{"id":52335,"date":"2013-05-15T11:00:38","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=52335"},"modified":"2013-05-15T11:29:35","modified_gmt":"2013-05-15T15:29:35","slug":"when-baseball-isnt-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/05\/15\/when-baseball-isnt-baseball\/","title":{"rendered":"When Baseball Isn\u2019t Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PxPpWYmQnS0\" height=\"315\" width=\"600\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In Ivan Weiss\u2019s trailer for Bull City Summer, guest photographer Alec Soth says, \u201cWhat I\u2019m doing here isn\u2019t about the game of baseball.\u201d Soth isn\u2019t the first project participant to say this (or words to that effect). The notion has been with us virtually since Bull City Summer was conceived, more than two years ago. It has since grown into an informal slogan.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s curious to say that a project about a baseball team, set in and around a baseball park, isn\u2019t about baseball. But in fact, the diamond has long refracted our attention outward from itself: Walt Whitman compared baseball to America\u2019s laws and Constitution; more recently, Michael Chabon wrote, in <i>Summerland<\/i>, \u201cA baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The \u201csummer day\u201d part is a little too pastoral for me (the vast majority of games are at night, anyway), but Chabon is right that a ballgame, with its pauses and blank spaces built around what Whitman called the \u201csnap\u201d and \u201cfling\u201d of the game\u2019s energy and action, encourages you to take in everything around it\u2014everything that \u201cisn\u2019t about the game of baseball,\u201d as Soth says. Chabon and Soth are getting at why we call baseball the national pastime instead of the national sport. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Of course, it\u2019s both: a sport <i>and<\/i> a pastime, to borrow from James Salter. The autograph hounds in Weiss\u2019s trailer, the voyeurism that unsettles our photographer Kate Joyce, and that peculiar alone-in-the-crowd feeling that haunts Soth\u2014none of that arises without the ballgames themselves. There\u2019s a reason <i>A Sport and a Pastime<\/i> is so full of sex, described in elaborate, ritual detail: Salter understood that the strenuous, disciplined, daily exertions of love\u2014the physical sport\u2014enabled and ennobled the pastime of the life around it. The sex had to be closely observed and recorded.<\/p>\n<p>So does the physical sport that is baseball, its strenuous, disciplined\u2014and, above all, daily\u2014exertions. A Triple-A baseball season compresses 144 games into just 152 days. \u201cIt\u2019s a long season,\u201d says Annie Savoy in <i>Bull Durham<\/i>, \u201cand you gotta trust it.\u201d There is a point, usually around the second week in August, when the Triple-A season begins to seem endless: the long overnight bus rides, the gas station suppers at three in the morning followed by noon games under blazing sun; the bruises and blisters, strained hamstrings and obliques. The players trudge to their positions and wilt in the heat; they are homesick, hurt, behind on their car loans. Teammates with worse statistics get called up to the majors\u2014it\u2019s a numbers game, but the numbers are in dollars, not stats. Finally, Durham Bulls manager Charlie Montoyo shortens practices and sometimes even cancels them. \u201cJust show up and play\u201d is the line he\u2019ll invoke with reporters in August. But it\u2019s no longer play. It\u2019s work.<\/p>\n<p>In order to do it, you have to have good habits. Cerebral as baseball is, you must be able to play the game unthinkingly and to play it right even when playing it right doesn\u2019t matter. That\u2019s why, for me, the most potent moment of Weiss\u2019s trailer is one he probably did not even intend to capture, let alone draw attention to. Around the twenty-five-second mark, a pair of catches are made in sequence: the first, a fly ball in right field by the Bulls\u2019 Wil Myers; the second by a kid contestant in the promotional \u201cTermites in the Trousers\u201d game (sponsored by a local pest-control company) played between innings. As the kid bags the stuffed animal in his oversize costume pants, a Bulls infielder appears behind him, taking a practice grounder.<\/p>\n<p>Every baseball team observes this ritual between innings: the first baseman throws soft, bouncing balls to his fellow infielders, who nonchalantly scoop them up and lob them back to him. It\u2019s not even close to game speed, not demonstrably useful \u201cpractice.\u201d It\u2019s just something that\u2019s done while the pitcher throws his eight allotted warm-up pitches. Perhaps it\u2019s as close as players get to the enjoyment of a pastime on the field. The infielder taking the practice grounder behind the termite kid is Hak-ju Lee, the Bulls\u2019 highly regarded, twenty-two-year-old shortstop prospect who, in 2013, earned his first exposure to Triple-A after climbing the rungs of Class A and Double-A. Lee\u2019s greatest asset is his glove, not his bat, but he was, surprisingly, one of the International League\u2019s best hitters for the first two weeks of the season, with an astonishing .422 batting average. Lee was an electrifying player to watch at the plate, in the field, and on the basepaths, where his dazzling speed worked havoc on opposing teams.<\/p>\n<p>In this split-second moment in the trailer, Lee happens to misplay the practice grounder\u2014it hits off the heel of his glove and caroms up toward his torso just as the edit cuts away to another shot. It would be a poignant moment, even if only for the unlikely error: Lee, a great shortstop, has fielded thousands of those warm-up grounders without incident, and here Weiss catches him flubbing one.<\/p>\n<p>But the image cuts much sharper and deeper. Just days after this footage was shot, Lee was the middleman in a double-play attempt. His teammate made a bad throw to second base, and Lee leaped acrobatically and reached to his right to try to catch it. But the errant toss was just beyond his grasp, and the ball bounced off Lee\u2019s glove, to his left. Lee lunged the opposite direction and made a second stab at the ball just as the base runner slid in under his knee, which was planted, straight and locked, at a slight angle to his body. The collision broke the runner\u2019s nose. It also tore up ligaments in Lee\u2019s knee; he\u2019s out for the season. It was the worst injury I\u2019ve ever seen on a baseball field. Watching the trailer again now, Lee\u2019s harmless background bobble seems to augur this disaster. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The postgame scene in the clubhouse after Lee\u2019s injury was unexpected. Instead of sepulchral quiet, there was the familiar pound and froth of loud music and the usual macho badinage of barely clothed Bulls snorting and letting off steam and suds. The first-place ballclub had just swept a doubleheader from their closest division rivals (despite losing Lee in the first game), and they were disporting in what the poet Donald Hall has called the \u201clightness [and] resiliency that you can see rising like an aura from the bodies of winning ballplayers.\u201d The snap and fling.<\/p>\n<p>Even more surprising was that Lee himself was still there, too, sitting in front of his locker\u2014not at the hospital as you might expect. His left leg was in a huge, immobilizing brace. He was, as Soth observed of so many people at the ballpark, alone in a crowd, his eyes empty, inconsolable. Not that anyone was trying to console him. What could really be said, and was there even time to say it? Lee would leave the next day for medical treatment in Florida, and then on to his home in distant Korea, not to return for a year or more. You can be forgotten very quickly in this sport, especially the minor leagues, where there is always someone waiting to replace you\u2014in Lee\u2019s case, the very infielder who made the bad throw that cost him his season. A ballplayer must be, like Phillip Dean, the hero of <i>A Sport and a Pastime<\/i>, \u201cclose to the life that flows, transient, borne away [\u2026] joined to the brevity of things.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In any case, there was no time to dwell. The next day happened to be Sunday\u2014an off day for most of us, but the Bulls had another game scheduled for five <small>P.M.<\/small>, and they\u2019d have to show up and play. For us in the crowd, the pastime, the cadence of a summer day. For them, the sport.<\/p>\n<p><em>Adam Sobsey has been covering the Durham Bulls since 2009. He is a columnist for\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseballprospectus.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Baseball Prospectus<\/a>\u00a0and a contributor to its recently published guide,\u00a0<\/em>Baseball Prospectus 2013<em>. Follow him on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/sobsey\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Read more about the Bull City Summer project\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/bullcitysummer.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>, and read the whole\u00a0<\/em>Paris Review<em> series\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/category\/bullcitysummer\/\">here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Ivan Weiss\u2019s trailer for Bull City Summer, guest photographer Alec Soth says, \u201cWhat I\u2019m doing here isn\u2019t about the game of baseball.\u201d Soth isn\u2019t the first project participant to say this (or words to that effect). The notion has been with us virtually since Bull City Summer was conceived, more than two years ago. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":514,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10788],"tags":[2112,10760,375,10650,8468,7434,10648,10892,369,313,264],"class_list":["post-52335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bullcitysummer","tag-a-sport-and-a-pastime","tag-alec-soth","tag-baseball","tag-bull-durham","tag-charlie-montoyo","tag-donald-hall","tag-durham-bulls","tag-hak-ju-lee","tag-james-salter","tag-michael-chabon","tag-walt-whitman"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>When Baseball Isn\u2019t Baseball by Adam Sobsey<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 15, 2013 \u2013 In Ivan Weiss\u2019s trailer for Bull City Summer, guest photographer Alec Soth says, 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