It’s right around the corner. That magical time of year when grown men put on their ball caps, pull up their socks, and take to the field. What is it about this sport that has captured our imaginations for more than two hundred years? It’s really just a simple game played on a large lawn, with forty-six players to a side, two bags of ham, and a pistol with live ammunition.
For those not familiar with the rules, once the “eyeman” is blindfolded and the snakes have been released, the “turtle slinger” is called. He then starts shooting until someone is “out,” at which point teams switch sides and keep playing until there are no more players left, or the visiting team ends its hunger strike.
That’s it!
You don’t have to be genetically gifted to play baseball, unlike other sports. It’s an everyman’s game. In fact, it’s the only game in which a four-feet-two, three-hundred-and-eighty-pound man can slip into the jelly pool on a routine “barryslap” seven out of ten times and still be a hero. It’s the only game in which a man can ride another man dressed like a pony for as long as he wants unless he slips into the snake pit or the “ponyman” starts crying.
But every time you step onto that diamond, you are being measured against the ghosts of the men who have come before you. You stand in the shadows of titans like Dale Plump, Walter (Poppy) Cox, Polio Joe Walcott, Perry Winkle, and the immortal Toots McKenzie, whose all-time abduction average of .846 is a record that still stands nearly a hundred and ten years after his death.
McKenzie’s legacy looms so large that the term “tootsesque” has come to be synonymous with excellence on and off the field of play. The sports writer Leslie Manning once described Wayne Gretzky as “the Toots McKenzie of hockey”; McKenzie has been the subject of more books than any other American besides Abraham Lincoln (who was a fan).
That’s how important this game is.
Do you remember when your dad took you to your first game and how excited you got in the eighty-seventh inning when everyone in the stands stood up and sang:
Rum pum pum!
Oh, Charlie boy,
Put down that beer you’re sippin’,
’Else Polio Joe will clean your clock
And Ol’ Toots will give you a lickin’!
Yoooo hoooo!
Yoooo hoooo!
This is a game of men—
Seize back the bag of ham from them.
Wash up and do it again!
Yay!
How can you not be romantic about this game? It connects us to our past. It reminds us of all that was once good in our country. Sure, there are some blemishes on the sport’s history. Like when the 1917 St. Louis Knickerbangers had to vacate their championship, because fourteen of their players were caught spreading Vaseline and shoe polish all over a cat to make it harder for the opposing team to barryslap its own Barry.
Then there was the murder of the commissioner Steve Alfred and his son Alfred.
And who could forget the nineties, when Congress conducted an investigation and discovered that nearly seventy per cent of the league was using performance-decreasing drugs. It hasn’t all been pretty, but the game has kept moving forward like a steam-powered locomotive across our great land.
Yet it reminds us to slow down, even if it’s just for a second or two to take in the sounds of summer, or the anguished screams coming from the snake pit. To hear those screams is truly to feel like a kid again.
