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Baseball: America's pastime
By Lee Kucera
It's time to say goodbye to our ballplayers, once again. We've come to the end of our third season as one of the host families who provide room and board to players on our local minor-league team, the San Jose Giants. The ironic thing is that we're not even baseball fans. Three years ago, I impulsively answered a newspaper ad that sought community housing for Giants players. Since then, eight of them have come from the farthest corners of America to live with us off and on during the spring and summer months.
Typical responses to this arrangement ("Are you nuts?") reflect the common perception of professional ballplayers in a society where the word "jock" is often preceded by "dumb." Presumably the stereotyped images are based, as mine used to be, on characters such as Tim Robbins' dimwitted pitcher in Bull Durham, the well-publicized antics of real-life bad-boy José Canseco, or the drunken lout played by, of all people, Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own ("NO! There's no CRYING in BASEBALL!").
Surprise. The ballplayers who have lived with us have been smart, polite, funny and adored (if temporary) big brothers to our teenage daughter. One graduated from Rice University with a double major in business and politics. Another switched from pre-med to business administration because afternoon biology labs interfered with baseball practice(!), and finished college in three years. One carried his Bible with him to the field each day. Typically they call their parents after every game.
I still don't know how an ERA is calculated, and no matter how many times it's explained to me, the difference between the jobs of long relievers, short relievers and closers remains a mystery. But it's impossible not to admire the skill that develops when a physical gift is honed by countless hours of practice and training since childhood. Our players and their teammates move with the easy grace and power of accomplished athletes. On the field, they are transformed from raw post-adolescents into commanding, well-oiled machines.
In a recent game, I watched one of them--the epitome of easygoing good nature off the field--stare at the hitter with the intense, murderous gaze of a pitcher about to swing into a change-up. On the first throw, in the barely measurable amount of time it takes the ball to hurtle from the crack of the wallop at home plate to the pitcher's mound at 90 mph, he vaulted straight up several feet off the ground, apparently without effort, and snagged the ball in mid-air with his upraised glove almost before the batter had a chance to begin the dash for first. He hit the ground, pivoted seamlessly and, in one smooth sideways arc, shot the ball to second base where it landed with a solid thwack in the infielder's glove--a micro-instant before an opposing runner's feet touched the base in a sliding spray of dirt. It was two or three seconds of pure, fluid poetry.
At San Jose's Municipal Stadium, home games open with the national anthem. The nine starting players make a sparse formation in rows of three down the distant length of the empty field and face the flag with their backs to the crowd, their caps over their hearts, heads bowed. The setting sun behind the foothills beyond the stadium casts long shadows on the field. The raucous crowd grows silent for the "Star-Spangled Banner," which is likely to be sung by a barbershop quartet or local musical theater performer. As the anthem fades, I watch our young players and their teammates--about to give the best that is in them, once again, for sheer love of the game and the slim chance of realizing an unlikely dream. And I understand a little of why baseball is called the great American pastime.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
