Take me out to the ballgame!

It was not Sigmund Freud but Joseph Wechsberg, the Vienna correspondent for the New Yorker magazine, who discovered that Mozart is a cure for headaches and depression. I can buy that. Especially if the patient is (a) Viennese, and (b) has any musical taste at all.
But for Americans, nothing works like a baseball game, preferably low-key and minor league. It's good for stress, midlife crisis, sophistication, upward mobility and whatever else ails you.
Caution: The food served at ball parks--red hots, Polish sausages drenched in mustard, peanuts, popcorn, Crackerjacks, beer, and, these days, nachos and jalape–o peppers--is not recommended for the digestion. Baseball food is what keeps fans happy, minor league clubs in the black, and the manufacturers of bicarbonate of soda going. A ball game wouldn't be the same without it, and the addition of Tex-Mex fare is another argument for the satisfying, ever adapting American national culture.
If the designated hitter remains an abomination, the nachos are a big improvement. It's what baseball offers the mind that soothes and revitalizes the American nervous system.
A baseball game offers a mix of discipline, tradition and possibility (like Mozart) all softened by good clean, wholesome fun. The assuring rituals include the national anthem played on the organ, or maybe a calliope.
Unfortunately, baseball uniforms are no longer baggy, with the home team in bright colors and the visitors consigned to gray. Stripes are in, solids out. Baseball uniforms these days are a calculated exercise in nostalgia for the 1910s. Only handlebar mustaches and muttonchops would be required to complete the ensemble, and they may be coming back. Chewing tobacco is going out, thank goodness and the American Cancer Society.
The best time to get to a game is early, while the sparse crowd is trickling in and the pitchers are still warming up with a languid grace that implies all the time in the world. The heat of the day is dissipating, like your troubles.
It's like getting to a concert early to hear the orchestra tune up; there is the same sense of unhurried anticipation, of discordant harmony. Night games are a visual feast, with the green infield shimmering in the white glow of the lights, making the signs on the outfield fences look as if they had been painted only an hour before. Day games on perfect days are simply glorious.
Baseball is one sport that has not accepted the tyranny of arbitrary, ever ticking time. Its timeless clock counts only balls and strikes, runs and outs. It moves by the inning, not the second. Something actually has to happen for time to pass on the diamond; here man is still the measure of all things. Theoretically, a game could go on forever if it were eternally tied. Maybe heaven is like that--one unending, extra-inning game with each pitch both climax and expectation.
Unlike football or basketball, baseball is not made for stopwatches--or for television, which zooms in on an amputated, foreshortened simulacrum of this pastoral delight.
To watch a game on television is to watch it through another's eyes. The camera forces the spectator's attention, rather than letting it roam freely around the outfield, over to the coaches on the sidelines, down to the players in the dugout, across to the fans in the bleachers, or up at the cumulo-stratus clouds over the American flag in center field.
What fan with soul so dead has never, not once, during a pitcher's duel or a fielder's game or a manager's strategic battle (for those are baseball at its best; batting is just bombardment) has not thought to himself: "God, I love this game!"
Baseball is so . . . American. And like things American, it has captured the imagination of the world. It appeals to the Japanese love of ritual, and the Latin American regard for the solitary, sun-and-shade duel of pitcher and batter.
The television-bound spectator may not see the way the second baseman moves to anticipate a ball that never comes, the warm-up pitches of the relief pitcher who's never needed, the crises that never happen--all the active inaction of the game, with its richness of speculation. Some of the most interesting things in baseball or chess never happen except in the mind, where all things are possible.
But to watch baseball on television is to don blinders. The action ends where the camera's field of vision does. The camera does the same choppy thing in symphony concerts, offering either a close-up of a player or a massed blur when it shows the whole orchestra.
Radio is a far superior medium for baseball, especially when its coverage verges on the fictitious. Can you remember Gordon McLendon, the Old Scotchman, and his "re-created" ball games? He broadcast directly from a tickertape and a lively imagination. His accounts were effective, and affective, because the listener's imagination filled in the scene. The same way a reader's fills out a writer's words and intimations.
Ronald Reagan got his start broadcasting ballgames on the radio, and developed into an orator who could make a whole nation see thrilling possibilities. And make them reality. He came by his power to transmit myth into fact early. Sticklers said he wasn't accurate, that he couldn't actually see the game. Others understood that myth can be a truth greater than the facts. Just because Oedipus was a story does not make it less true, or Sophocles some kind of fraud. Baseball, too, can be catharsis.
In the beginning, a baseball game is all potentiality--like an undiscovered continent or a chess game before white opens. After the first pitch, both the forces of change and conservatism are put into motion, and the game is always striving for some new equipoise. The play-by-play reveals that there are no unimportant pitches, that each play shapes the pattern. Which is why the shots of dramatic moments aired on the evening news seem so untimely ripped from context. They might as well broadcast the final chord of a concert without all the unimportant stuff that went before.
It's not the outcome that is baseball. It is also the plays that didn't materialize, the possibilities unrealized, the dangers escaped. Appreciated right, both baseball and history are records of what did not happen, too. Just as one of the joys of knowing a language well is being able to appreciate the meaning of the silences.
Then there are the Added Attractions. Between games of a double-header, fans can still see shows Bill Veeck would have appreciated. One year at Little Rock's Ray Winder Field, I saw a girls' softball team, augmented by Bozo the Clown, take on the home-team bat-boys. Those inclined to take offense at a parody of anything as worthy of reverence as baseball might remember that only something serious can be parodied. Nobody parodies professional wrestling.
For a sport to be parodied, it must be serious. If a time ever comes when Americans no longer razz umpires ("Put your mask back on! You're scarin' the kids!") or cease heckling the ballplayers ("I've seen better swings on a front porch!"), then it'll be time to worry.

Paul Greenberg