Two Things I Love About Baseball

The Yankees won the World Series and that feels very right to me. But now that the season is over, I find myself feeling a bit lost in the evenings without a baseball game to watch. That got me thinking about baseball and its appeal. I've been a Yankees fan as long as I can remember, but the first time where I specifically thought, "I love this game," was at the World Series in 1977 or 1978. It was against the Dodgers, in any event. (I went with my pal Jeff and he'll tell me which year it was.) We sat down the third base line in seats that today would require a second mortgage. At one point, Graig Nettles made an astounding dive to his right to snag a hopper in the hole, got up and threw the runner out. It was an amazing, graceful play thatmade me appreciate how beautiful the game could be.

But it's not just the beauty and the athleticism of the game that I like. Thinking about it more recently, I came up with two things that I truly admire about baseball.

One -- Nothing has changed. Well, maybe not nothing; there are new rules and new equipment, juiced balls, superstars with astronomical salaries and quite a few other things that have changed. But fundamentally the game the Derick, A-Rod, Jorge and Mo play is the same game that Mickey and Joe D played, that Babe and Lou played, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker played and that Honus Wagner and Cy Young played. So, when you read an account of an early game, you can follow the play by play and imagine the excitement of the crowd, even if the game was 100 years ago. As Sherlock Holmes said to Watson in His Last Bow, "You are a fixed point in a changing age." There are fewer and fewer of those.

Two -- It changed everything. Well, maybe not everything, but it has had a very positive impact in at least one respect. Wearing my Yankees cap, I was riding back to my parents' house in Manhattan Beach on the Q Train after my first visit to the New Yankee Stadium. The Yankees were losing badly to the Mariners so I left at the top of the 8th to beat the crowd. On the train, a young African American man with whom I -- a middle aged suburban white guy -- probably have very little in common, struck up a conversation about the game. He asked what had happened, what the score was when we left. He expressed the same disgust I felt at the outcome. We talked about the game, the team and the new stadium for a bit until he got off the train. Not a big deal, but I'm hard pressed to imagine another topic in which two people so different could have come to such a meeting of the minds. Baseball today transcends race. I'm sure there is still racism in baseball, as there is in other places. But the fact is that on the baseball field, players are players, heroes are heroes, a great performance is a great performance no matter the color of a player's skin. And that, in turn, binds us as fans. We take that for granted today, but I also started to think how much we owe Jackie Robinson for enduring what he endured to break that barrier.

Anyway, there's plenty of time to contemplate baseball now. As Joe Girardi said at City Hall the other day, pitchers and catchers report in 96 days. Something to look forward to.