Much More Than a Game: A Tribute to Baseball

A magnificent writer, Elizabeth Thecla Mauro, has a passion for the sport, and boy is she good at her craft.  Her team?  The Yankees.  Well, that’ll just have to be overlooked.  She finds a nobility in the game and in the players, or in many of them that is, and she paints this beautiful picture of a sport that I never thought was anything but “a game.”  I was wrong.  Speaking of nobility, there ‘s  Joe Torre, ex Yankee manager.  He’s with the Dodgers now.  I always loved this guy.  His sister is a nun and his brother played pro baseball for a while — with the Mets no less. Torre won my admiration because of the way he treated his players.  They were not just numbers, they were men, with souls, with families. Chuck Knoblauch was one such well-treated player.  He was a fine second baseman for the Yanks, good fielder, good hitter.  In one game, however, after fielding a routine grounder, Knoblauch chucked a wild toss to first base that not only missed the mark but went flying over the first baseman’s glove and into the stands hitting a newcaster’s mother in the face.  Another easy grounder came and another bad throw.   Knoblaugh’s arm and  head had lost sync.  He developed some kind of motor reflex adjustment problem.  Every time he had to throw to first base he seemed to stiffen up and almost push the ball instead of throwing it.  It was astounding to watch this.  It was hurting the team.  Ballplayers called the phenomenon “the yips” or “Steve Blass Disease.”  But Torre stood behind his second baseman and let him play.  Nor did anyone on the team object. The Yanks were winning and they were holding on to first place.  Knoblauch’s errant arm, however, never totally loosened up, so instead of benching him, Torre moved him to left field where the problem disappeared. That’s nobility. Every one of the three years Knoblauch was with New York (1998-2001) they won the pennant.  I love this clip from Mauro’s article:

From Inside Catholic website: “Only baseball can do this. Only baseball repeatedly puts one man out into the field, against a whole team, or a whole stadium, or the whole world, and then cheers him, win or lose, for his courage and his humility — for the heroic virtues he has brought forth from himself and, it is hoped, inspired in the rest of us. Only baseball can combine drama and buoyancy and innocent awe into such a heady brew of human theater that you forget you are watching a mere sport.”  For a great read, a masterpiece in fact, click here.