It's a peeve of mine that smart people who want to write about baseball are so often numbers-obsessed. Stat fixation particularly poisons the baseball blog world. But Beth over at Cursed and First is a notable exception. In a new installment of an ongoing series about the amazing Red Sox postseason, she waxes existential considering the mysterious symmetries and unlikely events that brought Boston the title. Here she is on Game 1 of the World Series:
The first moment that has stuck with me like that is Mark Bellhorn's home run in Game 1. Perhaps not an insignificant moment, but still--it was only Game 1, and has since been overshadowed--and rightly so--by the Last Out by Keith Foulke, and the reappearance of the bloody sock, etc., all of which I appreciate...but the moment I replay over and over in my head--and sometimes over and over on my various World Series videos--is that clanging, clunking homer that won the Sox their first World Series game in nearly twenty years.What the retrospectives don't emphasize is the fact that Bellhorn had hit a pitch to the precise same spot moments earlier, foul. Maybe it doesn't really matter--but to me it does. Because without the letdown from "get out! get out! get out...!...argh, foul ball!" moments earlier, you don't get the element of surprise to the elation--and that's probably what makes the moment so sweet to me.
This underscores the difference between the merely beautiful and the sublime. By any account, the Yankees played beautiful baseball in their absurd 1996-2000 stretch: 4 World Series wins in 5 years. Their 1996 win was arguably sublime, with its dramatic comeback victory and its status as their first title since 1978, but the 1998-2000 wins were merely picturesque. But the 2004 Red Sox were sublime in the best sense: equal parts tragedy and beauty, struggle in the face of generations of clanking, creaking losses and crushing disappointments. The sublime ineffably combines pain and the sense of beauty. You don't attain it with merely good play; you have to suffer in the process. By any account, the Red Sox met that criterion: Curt Schilling's bleeding ankle; Boston's three losses in the ALCS; Bellhorn's foul ball before his home run; Derek Lowe's scintillating performances as a starter after being relegated to the bullpen; Johnny Damon's grand slam in Game 7 of the ALCS after a long, horrific dry spell. Even some fans' fear that winning the World Series would diminish Boston's unique appeal qualifies this postseason as sublime, rather than beautiful.
After noting the mirror-image similarity of Bellhorn's homer to Carlton Fisk's 1975 walk-off piece, Beth goes on to muse about her search for post-hoc astrological omens to explain the Sox victories. She comes up empty, but then concludes:
I want to believe that there's something more to the world. More to the universe. I want to believe, looking up into the sky where a small white ball is hurtling off into the distance, that its much bigger brother millions of miles away is sending some sort of message, that somehow the alignment of the planets is connected with the alignment of bat and ball and glove and foot and base.I want to believe that this story, of the Red Sox, that has been unfolding for the last eight and a half decades, and finally bloomed into this beautiful, satisfying, serendipitous conclusion--a linear story, a problem and a climax and a resolution--means I can hope for anything similar from life in general.
But the moon doesn't mean anything. It's a hunk of rock in space. And ultimately, we decide our reality; among the most distressing aspects of the human condition is that the kind of closures and ultimate, healing understandings brought about by the 2004 Boston Red Sox are rarely afforded in life, and when they are, they are to be found in disproportionate number in the uncanny symmetries and epic metaphors of our games--the things we take (or are supposed to take) less seriously.
Excellent stuff.