E Pluribus Unum

I have loved baseball since I was 8 years old. I loved playing it and watching it. I became a student of the game and its history. I love its tradition. To those who say baseball is slow, I say: chess is slow. So what? I love it that the best sports movies are stories about baseball: The Natural, Bull Durham, Pride of the Yankees, Major League, and of course, Field of Dreams:

The one constant through all the years 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, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again.

I was saddened by the death of Ted Williams; this was one of the pillars of baseball's tradition, and a genuine American hero; Williams gave up 5 of the best years of his career to serve in the Armed Forces during World War II and the Korean War. That done, he still had career statistics that put him in the pantheon of the greatest players ever. Some say he was the best there ever was. I never saw him play. But I knew people that had. Eddie the mailman used to tell me about the towering fly balls that Williams would hit, acting out the part of the hapless outfielder, his back to the wall, watching another Williams home run disappear over his head. Williams was a complicated personality. Here's what Joe Saraceno said about him in USA Today:

If Joe DiMaggio was beloved for his icy elegance, the equally private Theodore Samuel Williams was positively bedeviled by the very magnitude of his own magnificence. Genius doesn't need confirmation.

Translation? Williams hated the sportswriters and didn't respect the fans much more than that. It took a novelist, John Updike, to describe the nature of the relationship between Williams and his constituency. It was part of a memorable story for The New Yorker describing the outfielder's final at-bat, a dramatic home run at Fenway Park before a sparse crowd on a cool, late September day:

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching, screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs — hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept and chanted, "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense, open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is non-transferable. The papers said the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Rest in peace, Teddy Ballgame.