The Chariot of Desire: Part VII

October 27, 2017

A word starts to sound funny the more you repeat it.

Based on the latest science available, the history of baseball begins, arguably, six million years ago, when humanity diverged from its ape ancestors. A series of humanlike species would glacially evolve in prehistoric Africa, eventually morphing into creatures that resemble modern people. A couple hundred thousand years ago, those people  migrated into Asia and Europe. It would take thousands and thousands of years more, but eventually human people spread throughout the Balkan Peninsula. Knossos, on Crete, was settled roughly 9,000 years ago, making it one of the first known major neolithic settlements in Europe. The Minoan culture would emerge over the next few thousand years there, culminating in a written form of language around 2500 BC.  This written language would be partially adapted by Mycenaean Greeks, giving us the first known written form of the Greek language. (Tablets mindlessly left lying around in a Knossos dwelling from about 1400 BC provide the earliest evidence.) Parts of this early version of Greek persist in the works of a writer we call Homer, whose language we call Epic (or Homeric) Greek. It’s in Homer’s Greek where we find the verb “βάσκω,” the noun form of which is “βάσις,” which translates as “step,” “foot,” or “foundation.” Latin would eventually adopt a similar word with a similar meaning: basis. From this Latin term springs a number of derivations in proceeding European languages, but none perhaps more consequential than “basse,” a word used in Anglo-Norman writings by the proto-French poet Phillippe de Thaun around 1119 AD. The same word would appear in the French language for centuries onward, and slightly later (circa 1300 AD) it would be stolen and modified for use in English as “base.”  The Oxford English Dictionary lists seven noun forms, four verb forms, and one adjective form of “base.” The third noun form originated in 1440 AD, and it describes a children’s game similar to tag and sometimes called “prisoner’s base” or “darebase.” Most variants of the game involve two teams running back and forth trying to tag and capture the opposing team while tagging and freeing members of their own team. The first printed mention of a game called “base-ball” came in 1744 in an English children’s book published by John Newbery.

And if you’re still reading, that’s where the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, hastily begins its early history exhibit—with this children’s game called “base-ball,” or sometimes “rounders,” played with bats, balls, and bases.

Bourgeois 19th-century social clubs in the United States would give grown gentlemen an uninhibited excuse to perform this children’s game. They formed their own teams, dressed themselves in elaborate matching costumes, composed and published entire rulebooks, and kept meticulous record of their own inconsequential achievements. Eventually this children’s game become so special that grown men were hired and paid to perform it better than other grown men. But certain grown men with certain physical features were not permitted to perform the children’s game with the special grown men—they’d have to dress up in their own elaborate matching costumes and keep record of their own inconsequential achievements, which would be regarded as even more inconsequential than the special grown men’s achievements in the children’s game. And grown women could not perform with the special grown men either, nor should they perform it on their own—ladies performing the special grown men’s children’s game would amount to a “miserable burlesque.”

Special grown men paying other special grown men to dress up in elaborate matching costumes and perform a children’s game: this is how base-ball became baseball. And by some thread of storytelling, we end up with today’s billion-dollar entertainment and merchandising industry with millionaire superheroes and batting helmets full of nachos. Or at least that’s the thread we’ve chosen as the popular and collective history of baseball. An overwhelming portion of the baseball audience invests in a history that dignifies and aggrandizes the inconsequential achievements of grown men performing a children’s game. They tell the tall tale of a serious journey to “greatness,” a lofty destination at which only the greatest grown men most driven to be the greatest performers of a children’s game can arrive. Those inconsequential achievements of greatness include winning the most performances, batting the most balls, running the most bases, and countless other recorded measurements that are dedicated to the most avid patron’s memory, ready to be recalled instantly and recited by heart.

The Baseball Hall of Fame consecrates these inconsequential achievements of greatness and preserves all associated relics. The most avid patrons (me, for example) take pilgrimage unto this revered shrine of the grown men’s children’s game so that they may view up close the precise bats, balls, and bases utilized in the interminable journey to greatness. After a savory stroll through the hallowed spaces, patrons can wander into the withering daylight of a small lake town in upstate New York and purchase relics of their own journey, like t-shirts, hats, and keychains.

I did all of it. I saw the bat Babe Ruth hit with, the glove Willie Mays caught with, the cap Marcus Stroman wore with his elaborate USA costume when he pitched in the World Baseball Classic championship—a thrilling performance of the children’s game I attended in Los Angeles this past March. I walked through the Hall of Fame Plaque Gallery, a spacious chamber with bronze pictures of the greatest greats accompanied by descriptions of their inconsequential achievements of greatness in a children’s game. Then I went to a store and bought two t-shirts.

This whole experience was the scheduled apex in my sweet Chariot’s cross-country ride. I love base-ball, the goofy children’s game played with bats, balls, and bases. I love that anyone can play it, and that I can watch anyone play it with nearly the same interest as though I were playing it myself. And I love that it can be played anywhere.

In a glass case stuffed with a hodgepodge of artifacts, I noticed an old wooden home plate with nails precariously protruding outward. This was not a regulation home plate. The special grown men would never allow this hazardous base in one of their performances. An adjacent placard explained why such an unacceptable prop was placed in a display case with Luke Appling’s glove and Bobby Thompson’s bat.

Baseball as Solace and Symbol
In the panic following the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of over 70,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry into “internment” camps. Denied freedom, they would not be denied baseball, often improvising makeshift equipment from scavenged materials and using flour to mark baselines.

Internees cherished baseball for many reasons. With camp teams often linked to the ballclubs of pre-war Japanese-American communities, baseball was both a comforting reminder of a happier past and a symbol of enduring patriotism. “During a bleak moment,” recalled internee Shiro Kashino, “baseball gave us hope.”

Wooden home plate from Zenimura Field, made by Japanese Americans at Gila River Relocation Center, Arizona, 1943.

Sometimes I wonder when the last base-ball game will be played. The first game, whenever one might claim it happened, was probably played by children. The last game, I guarantee, will not be performed by special grown men in elaborate matching costumes. It will be played by an imperfect assembly of 18 or so human people in mostly suitable attire with mostly suitable bats, balls, and bases. The score will be mostly kept, the rules mostly followed. But near the moment when the teams disperse and the game ends, we might simply decide to call it something else.

Baseball. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball? Base. Ball. Base. Ball. βάσιςball. Base-ball. Still sounds funny to me.