Wednesday, April 13, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Baseball
season
It’s dangerous to write
about baseball. The topic
is too loaded, has been
done badly too many times,
and almost everyone is an
expert. But it is spring, after
all, the loathsome caterwaul-
ing of the election primaries
is getting worse, the season
is underway, and this is Vin
Scully’s final year — or so
he says.
There is an old saw that
goes something like this:
Football is brothers beating
each other up in the back-
yard, baseball is fathers and
sons (or daughters) play-
ing catch. Sappy? Maybe,
but there is something
there, something too rich
to be ignored in today’s
hyperbolic world, where
professional protestors, pur-
veyors of screech theater and
grievance robots abound,
endlessly tilting at the foun-
dations and institutions that
have framed our life of rela-
tive peace and luxury.
So this spring — every
spring — I turn toward base-
ball, and not just because
everyone looks better in
pinstripes — which they
do — but because it allows
me to clock out of the sound
and fury for a few precious
hours. Especially when I lis-
ten on the radio, which is a
kind of time travel.
Baseball is doing its best
to ruin itself, naturally, by
caving to the grievance mon-
gers and putting mound con-
ferences on a timepiece, but
I’m willing to forgive that
horrendous indiscretion for
the pleasure of an acrobatic
double-play, a Kershaw
pitching masterpiece, or a
manager going postal over
a called third-strike, rip-
ping second base out of the
ground and tossing it into
the dugout.
Kenneth Turan told us
that the game “endures at
least in part because it is
a contemplative sport that
delights in nuances. Not a
brazen game, eager to sell
its thrills cheaply, but rather
an understated affair that
must be courted if it is to be
loved.” It’s never been said
much better, and contained
in there is a larger lesson
— as baseball is wont to
provide — in how we might
approach modern life in
general.
Baseball, we are told,
is losing its audience, and
youth participation is lag-
ging. That’s probably true.
It’s also lamentable for what
it says about what we are
becoming as a culture. The
game, they say, is simply too
slow, laborious to the unin-
formed, and doesn’t pack
a thrill a minute. I would
argue that it is precisely
baseball’s pace which rec-
ommends it, particularly in
our on-demand, must-have-
it-now, impatient, entitled,
and uber-selfie universe.
My grandfather, a life-
long working cowboy, once
told me the only other thing
he would have wanted in
life, outside of the deserts
and mountains and some
great horses, would have
been to play professional
baseball. And my memories
of him are full of the voice
of Vin Scully calling the
Dodgers and Giants, of sit-
ting in the cab of his truck
on a hot summer afternoon
with the radio on, far out on
the Nevada desert, listening
to the ballgame by some
miracle bounce of scratchy
radiowaves, and watching
a fresh load of bulls stir up
dust in the corrals.
You never get those
moments back in full, but
you file them away, and so
the game becomes a mean-
ingful part of your fabric,
and perhaps even an influ-
ence on how you see the
world. Baseball can still do
that.
Regrettably, this season
is Vin Scully’s farewell, and
when that voice goes silent
we will have lost some-
thing utterly grand, some-
thing poetic and sublime
that has been playing in the
background for 67 years. To
hear Vin Scully call a base-
ball game is like listening to
Homer recite the Iliad. He’s
that good, and fans of the
game will feel a hole open
up in the middle of their
chests when he signs off for
the last time.
But baseball also teaches
us that the great ones all
go down. Sometimes, like
Chuck Knoblauch, they
just can’t throw the ball
to first base anymore. No
one knows why this hap-
pens, but it does, and they
disappear from the game,
leaving us with another
29
mystery and another set of
memories.
Baseball is a game of
numbers, of course, and
here are a couple: I’ve
watched all nine volumes
of Ken Burns’ epic on base-
ball. That’s a feat on par
with drinking nine gallons
of chocolate milk, back-to-
back, but I’d probably do it
again, because the game can
teach us about ourselves, our
world, and encompasses,
unlike any other sport, the
history of our nation — good
and bad.
Closer to home, on a dif-
ferent level of the game,
we have the Outlaws, who
each year field a fine brand
of baseball, and I would
encourage all of you who
still care about the game to
join me this spring to cheer
them along. They are young
this season, but they are
well-managed, and no team
from Sisters will ever lack
for heart. Sometimes heart
is enough, Hall of Fame
careers have been built on
heart, and luck, and just a
little skill. So put on your
rally caps and come out to
watch the games, or just
come to yell at the umpire
a little bit — he might
need help with his strike
zone.
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