the very emotions that give the entire experience meaning.
We saw that while the game itself may be an ideal, it’s still populated by, powered by, and played by humans.
Humans who err, sure, but also humans who feel, humans who forgive, humans who hope and humans who will, most importantly, play on.
