Baseball is Stupid and Irrelevant
and that's why it's GREAT
This is another post in my series for Jewish American Heritage month, wherein I, A Jew, write about something American. You can read the first one here (spoiler: it’s about Star Trek).
I’m something of a Quotation Hoarder. I love collecting random, wide-ranging quotes that I can pull out of my hat in any situation. Goes with my “don’t reinvent the wheel” philosophy - if someone already said it, and said it well, just quote it.
A whole subsection of my Quotation Library is baseball quotes. I’m sure other sports have their quotable folks, but maybe because baseball has such a long history, and so much documentation has gone into it, the quotes just have greater staying power. (Or maybe baseball is just such a weird game with such bizarrely niche skills and therefore attracts lots of quotable weirdos. Unclear.)
A sampling of some of my favorite baseball quotes:
“I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big and I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.”
~ Babe Ruth, who would have gotten along great with Giancarlo Stanton
“Somebody’s gotta win and somebody’s gotta lose, and I believe in letting the other guy lose.”
~ Pete Rose, who always bet on the other guy losing
“The secret of my success was clean living and a fast outfield.”
~ Lefty Gomez, a wise pitcher
But I think my favorite quote is one that I never see anyone mention, from a beloved and enigmatic figure in New York Yankee history, Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez.
For those unfamiliar, El Duque is a Cuban-born pitcher who pitched for the Yankees during the late 90s and early 2000s, including multiple World Championship teams. (In a happy coincidence, the Yankees recently honored him with the “Pride of the Yankees” award, but I was planning this post before I knew that was a thing.)
Aside from the story of his evasion of police and defection from Cuba on a fishing boat, very little was known about his life, and in fact his age was a mystery until legal documents turned up after his retirement (a great bonus quote from the Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman: “If he signs with us, he’s 28. If he signs anywhere else, he’s 45”).
With that in mind, the quote that sticks in my memory more than almost any other is this:
“Sometimes the batter gets a hit, sometimes I strike him out. In neither case does anyone die.”
Dang.
That is a quote.
I don’t know if this was just El Duque revealing a somewhat morbid sense of humor, or if this is his serious perspective shaped by his genuinely difficult life experiences where death was a possible outcome. I don’t know.
But I know that it’s true. No matter what happens in any given baseball game, no matter who wins or who loses, who gets a hit or who strikes out — no one dies.
And man, do I need that right now.
With social media constantly bombarding us with endless disasters; carnage; corruption; war; hate crimes; rage; judgment; litmus tests for the purity of your thoughts and intentions; demands that you choose a side on everything from geopolitical conflict to the latest celebrity divorce scandal; insistence that everything you do, everything you say, every choice you make, has dire and irrevocable moral consequences — with all of that bubbling in a seething cauldron of utter misery, we all need something that absolutely doesn’t matter.
Baseball doesn’t matter.
Aaron Judge hitting or slumping isn’t going to save or destroy democracy. Elly de la Cruz stealing a million bases isn’t going to end any wars. Luis Gil breaking El Duque’s Yankee rookie record for strikeouts in a game isn’t going to broker a ceasefire. Harrison Bader making a leaping catch over the outfield wall to rob a home run isn’t going to repair the deep and growing divides in our society. Obsessing over infinite statistics and tracking and comparing bat-speed and exit velocity and spin rate down to the tiniest fraction isn’t going to end anti-semitism, Islamophobia, racism.
Baseball just doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant and stupidly incapable of solving world problems.
But it also isn’t going to kill anyone. It’s just not that important.
In neither case does anyone die.
Baseball is irrelevant, and I think that’s glorious.
Thank you for reading this edition of SM’s Movie Cramming Project, where I, SM, mostly watch movies so that you don’t have to, but occasionally also give the internet a stern talking-to and encourage it to think about what it’s done.
If you’re interested in reading some more Jewish American content, you can check out my novelette “Moon Melody” in Jewish Futures: Science Fiction from the World’s Oldest Diaspora, or my snapshot memoir, Millennial Quarter-Life Crisis: A Mosaic of Thinky Thoughts.