All you have to do is succeed utterly
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
—Bart Giamatti
When I think about it consciously, I try not to get too sentimental about baseball. I like baseball, and I think it’s fun, and it brings a lot of joy to my life (both from cheering for the Yankees, and passionately loathing the teams I hate, which is pretty much every team that isn’t the Yankees). At the end of the day, though, baseball is just a game, and its consequences for our daily lives really are minimal.
And yet we all know what I just wrote is bullshit when the rubber hits the road. Baseball fans can’t help but get sentimental about the game. It draws us in, it incites us to irrational devotion, and, as former commissioner Bart Giamatti says above, it always breaks our hearts.
That heartbreak takes different forms, and I hope you’ll indulge a Yankees fan mustering the audacity to describe his personal experience. There’s heartbreak caused by moments, like watching an improbable Luis Gonzalez bloop touch the grass in 2001. There’s heartbreak caused by a series of moments, like watching the Yankees blow a three-game lead in the ALCS against the hated Red Socks in 2004. There’s heartbreak that only manifests itself in retrospect, like looking back on the career of a Yankee great like Don Mattingly and shaking your head at his conspicuous lack of a World Series title.
If you’re like me, you’re feeling something entirely different, and maybe entirely unfamiliar, today, as you forget all your impotent rage over Armando Galarraga’s almost but not quite perfect game, and it starts to sink in that Ken Griffey, Jr., just retired.
You can go elsewhere to read about the Kid’s signature smile or signature stroke, which turned “the sweetest swing in baseball” from a banal observation to a Homeric epitaph. Nor will I spend much time addressing Griffey’s pundit-bestowed role as a beacon of goodness and fair play in an era tainted by the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs. Nor will I lament what could have been, had Griffey not spend so many games during the prime of his career on the disabled list. His career is what it is: excellent, irregardless of our dashed hopes and expectations. Instead, I’ll just tell you why the day that Ken Griffey, Jr., retired, even though we all knew it would come at some point, was so sad: because when I came to love the game of baseball, he was there.
Like a lot of young boys, my dad taught me how to throw and catch, and I spent my summer weekends on a Little League field. But my archetypal, Sandlot-esque pastoral experiences with the game happened in the Lincoln School parking lot in Cranford, New Jersey, playing with tennis balls and metal bats with my brother and cousins. Everybody got to pick the player they wanted to be. I was a second baseman when I played organized ball, so I would be Ryne Sandberg. My cousin Chris called Mike Piazza, and his brother Matt called Frank Thomas. And my older brother, who always let me tag along when he and his friends would play wiffle ball in front of the warehouse across the street, or hit cherry pits over the fence in his buddy’s yard around the corner, and who I looked up to since I was first able to look up, would be Ken Griffey, Jr. Every time.
Sandberg is gone. Piazza is gone. Thomas is gone. And now Griffey, the greatest of them all, the guy that history will redeem as the best player of a generation, is gone. It’s enough to break your heart.
This is the way the game was played in our youth, and in our fathers’ youth, and even back then—back in the country days—there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped. Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.
—Roger Angell
Tags: Ken Griffey Jr., sands of time yada yada yada, the halcyon days of youth
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