John Fogerty - Centerfield

We're Born Again

People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

- Rogers Hornsby, MLB Hall of Fame

1. Baseball is here again, forcing the sun a little higher in the sky, demanding winter keep its fangs away. It’s a great and glorious and silly child’s game, played in the grass and dirt from Caracas to Brooklyn. Baseball unites us across time and distance. We wear our team’s cap because our grandfathers loved that team. We leave the radio tuned to the game all summer long and we use to it mark the passage of time. We speak in loving terms of players like Catholics speak of saints - Our Chapel of Saint Willie the Divine, tell the good lord Say Hey, and The Order of Teddy Ballgame, may your splinters always be splendid, and your average be always over .400. And in that same spirit, sacrifice is always rewarded in baseball. There are churches, basilicas, and shrines in this silly game. Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium and Cooperstown. In New England baseball IS religion, united by red socks and a looming 37-foot-high green monster. And there are prayers… oh believe there are prayers. Prayers for a base hit. Prayers for a pennant. And now spring is upon us, warming the earth and wind - that wind that blows into San Francisco off the bay, and the wind that blows into Cleveland off Lake Erie – and the season is upon us. As our friend Alexander Pope reminds us, hope springs eternal in the human breast. Let us enjoy this remarkable pastime by allowing time to pass – ineffable in the human spirit, and immutable to the forces of human nature.

2. Tom Boswell, the magnificent retired baseball writer from D.C., published a book called Why Time Begins on Opening Day in 1984, the last year my Tigers won the Series. It remains the best inside baseball book I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of them, filled with insights only someone like Tom could provide and relay.

   The general theory behind the title is this, time begins on Opening Day and ends with the last out of the World Series. That’s a shade over six months, or at least it was when Tom wrote the book. That means the clock stops. We do not grow older. This means every old ballplayer you meet is really only half his age. Sandy Koufax, a member of the All-Nickname Squad – the Left Arm of God – is 88 years old. That means, because time begins on Opening Day, that Sandy will turn 44 this season. Need proof? None exists, but watch that 88-year-old man hanging around the Dodgers in Spring Training and see how vibrant, how YOUTHFUL he becomes. An Irish playwright once tried to warn us.

   We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

   -George Bernard Shaw

3. John Fogerty’s Centerfield is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s in Cooperstown and for damn good reason. I don’t know much but what I do know is every baseball fan, every soul becomes a kid when they hear it. It’s drenched in nostalgia without being hokey, it’s optimistic without being sappy, and the line “we’re born again, there’s new grass on the field” strikes deep chords in the fiber of my being.

   I want the game to last forever. I want it to hoist the sun back up in the sky and command it to stay there, for just one more moment. Because that’s what baseball is - it’s moments, punctuated by beats and pauses that give us time to take our breath and revel in the camaraderie with those around us. Gimme one more sip of beer, another peanut. Let me invest more of my time, a thing I’ll never get back, in delightful silliness and joy as I celebrate with my fellow rooters. Baseball is not the best sports metaphor for life, because baseball has a leg up on real life - baseball is actually fair. You get your chance, no matter what. No one can kneel on the ball, run out the clock, and take your moment from you. A coin flip doesn’t decide if you get the ball or not. Your opponent must stand there, throw you a pitch, and give you a chance to beat them. We should all be so lucky.