The greatest baseball player of all time, Willie Mays, turned 90 today, and that got me thinking– about many disparate things, as it turned out, each occupying its own separate orbit. That often happens with this sport, above others: following baseball’s thread through my life (with a late start at age 9, when we immigrated to San Francisco from Singapore in 1965), I am surprised by the number of key memories connected to it.
In 1965, remember, Willie Mays had been playing in SF for seven years, since the Giants moved from New York in 1958. Maybe this is only an urban legend, but it is said that Mays wanted to buy a home in Orinda, the East Bay town where my family eventually settled, but he was prevented from doing so– by whom, exactly, is unclear. Suffice it to say that on the original 1948 deed to our current Orinda home, sale of the house to people of “Negroid or Mongoloid” origins was strictly prohibited (Say Hey– that’s us)! By the time our Chinese family arrived here, Willie Mays was already well-ensconced as a Bay Area hero, so I assume his exclusion from Orinda took place some years earlier.
Like the TV screen on which we watched him play, it was a black-and-white world. But the game of baseball seemed to offer some respite from the overt and systemic racism of that time, ever since Jackie Robinson first broke the ice. Great baseball players of many ethnic origins abounded, and amid the embarrassment of riches on both sides of the bay, I naturally gravitated to my home team, then and now: the Oakland Athletics.
Even when I left for college– or perhaps especially when far away from home– I loyally followed my World Series champion A’s. In a weird twist, at the same time quite a number of them (Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson et al) followed me to the East Coast. But the home team never let me down; years later, living in Oakland, our two kids grew up with A’s games, bobbleheads and Fan Fest autographs. Their love of the game inspired me later to coach for my son’s Little League team.
Backing up to the late 1970’s: When I graduated college and moved a few blocks over to the medical school at Yale, a distinguished professor of Renaissance literature at the time, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was chosen as the next President of Yale University. When interviewed by Time Magazine, he acknowledged that it was a great honor indeed, but to be honest, he would rather be the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
In 1988, Bart Giamatti got his wish (tragically, he died the following year of a heart attack). His love of baseball and the Red Sox comprised two of Giamatti’s great passions well before he became Baseball Commissioner, and he wrote about the game as only a professor of literature could. From two essays in his book A Great and Glorious Game:
“Baseball is quintessentially American in the way it tells us that much as you travel and far as you go, out to the green frontier, the purpose is to get home, back to where the others are, the pioneer ever striving to come back to the common place. A nation of migrants always, for all their wandering, remember what every immigrant never forgets: that you may leave home but if you forget where home is, you are truly lost and without hope.”
And “the hunger for home makes the green geometry of the baseball field more than simply a metaphor for the American experience and character; the baseball field and the game that sanctifies boundaries, rules, and law and engages cunning, theft, and guile; that exalts energy, opportunism, and execution while paying lip service to management, strategy and long-range planning, is closer to an embodiment of American life than to the mere sporting image of it.”
Baseball even reaches into my writing. At a reading of the science-fiction novel Fourth World for a 6th-grade class, one of the kids asked me why I had colonists on Mars playing baseball. My anti-hero protagonist, Benn Marr, may be a star shortstop for the Hydra Giants, but in the bigger picture of his life’s journey, he is ultimately struggling to return home. Will his homecoming be that of Ulysses in the Odyssey, or the Prodigal Son in the Bible?
More importantly, would Benn Marr be allowed to buy a home in Orinda? Maybe not, but I do hope Willie Mays tries again– Happy 90th birthday, and thanks for everything great you’ve brought into our lives!
In this excerpt from the second novel in the trilogy, Fourth World Nation, Benn Marr has just exploded his bat connecting with a slider for a one-out, opposite-field double off the top of the wall:
“Helmut, after staring long and hard at Benn, faced the next batter, who happened to be the Giants pitcher, Hank. Pitching again from the stretch, Helmut blew a fastball right past him. “Hmm, a bit of anger in that pitch,” remarked some of the programs lying in foul territory, well within earshot. On the next pitch, another fastball down the middle, Hank laid a bunt down the third base line. Helmut’s follow-through naturally carried him in that direction, but Benn was already standing at third, hands on hips, so Helmut’s only play was to first. How had he reached third base so quickly? Helmut yelled an expletive before throwing out Hank, whose running speed was well below average.
“Two outs,” announced the loud metallic voice. Someone shouted, “Everybody up!” The fans grew taller, noisier, and also uglier, as they rose to their feet.
“With Helmut glowering at him, Benn suddenly realized that he had been in this same scene before. Yes! He had dreamt it, lying inside a bioscanner, attached by cranial leads to the CIA’s psychometric computer. The positronic psychoanalyst had fed him scenarios, then analyzed his actions within the dream. As Helmut turned away, Benn took four quick steps and leaned toward home plate. He remembered the formidable pitcher in his dream daring him further- come on, lean just a little bit more! The next Giants batter was up: first baseman Steff, a six-foot-six, left-handed power hitter with the arms and strikeout rate of an orangutan. The team called him Swingin’ Steff, as he swung as hard as he could at every pitch with little regard for its location. He would most likely make the third out. Then, if the Cadets could score—not difficult, against poor Hank, who appeared exhausted after eight innings—the Giants would lose the game. Helmut threw a changeup, and Steff took such a mighty swing that he lost a shoe: strike one. Benn looked away and rolled his eyes.
“The next pitch, a sinker low and inside, barely avoided hitting the batter’s front leg—but he took another huge uppercut swing for strike two. It was only by the sheerest margin that Helmut’s heavily-sinking fastball and Swingin’ Steff’s powerful bat, barreling past one another just centimeters above the plate, both missed crushing Benn’s skull as he came sliding home head-first in a shower of red clay. Just as in his dream, Benn had timed his arrival to the micro-second. The entire park, spectators and players alike, fell dead silent, and the home plate umpire—despite its advanced quasi-human intelligence—completely forgot to call the second strike.”
To that 6th-grader who asked me why there is baseball on a place like Mars, my answer is that life’s challenges– and the principles of baseball– have a universal quality, and sometimes, when things are looking bleak and hopeless, you just have to take it upon yourself to steal home.
Fourth World 