August 15, 2006

DO NOT ALL CHARMS FLY? DEREK JETER'S TRANSIENT MOMENT

        Horsefeathers expects that when Sharia law arrives, baseball will be banned as a Godless infidel sport. After all, it is profoundly anti-utopian while at the same time quintessentially American in being open to anyone, regardless of social background. Talent rules, but the game will ultimately humble everyone. Paradise is transient. Mighty Casey always strikes out. I remember Joe DiMaggio, not just for his storied achievements, but for his limping, pain ridden body, struggling unsuccessfully to catch up with fly balls he formerly put away with ease and grace; Mickey Mantle unable to catch up with high hard ones, and whiffing; Casey Stengel going from hapless failure to astounding success and back to failure. In fact, failure is the norm, with occasional bursts of success. The law of averages rules and it is 55 years since Ted Williams hit over .400. The greatest successes inevitably foreshadow the next checked swing, and strike three. The game always ends, and today’s victor is tomorrow’s loser. And of course, every individual player faces the end- mortality, the slowed reflexes, the joint pains, the torn muscles, the signs of physical decay that most of their non-athletic peers can ignore or deny.
        Even the greatest moments in baseball are just that- transient moments. They’re over in a flash, a few seconds at most. They live only as memories, and are therefore more like the actual song of the Nightingale, than the Ode to a Nightingale. Sometimes they're not even recorded by those who were witnesses. One such moment, overlooked by local sportswriters, occurred during Monday night’s baseball game at Yankee Stadium between the Angels and the Yankees. It was a desultory, mid-summer game, with the teams tied at 2-2 in the bottom of the 7th. Momentum seemed to be going in the Angels' direction as they fought back from a 2-0 deficit. Derek Jeter, in his MVP season, had put the Yankees ahead with an early home run. Now he came up with a runner on first and no one out. Everyone in the stands anticipated a sacrifice bunt to move the lead runner into scoring position. So too, did the Angels. The third baseman was almost on top of home plate, challenging Jeter and reducing the ground he had available to lay the bunt down. The pitch came in, a fastball in on the hands, impossible not to pop up or foul back, but somehow, Jeter pulled his hands in, jackknifed his body away from the ball, and softly caught the blazing fastball on the barrel of his bat, deadening it. It dropped as if it had become an animate extension of Jeter's hands. He had taken the speed out of the pitch and the ball slowly rolled towards third base, hugging the foul line and dying in fair territory, as the third baseman, initially reacting as if it might roll foul, picked it up and threw—too late. This was the Platonic ideal of the bunt, the most perfect example this observer has witnessed. Soon the go ahead, winning run scored.
        After many years of observing baseball, Horsefeathers agrees with the Sabermetrics view that bunts are a bad bargain; outs are precious, and should not be given away deliberately. We tend to go with the numbers rather than the received, usually wrongheaded wisdom. However, Derek Jeter reminds us of the limits of quantitative analysis. Statistics would have argued against Jeter’s bunt, but creative genius prevailed. You cannot ‘unweave a rainbow’. John Keats has the last word in Lamia.

"…Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air…