Play Ball! Imagination Required
Even faster than a 95-mph fastball reaching home plate (0.425 seconds), there are some things about baseball that connect with me instantly and always.
Now that Major League Baseball is back and once again firing our imaginations with the hopes and heroics of a new season, I am reminded of how beautifully America’s pastime plays out in the mind’s eye. Even if you’re not physically present to hear the crack of the bat, there’s a field of dreams within each of us that’s always ready to put the ball in play.
Radio: So Real You Can Smell the Grass
If seeing is believing, sound stirs the soul. Yes, a televised broadcast or a video recap provides vivid, pixel perfect detail of curveballs dropping through strike zones and infielders spinning double plays. But radio? That’s glorious theater of the mind—pure, sun-drenched imagination. It’s baseball at its best when by voice alone another person can call a game and fill in the interstices of the action in your brain in live time.
Few announcers were or ever will be better than the legendary Vin Scully, who was the play-by-play announcer for Dodgers Nation from 1950 to 2016. That would be the Brooklyn Dodgers when the youngster started. Then when the Bums switched coasts in 1958, Vin did too and made history.
It’s fair to ask — given how little I’ve actually lived in L.A. but how much I’ve listened to Vin Scully over the years—am I more of a Dodgers fan or a Vin Scully devotee? Definitely both, and here’s why—his play calling was so real you could smell the grass.
When I was a kid, there were very few Dodgers games on TV in the variety of non-LA places I moved around to. I even recall finally getting to watch a game for a couple of innings and being disappointed, because it was not as “real” as the game that was painted in my head by Vin.
In 2008, I had the opportunity to throw out the opening pitch at a Dodgers game. At the time, I was at Dreyer’s Ice Cream, and we were a supplier being recognized for our partnership. The contact for the event said I could meet with any Dodgers player or manager there, which included greats like Manny Ramirez, manager Joe Torre and a hot rookie pitcher named Clayton Kershaw. Who did I pick? Vin Scully. It was a truly magical moment—for me and my daughters who attended the game with me!
Baseball Cards: Yesterday’s Ephemera, Today’s Talisman
Let’s face it. Baseball cards are one of the oddest hobbies a person can carry into adulthood. A simple paper product—bendable, smudgeable, ruined by water, bulky to store, heavy to move—these scraps of cardstock are of zero value to anyone who isn’t a collector. And yet ….
I recall what it was like to open a wax pack of cards, throwing away that gawd-awful bubble gum and savoring the thrill of finding a long-sought-after favorite player. Last summer, I saw a card that had a Dodgers ticket stapled to it … and suddenly, I was at a game even though I had been nowhere close to it when it was played.
The connection for me was that the ticket was also a promotion for Frito-Lay. Again, theater of the mind took over. I could imagine the team and the stars that season, the sun and shadows on the field and the free snack everyone got who attended! I was there, first pitch to final out.
Fantasy League: 30 Teams, 750 Active Players, 162 Games—GO!
Speaking of odd hobbies, let’s talk fantasy sports. I’m one of an estimated 50 million Americans who play, and on occasion, I’m still mystified by how deeply fantasy sports permeate our culture. If radio and baseball cards are throwbacks to earlier eras, fantasy leagues add intricate new layers of instant connectivity for baseball fans of current generations. I have been in the same league for 30 years—and in 28 of those years, I have chanted to myself, “Well, wait ‘til next year.” Will this year be that year? Talk to me in October.
In the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, the classic line starts, “If you build it.” You know the rest. At a fundamental level, the connection point among everyone who enjoys a game—players and fans alike—is the stuff of dreams. That’s a field of play as magnificent as any ballpark in the world. It’s always open and ready for joy and verve and poetry.
The movie ultimately revealed another truth about connection—the joy of playing catch. Baseball is unique in this way. The fundamental thing that every player does must be done with someone else. The protagonist in the movie wanted one more game of catch with his dad. As I did some warm-up catches with my son Nicholas this past weekend, I was reminded of that joy.
My love of baseball glows just a little bit brighter every time I play catch or luck into an inning or three on the radio. Occasionally, I meet a new player from a bygone era on a baseball card. Quite often, I get a fantasy alert on my phone from a game being played hundreds if not thousands of miles away.
That’s the imagination for you. Yogi Berra was right (of course). Baseball is 90% mental and the other half physical.
And to paraphrase Vin Scully, by using our imagination, we can keep pushing the sun back up in the sky to give us one more day of summer.