Extra Innings: Fall Baseball's Crimes of Excess

Say "Screw it" to restraint and swing

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As multitudinous as leaves carpeting the ground in autumn are writers’ overzealous words on the sport of baseball. Scattered throughout newspaper archives, anthologies, histories, and as told by player autobiographies are the tropes of the trade. Highly educated, mid-century men say Screw it to restraint, to conciseness—all the literary traits they hold dear—take their pen to the batter’s box and swing for the fences.  

In his essay “Proseball,” former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall described such literary antics as the High Belletristic Tradition, a label as ridiculously rotund as my own use of the word multitudinous. It fits: a snooty, convoluted reach for beauty and meaning that sounds more than it signifies. Fact and journalistic credibility clouded by the mist of mystique. 

“Gods do not answer letters” is the most famous example. The phrase is John Updike’s, from his famous New Yorker article about Ted Williams’s final at-bat at Fenway Park, in which Williams homered, rounded the bases with his head down, then disappeared into the dugout without even tipping his cap to the roaring faithful. Updike’s title is further proof: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” Updike, like some high priest of pretension unable to resist the Latinate flourish, literally committed the hitter—the “god”—to the divine.

Or there’s Red Smith’s newspaper article “Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff,” written after Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard ‘Round the World clinched the National League pennant for the New York Giants in 1951: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.” That, my friends, is excess.

Hall notes that “rumination and ruin,” “nostalgia,” and “corn” are all key features of baseball prose. These are elements that elicit eye-rolls in most writing. A home run as the miraculous. A surly veteran as some kind of aloof deity. Beach balls for the Malamuds or DeLillos in the bleachers to wallop around, watching as they rise in an exponential arc only to float dolefully down. 

It’s easy to poke the belly of these types of sentences. The sport clings to trite metaphor, pinches pennies with store-brand symbolism. Baseball as “more than a game.” Baseball as church. Baseball as America. Baseball as Paradise, as war, as justice, as business. It’s an allegory for…life, man. Baseball as “the national past-time,” so its players and their acts become myth, become gossip, become larger-than-life, become history.  

Knowing and recognizing all that, it’s still difficult to resist the cliches. Whether the origin is the movie “Moneyball” or Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary, the rhetorical “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” continues to ring true. I’ve been around the game long enough that I feel this in most instances of interaction no matter how peripheral. Whether it be bouncing a tennis ball against a wall, clearing the weeds from the infield during an adult softball game, listening to the Giants play on the radio, wearing my glove around the apartment or my San Francisco Seals hat to a friend’s wedding, taking the train into Fenway, or poring over Barry Bonds’ stats (232 walks in 2004!).  

Baseball can be all-consuming—the game within the game and all that—but it’s also atmospheric. You can walk in and out of a baseball game like you can do with no other sport. A huge contributor to that quality is its long season: 162 games and a postseason that, combined, can stretch from late March into early November. But within each individual world created by a game are numerous gaps and natural pauses. It’s a languid rhythm that encourages you to fold laundry in the other room or take a nap on the couch rather than directly engage. There is no deeper satisfaction than walking into a garage with a baseball game on the radio, or turning on the car to hear the middle of an inning foaming from your dashboard speakers, or hearing every third word of Jon Miller’s deep-toned ramblings as you putz around, going back and forth from your backyard to your kitchen, screen door rattling against the jamb with every exit and return. 

Admittedly, this is not a marketable quality for baseball. Time is hyper-present in football (both kinds), basketball, and hockey. The moment the game starts, time is running out, tick-tick-ticking down. When the clock does stop, it becomes tracked or governed by another watch: the one-minute time out, the play clock, the shot clock, stoppage time. Football (the American kind) has become almost completely digital, its clocks and players segmented and faceless. Everything is a countdown to kickoff, to snap, to the second half, to the fourth quarter, to Thursday night, to Sunday, to the Super Bowl. Though this constant reminder of time makes it easy to prove the value of having your butt in your seat for every play, it provides little aesthetic nourishment. These sports need to be seen—to be consumed—or they disappear while, by contrast, baseball lives in the air. 

A scene from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza illustrates this quality perfectly: Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) leaves home while his little brother is listening to Vin Scully’s broadcast of the Dodgers game, then drives across town, walking into a restaurant only to reencounter the rhythm of Scully’s iconic drawl. No one in the restaurant is talking about the game. The characters don’t interrupt their conversations to figure out the score, but it’s there all the same, a wave of continuity rippling out and infiltrating every corner and cul-de-sac and canyon of the San Fernando Valley. And in a movie deeply concerned with recreating the vibe, the feel of early ‘70s Southern California, a key textural component for Anderson was a Dodgers game.

So, baseball lives in the air. It’s governed not by our measurement of time, but by the natural order of things, the seasonal sync, the energy all around us. Its long season of play mirrors the Earth’s tilted orbit, the Northern Hemisphere’s run from springtime back to hibernation, from growth to dormancy, from equinox to equinox. Opening Day blooms. The promises of warmth. Sunlight refracts across the curve of the planet. The days lengthen. Innings stretch. Games waft and waver through the heat and humidity, the delusional haze of the endless dog days as the A/C unit hums through the radio call. Runners on…low and away…routine grounder to third…two down…now that’s a liner in the gap…K-A-R-S Kars 4 kids…. Every game is a day and every day is a life, and just as you become convinced of this, the drawn-out summer gets blown away by the cold air of autumn. 

Of course, baseball ends—and ends beautifully, but not with a countdown. Instead, it makes like the trapped sugars in a dying leaf, bursting into a reticulated red. October is a month of finales. It is a month of closeting your cargo shorts, closing the windows, bringing in the cordwood. It’s about burrowing in, batoning down, zipping up. It is not a time for fresh starts or renewal. Hope dries out in October. It falls. So, as baseball lovers, we have to spread out the detritus and commit it to the earth with narrative flourish and inflated prose.

A flat black sky envelopes the stadium as Mariano Rivera stares toward the plate. Fumes of worried breath rise from the bleachers in the chill air as anxious bodies shake. A clock might chime midnight, but time hangs still. Nothing happens until the ball is smacked into orbit. Carlton Fisk pulls a planet down the left field line, waves his limbs in prayer: Stay fair. Stay fair. Luis Gonzalez’s bloop single floats over New York’s infield. Willie McCovey’s line drive rips through the air, but not through the pocket of Bobby Richardson’s glove. And now time restarts, more vivid than before.

In other words: I embrace the cliche. As someone who’s written articles about half of the San Francisco Giants’ games over the past two seasons and watched even more of them, it still amazes me how a single, inconsequential game can swallow you whole. Any inning, any out, any at-bat can get atomized, inflated, scrutinized. It can become a world entire. So I get the belletristic writing. It’s a form of farewell, a long goodbye we need to say, an act of praise, an acknowledgment of a connection to something greater.  The Series is a tournament that doesn’t breed hope. Instead, it breaks it down and transforms it: the green leaves going red. It’s creation in extra innings, life at the last gasp.

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