In a room in my parents’ house, there is a framed poster from the Met: “Baseball cards from the Burdick Collection”, and it contains just that–images of baseball cards, as early as Cobb, and up to Willy Mays–five rows of four cards each.
I remember when the poster was first hung–I can’t tell you how my parents acquired it or, really, even, when, but I can tell you what I remember was my first impression:
Who were these guys?
There were maybe three I could identify–Babe Ruth (though the pinstripes on his uniform are completely faded), Mickey Mantle and Jackie Robinson.
But the others? Joe Jackson? Tris Speaker? Satchel Paige?
Now, of course, it’s a little different.
So many years later, I am familiar with every name on the poster–even if not the intimate details of said player’s career.
Somewhere along the line, I learned baseball.
It’s a funny thing, baseball–because there is so much to it. There’s the game itself, of course–the rules, the procedures, the scoring, the competition–but much more than the present, and more than any other sport today, there is also the history.
No other American sport has a history like baseball–one that goes as far back (if I remember correctly, we’ve traced it back at least to the eighteenth century in some form, maybe earlier), one that is as richly documented (even if the origins of the game itself are still shrouded in mystery) or one that has become so woven with the fabric of American society.
Somewhere along the line, any serious baseball fan learns the game’s history. Whether they choose to do so through the narrative, like going through the museum at Cooperstown from start to finish, or through the statistics (check out The Numbers Game) if you have not already done so), whether it occurs through some form of osmosis or through careful and active study, it happens.
Somehow, somewhere, you learn who Babe Ruth was, and Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams, and Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner, and when you do, your experience of the game becomes that much richer.
Baseball is nothing if not for the stories that color its past, giving us fodder for G-d-only-knows how many books, movies, plays and superstition.
We can joke about there being a curse at Citifield, for example, but it takes on so much more meaning when one thinks about the billy goat curse of the Chicago Cubs (if you believe in that sort of thing, of course.)
We can delight in the Yankees winning the World Series, but the wins become something else when we remember that same emotion that we as fans feel may very well have been the same as our parents and grandparents–never mind the emotions running through the players on the field.
Without its past, baseball is just another game.