A guest post by Mary Rand
I am a baseball player. Not one of any great skill, not a student, not a professional, paraprofessional, just a lover, an amateur. I play sandlot.
Mary Rand
The leading theory for the beginning of eukaryotic life – that is, complex, leafy, fungal, animal, human life, is that many millions of years ago one prokaryote (that is, a cell lacking a brain) ate another, an ancestor of the energy producing powerhouses we know as chloroplasts and mitochondria. With that life-within-life inside it, this voracious prokaryote grew and reproduced and evolved into organelles and tissues and organs and structures and sense and intelligence. Its many children found themselves across the world with an appetite and not a lot to do. These cells were innately permeable, excreting and absorbing fundamental parts of their being into the primordial soup constantly. Where one unit ended and another began changed by the day. And so these cells of cells both fundamentally blurred the line between what we can consider discrete beings and, in a more tangential sense, invented the game of baseball.
Really, it did, if you skip a few billion steps. But let us zoom in a little.
I am a baseball player. Not one of any great skill, not a student, not a professional, paraprofessional, just a lover, an amateur. I play sandlot. I don’t play for glory; we keep no stats. Sandlot is human, soulful stuff. If the game is a complex organism, then I am a mitochondria within the cell of it. Found on the street, showing up when called, I give the bigger thing energy, throwing the ball and swinging the bat. Few on our team have a fixed position, we range wildly in height and age and skill. We all have spotty attendance, secondhand equipment, and hit waterlogged, browning baseballs.
In my summer with the Albany Riverfront Rangers, we did hold real games, but when they started, it was rarely on time; when they were played, there was rarely a well-kept score, and few of us ever really knew the inning. We were a team, but the number of walk-on additions could outnumber the official jerseys, and when games ended, it was less about victory or twenty seven outs and more to escape from oncoming darkness or for lack of players.
There is joy in it, the baseball of spare parts. What does it matter if we borrow half of the other team’s roster to fill out our own, if we put a twelve year old in right to stop the ball, if we give the team lagging behind an extra three outs, if we have balls and strikes by democratic agreement instead of umpires? In the doing, we had found the way to pull the tenuous thread holding the structure of the game in place and in doing so loosen it and unravel it across an entire summer.
Gone was the need for definition, and with it expectation. It was baseball as cellular life in the days of the hydrothermal vent, just warmth and the unending exchange of baseballs as elements. Absent season standings and playoff pushes, practice becomes less about suffering and more about adoration, singing the song of the body, communion with the self on one’s own terms. Or, in less lofty language: you can drink a beer on the mound, lay out in the outfield, smoke behind the plate, who gives a shit.
On any given day for five months I had the possibility to end my night on our half grown-in field out back behind a high school, scooping up ground balls for throws to first, slapping softly lobbed tosses back out into the infield, or chasing down fly balls in left, center, or right. In these anarchic, boundless practices we traded positions at ease, organized drills for the hell of them, and – at least for myself – practiced less for the intensive development of skills (for we had no coach, and a spectrum of baseball experience) but for the want of motion, and the in-bult desire to separate cell from cell, ball from glove to hand to bat to glove to hand to glove and back again. Ball to third, throw to first. Ball to short, throw to first. Ball to second, throw to first. Ball to first, throw to third. And repeat. There are few things prettier than a good, solid crack and the sight of an easy, lazy swing on a soft tossed ball; tracing with the eye the arc up and up and out into a redding June sky.
Sandlot teaches you that nothing is altogether set in stone. It teaches you that anything is changeable, improvable.
Mary Rand
Into how many parts can a game be divided until it no longer is coherent? How many endless, inningless scrimmages with mid-game roster swaps, incoherent batting orders, two outfielders-and-no-catcher defenses, buckets of balls on the mound and no plans until sunset can there be until what we are doing is no longer baseball? I have to imagine there are some without the stomach for it, with stronger legs and quicker eyes and higher hopes of victory. And I wish them well. But I think of the ancestors of the sport, their gloveless games of uneven basepaths and poorly stitched leather hide balls and I wonder if we were ever meant to care about standardization, or about speed. Life certainly does not. It moves on without you. The muscles we use to throw and hit were born from a crossed boundary, a dilution of what it meant for one cell to be separate from another, a synthesis enabling something greater.
Sandlot teaches you that nothing is altogether set in stone. It teaches you that anything is changeable, improvable. And it makes you want to use your body for all that is good for. I’ve made all my best hits and done all my best plays in the most meaningless of situations, on the freest and breeziest of forgettable days. It doesn’t count for anything, but I don’t care. I remember. My body moved, my muscles pulled and contracted, my feet felt plugged into the earth that made me. With music in my ears, I biked home that summer exhilarated and bursting with love. No matter how sore my legs were, no matter if I had work in the morning and chores to do. I felt alive, more than I ever had before. Physically, grandly alive. Baseball might be a religion, or but it isn’t one with a promised land. Pray and swing a hundred times and you may whiff every one. All we are given is our hands and the cells in them, dying, dividing, burning energy, and so little time to use them.
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