Our Game

In America, we have a multitude of traditions by which we are identified around the world. We have our fattening food, our extravagant entertainment, and most importantly, our pastime, baseball. Baseball has been romanticized at each level of play, from the little leagues in which our nation’s youth plays, up to the big leagues, with fathers taking their sons to share with them the game they grew to love. Yet while baseball is our national pastime, it’s not our favorite sport. Football is surely this country’s passion, with the five months of pigskin overshadowing all other forms of competition in the last months of each year. Baseball may be played during the outdoor months of summer, but nothing compares to a crisp, bright Sunday spent overlooking a 53x100 yard field. Instead, baseball fills a leisure-based niche, as the sport is simply a way to pass the time. Its inherent rules and structure lend itself to being recognized as such. The nine innings of play can drag out, which, while boring to some, provides an excellent social experience. And if you though that was laissez-faire, consider this: if a batter succeeds three out of ten times, he is considered great. Forgetting sports, in what other profession can you have such a low rate and keep your job, much less garner you a raise?

Baseball in Florida is backward, however. In the spring, every team in the Major Leagues is either here or in Arizona, for both places offer ideal weather during the pre-season training month. Once the summer begins, though, teams scatter across the country, settling into their homes for the middle months of the year. Florida in summer is not an ideal place to play, with its repetitive sequence of sweltering heat and pouring rain, neither of which being conducive to playing the game. The happy medium would be the retractable roof, which would allow for open air on temperate days and a controlled environment when nature doesn’t comply. But rather, you have the Marlins in Miami, who are permanently outdoors, and experience an unbelievable amount of rain delays yearly, and the Rays in Tampa, who are permanently indoors, playing in a place that is nationally perceived as ugly. Of course, the walls of the structure are industrial-gray, as if the game were being played in a factory. The field is green, but it’s not grass. There’s light, but it’s not from the sun. Tropicana Field is an artificial, manufactured place, and disservices so human a sport. Contrast it with Chicago’s Wrigley Field, where ivy crawls to coat the outfield wall, or Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, where the skyline juts upward beyond the outfield and the Alleghany. One redeemable feature in Tampa is that the sun is somewhat visible during midday games, as it offers a faint bright spot on the thin white roof. Of course, baseball is a child’s game, so why not play it in a place reminiscent of the place of a child’s daydream: under a bed sheet, with the light from an overhead bulb seeping in through the woven fibers?

Baseball is improbability, unpredictability, and surprise. Nothing touts this better than this year’s Tampa Bay Rays. In their first ten years of existence, the team has amassed plenty more losses than wins, but in 2008, they made the playoffs for the first time and advanced all the way to the World Series. I have been in Tampa to see many games when the team was at its worst, when so few people attended that they began to populate the stadium with stingrays. Gimmicks like their fish tank were intended to attract more patrons, but as they’ve come to find, there’s no substitute for winning. No matter how aquatic the stadium became, all that was gained was the image that the empty seats were rows upon rows of flat blue shark teeth. Being in the dome—which was nationally insulted—watching a team that was never televised outside of their home market sometimes even felt like being in the belly a whale.

I went to Tampa when they had some excitement, which was relative, for most teams do not celebrate when they balance their amount of wins and losses. That’s what their fun became—while other teams enjoyed division championships and playoff series (the Yankees not included), the Rays were content seeing how deep into the season they could have a .500 record.

In the past, my dad always thought it was fun to check the standings during the first week of the season to see what teams would be on top after only a handful of games. If the Yankees lost their opening game and the Rays won, it was bizarre to see Tampa Bay above New York in the next day’s standings. This year, however, things were different. “It’s May, and the Rays are still on top!” my dad had said. This time, it didn’t change. Amazingly, their performance never slacked, and even when experiencing major injuries that would set even the best teams back, their collective effort overcame the loss of an individual player. They deserved to win.

I’ve seen the Rays skim the bottom of the standings, I’ve watched as they took baby steps to gain respect, and now, I’ve seen them near the peak of every team’s aspiration. They were eliminated from the World Series on this very night, and their unexpected season came just a few games short of championship victory. But how did they do it? Because baseball allows one’s dreams to be larger than one’s payroll. There’s room for hope in its open fields, and those who love the game know exactly where to look for it.