This I believe

   I believe that in baseball we find order in a chaotic universe. Like a amazingly orchestrated ballet, or the tide to the shore, baseball lets people work side by side in a constant rhythm of movement.

A baseball game is only as long as it needs to be for one team to win. There is no clock, no timekeeper, no buzzers or no bells . There is only the rustle of the ball as it moves towards the plate, the crack of the bat as the batter hits it or the muffled thud of the glove if he doesn’t. One player at a time works to help his team. The pitcher sends the ball. The batter tries to hit it. The catcher catches it if the batter misses. Someone else tries to catch it if he doesn’t. Every victory and every success is there on the diamond and the team holds together no matter what.

The unhurried cadence of baseball was my lullaby in a childhood made uncertain by adults. On warm summer nights, as I bunkered down in my tiny bed trying to disappear amidst the covers, my grandfathers old box TV—tinny echoes bathed in static—revealed the soothing, deep voices of baseball announcers. All must be well with the world, I thought. A baseball game is on somewhere.

Ty Cobb, Sam Crawford, Al Simmons. The very swing of their names brought me comfort. These are the giants in baseball. Here were men who were exactly where they were supposed to be: left field, center field, first base, the pitcher’s mound, and doing exactly what they should be doing: throwing, catching, hitting, running in that unspoken and unhurried poetry that is baseball.

The elders (such as my dad and uncles) in my life used baseball as a way to vent and show their emotions through yelling and protesting the umpires calls, and I have grown older I have somehow adopted their methods. Although it produces a constant joy that we seldom find anywhere else. The baseball diamond becomes our church and our deep observance of the game becomes our ritual. I could see the relief in my grandfathers brow when we would watch re-runs of old Tigers games. TY caught the deep fly ball to left field. I noticed the smile on my grandfather’s face when Sam Crawford smacked one into the gap between right and center field. When one Tiger or another did his job well, our shaky ground solidified.

Baseball’s calm , its lack of fury, taught me that in small ways we can find redemption. We find it in the constants in life, the movements, the rituals, the traditions that remain long after all else is gone.