“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game – it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. Ohhhhhhhh, people will come Ray. People will most definitely come…,” said James Earl Jones at the close of Field of Dreams.
He spoke with the wisdom, timbre, tone, and tempo of a man with understanding and empathy. He could throw out platitudes and metaphors, and they would all make sense, in keeping with his argument. That was just his voice. He was Terence Mann, his unbenighted character, truly. He was talking about baseball; his words could apply to all sports. They bring joy. Unlike any other pastime, the mix of anguish and frustration and humility and jubilation encapsulates what it’s like to live. Sports – the one constant through all the years.
They bring feelings – staring at the television on a Sunday night during the fall when the leaves have turned and fallen and everything is happening all at once. When someone cr-acks a moonshot during the playoffs or there’s a crowd *pop* and a timeout. During spring practices in the rain before there’s thunder – Boom. When time stops and reverts to being meaningless during the night when Keith Jackson is calling out the phase of the moon. It’s dreamlike but real – illusory.
Illusively in journalism, sports are looked down upon as a low form of entertainment for the masses – not worth the prestige of a Pulitzer or the writing quality and storytelling ability formented by the industry’s most prominent names. So-called “new journalists” embracing their title and leaving the backstop of the country to rot.
And people will continually debate over what constitutes high and low art. The distinction carries little genuine meaning. But there are dictionary definitions and colloquial meanings; the one most remembered is the one more commonly used. And so the meaning becomes the definition.
This is true with sports. They, truthfully and admittedly, are utterly irrelevant. Sports may only have value because we have accepted its value broadly as so, but, well, yes, its contrived nature is its exact appeal. Value and heart and community and narrative have become its defining characteristics, along with shared triumph and defeat. There is no problem with that, little literal value though there may be.
Yet, if baseball is meaningless then so are these words, words that only mean their definitions. Fortunately, definitions negate neither use nor meaning. Maintenant, talking about sports in this way is a romanticized viewpoint, but sports are easily romanticized – told as stories fitting into seasons and arcs and decades of humanity.
“Smalls, Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player that ever lived. People say he was less than a god but more than a man. You know, like Hercules or something. That ball you just aced to the Beast is worth… well, more than your whole life man.”
These are from The Sandlot.
“It was weird that Benny had said that Babe Ruth was like the Hercules of baseball and the Beast’s name ended up being Hercules. None of us could ever figure out what that meant, but we were all amazed by it… I was the last one to move away. But when I did, the Sandlot was still there.”
