A Case of Perfect Balance: Baseball, Life and Metaphors

On April 2nd at 1:10PM that all consuming sport we call baseball, a sport that transcends life and just about everything else, will be returning. The beloved/hated Yankees and the Rays will walk onto the field at Tropicana Dome. On their backs is the burden and glory of a tradition that now stretches across three distinct centuries and remains largely untouched unlike other "popular" sports beholden to expansion.

 Baseball exudes tradition and sentimentality. The notion of a season opener evokes many memories and nostalgia as players feel the tension of a new beginning. In 1940 the only no hitter opener was thrown by Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians against the White Sox. Every major-league pitcher dreams of an opening day no hitter yet only one has done it. Oh the agony! It is generally accepted wisdom that the path to a World Series ring must involve an 'ace filled' or thoroughly solid pitching staff. All managers will tell you that without an exceptional staff that path is near impossible.

The action of juxtaposing balance in both life and baseball seems appropriate here as opening day looms. It has been a long time since we’ve seen the boys of summer defying Newtons gravity and, to some baseball fanatics, balance returns when a reinvigorated CC Sabathia steps onto the field in April…

If you ask 100 people how we live a balanced life you will get 200 different theories. As Alan Watts tells us we cannot capture life in a bucket as we do water from a river. We must let the water flow…only then can we perhaps begin to “get” life. Einstein, who saw the physical world, and perhaps life,  as pictures in his head, observed that there is a great order and balance in life we barely notice, just as a child enters a massive library, containing books in many languages and senses there is a larger power at play. In a demonstration of humble yet brilliant human striving, Einstein pushed us past scratching the surface. He opened our eyes to a larger balance of competing and complimenting tensions.

 As many have learned, the key to finding balance is as much about what we feel inside ourselves as what we see and feel around us. One of the most breathtaking examples of balance is that lonely war between a pitcher and a batter. A MLB pitching mound is 60 feet 6 inches from home plate. No one is definitively sure why that distance but it created an Einsteinian collision of limits, balance, time, distance and competition. In a twist of fate, as is befitting this ancient sport, the human arm cannot throw a hardball faster than about 105 MPH. The human eye has trouble seeing the stitching of a hardball when it gets thrown faster than 92-93 MPH. When a ball comes at a batter at 98 MPH the human brain has only about 1/25th the perspective and choices as if it was thrown at 92 MPH. Batters compensate with knowledge, instincts and a quick assessment of the pitcher’s delivery and as the honest ones will tell you…luck. Both athletes, it seems, are at the outer limits of their capacity and skill when facing each other at that distance. Balance...   

 Sandy Koufax, of the LA Dodgers, was a great example of that balance. Koufax had the perfect legs, arms, fingers and grit to discover, even fleetingly, perfect balance. Most legendary batters, when up against the lefthander, relied on luck and providence when swinging at supernatural sinkers and rocket fastballs.  Koufax was a natural and deadly catapult for baseballs and mowed down batters at a torrid pace for six years in the 1960s. He even dabbled in the physics and mechanics of his pitching style and passed on his insight for generations after him. Koufax had one fatal flaw in his matrix, he did not pace his pitches. Every time Koufax threw he threw for keeps. By the time he hit 30 years of age his arm was finished. Koufax retired at the very peak of his mastery and re-established balance by insuring his arm would recover before being irreparably damaged by the violence of his devastating pitches. The human arm, it seems, cannot exceed what Koufax made his do. Balance.

Baseball historians still speak of Koufax with reverence and awe and still share stories of such things as when his fastball was launched batters could hear a faint scream as the ball collided with thin air and came blistering at them at about 100 MPH. Derek Jeter, that brilliant and near perfect Yankee, described the sound of a 100 MPH fastball as being a slight whistle or screech, and said the sound was one of “trouble”. As a pitcher sets to throw magic, batters lean back and stare defiantly into the abys ready to launch the ball into the second-row at centre field. A pitcher’s worst nightmare. Balance.  

 So our pursuit of balance will last our entire lives. I’m certain Einstein would have agreed that because things in our life shift constantly so too does balance. As that famous nerd Heraclitus teaches us, the only constant is change. What must give us inspiration is that there are always fresh starts and new beginnings. Baseball offers us opening day, its offers us a new game where the score is 0-0, if offers the balance of everyone on a team getting an equal shot to win the game unlike other sports, it offers us hope that a small kid from Brooklyn who could have played pro basketball shifted to pitching and for several seasons showed us the perfect pitcher.  He was as rare as the Hale-Bopp comet.

 In mid February pitchers and catchers emerged from Ray Kinsella’s ‘mythic’ cornfields and began walking onto diamonds across the American south. The fortunes of life play on such characters as “Moonlight Graham” and all the rest of us.  Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe” was a study in conviction, belief, imagination and finding balance. After the pitchers and catchers began the ritual of spring training they were followed shortly after by their comrades in arms thus fulfilling a tradition that began in the 1800s and on into this perplexing 21st century.   

So on April 2nd, at 1:10PM ET, sit back and watch the Bronx Bombers collide with the always tough Rays of the south. Longoria still dazzles with his unmatched eye for the ball and the laws of gravity, speed and velocity, Sabathia still launches bullets thrown more intelligently as his body begins the slow decline…balance.

So get up and 'Playball'…and all that brings to you.              

Note: The opinions represented here are those of the writer. They in no way represent those of his present and past employers.