“Baseball,“ my dad often says, “is the perfect game.“
Since Abner Doubleday designed the game in 1839, said my dad, the precise measurements between pitcher and catcher, as well as the distance between the bases, have never been tinkered with. There was no need. Perhaps just as Moses received the Law on God-chiseled stone tablets upon Mount Sinai, Doubleday also received the dimensions of a baseball diamond straight from the finger of God.
The pitcher’s mound on any adult baseball field today is 60 feet and six inches away from home plate— doubtless mirroring baseball diamonds in heaven. Each base around each field is precisely 90 feet apart— Platonic form meeting and transforming the dusty reality.
This must unquestionably be the way, said my dad, because if the pitcher’s mound was only 60 feet from home plate rather than the perfect 60‘6“, no hitter would ever have a chance against the pitcher. If the bases were 89 feet apart instead of 90, so many batters would beat out a ground ball that the defense would struggle to get the three outs needed to get off the field. It’s precisely perfect, down to the inch. Because, as my dad also often says, “Baseball is a game of inches.“
So even though pitchers throw faster fastballs today than in the 1800’s, even though they curve curveballs more sharply, hitters always seem to keep up at the same pace. Even though batters sprint down the line faster as the decades go by, the increasing arm speed of all those shortstops still guns them down. Because, the 60‘6“ is perfect, the 90 feet is perfect, and the game remains as it has always been played, perfect since its origin.
The perfect game.
The problem is, almost none of that is actually true.
The evolution of the rules of baseball, like most human social endeavors, has a complicated history. The oldest surviving rules of baseball we have are the famed Knickerbocker Rules, from 1845. Historians tell us that Doubleday had nothing to do with them. Bases are not 90 feet apart under the Knickerbocker Rules, and the distance between pitcher and home plate goes unmentioned. Balls and strikes didn’t exist, because in 1845 the whole goal was to get the ball in play—pitcher and batter working together rather than locked in an epic struggle.
It’s the Baseball Convention of 1857, convened by 16 professional clubs from New York, that defined and decreed the bases to be 90 feet apart. But apparently the stone tablets from on high were difficult to decipher, because the pitching line—not a mound yet—was set at 45 feet away, not 60 feet, six inches. The pitcher could choose anywhere behind that 12 foot wide pitching line to deliver the ball to the batter.
It took 36 more years of tinkering and development to finally get to 60’6″, and to settle on four balls for a walk, and “three strikes and you’re out.” The narrowing of the pitching line and moving it back were changes to try and stay a step ahead of new developments by innovative pitchers. The game we know today was largely codified by 1893. (And don’t tell my dad, but they’re still tinkering with rules.)
Whew. The beauty, it seems, comes through a process of finessing the rules of the system to achieve balance.
While baseball was the language of my family of origin, our own kids each chose different fields of interest. On this barnstorming tour of four games in four stadiums in four nights, I have been reflecting on my lifelong love of the sport—ruminating while driving back to Philadelphia on I-95 in the dead of night, pondering while swaying back and forth on the rails of the Northeast Regional train, typing while an Airbus A321 flies me home.
And, finding myself firmly in middle age and keenly aware of time slipping through the hourglass, I’ve been inflicting baseball’s history and wonders upon my family before it’s too late, mainly by text. (I wonder how many of them have muted the thread by this point.)
For a game that has manufactured an origin story centering around the perfection of physical dimensions, one strange quirk is that the placement of the fence in the outfield (that extremely important barrier defining when a hit ball becomes a home run) has never been given a rigid, specific distance in the rules. As the American Pastime captured hearts and minds (emptying the pocketbooks of spectators and lining the coffers of professional ball club owners along the way,) bigger and more permanent stadiums were built into the hearts of cities in the first half of the 20th century.
Sometimes, like with Boston’s Fenway Park, squeezing the field into that particular location made quite a short distance from home plate to the fence in left field. Builders compensated by making the fence really high, and “The Green Monster” was born.
Sometimes, like at the Polo Grounds in New York, they pushed the wall back, way back. In the 1930’s and 40’s, center field was as far as 505 feet away. Every outfield was unique and different.
Things changed as the Dodgers and Giants left New York for California in 1958, and baseball expanded the number of cities with teams. The Cookie Cutter era began, as multipurpose stadiums went up in suburbs across the country, where there was plenty of room to build. Outfields became symmetrical—not all the same as each other, to be sure, but with an internal consistency that identically matched the distances in left field and right field, in left center and right center (look for yourself at the dimensions of the stadiums built in the sixties and seventies.) And, horror of all horrors, grass itself was purged from the field, as the drive for no flaws led to the adoption of artificial turf.
The modern vision (a colonizing mentality) could no longer be constrained by existing city boundaries or living things that might grow too tall or dry out and die. Rather, everything was razed to the ground and built with sameness. Having invented a founding vision of dimensional perfection, that origin dogma (disconnected from reality) drove the precisely perfect design of modern stadiums. The natural world could be conquered, variables could be reduced, and a sameness to breed fairness could be created.
Imagining a past where each precise measurement of distance in baseball was and always had been perfect, where every line was equal and straight, the architects of baseball began creating that kind of future, erasing the existing diverse environment to create stadiums that adhered to straight, precise lines.
And in so doing, they created concrete blandness, lifelessness, and indistinct sameness.
When Camden Yards opened in Baltimore in 1992, they brought back an asymmetrical outfield fence. (That phrase is but one of the scintillating texts I placed on the family thread.) Rather than take a wrecking ball to the large, abandoned warehouse at the location, the architects designed around it. Fed up with carbon copy concrete monstrosities, boldly rejecting the (false) origin myth of perfection, they embraced quirks and uniqueness to create a ballpark experience that could only be found in Baltimore.
The street in front of the warehouse was vacated, becoming an avenue for spectators to grab a meal, buy a souvenir, and hang out with their friends, on a terrace built into the right field wall, with a great view of the game. Rather than surround and incase in concrete, rather than remove the game from the world outside, in a throwback to the downtown parks from the early 1900’s Camden Yards was open to the life of the city. Indeed, it brought life back to the city.
Left field (where most right handlers hit the ball) is 384 feet from home plate. Right field, however, is only 318 feet away, with the terrace and the warehouse behind it. There’s even a funky notch in left center, where the wall pushes out to 398 feet, then comes in to 376 feet, before angling back out to 410 feet in straightaway center. Right center doesn’t have that notch, with instead a smooth progression to the deepest part of the ballpark.
People loved it, in all its quirky and notch-filled asymmetry. Camden Yards changed the building of baseball stadiums from that point forward.
At this Baltimore ballpark, there’s a big advantage if you’re a left handed hitter, because the place you usually hit the ball is the shortest distance to a home run. With unique and quirky fields, teams can draft and trade and build a roster with pitchers and hitters that take advantage of their uniquely particular stadium.
“Whoa!” “That’s completely bizarre,” came the texts from my family. “Doesn’t seem fair.”
So then I had to tell them about Willie Mays at the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series.
Two runners were on base in the eighth inning of Game One. Cleveland’s Vic Wertz stepped up to the plate, and absolutely crushed the ball deep into center field. Center field is where the strange outfield at the Polo Grounds was the strangest, with the fence sitting 483 feet away from home plate in the 1950’s.
Center field is also where Willie Mays, “the greatest all-around player of all time” and my dad’s all-time favorite, roamed. When Wertz launched that baseball, Mays immediately turned his back to the plate and sprinted toward the wall. Somehow, as grainy black and white footage attests, he caught the ball over his shoulder, spun around, threw the ball back toward the infield to keep the runners from advancing, and fell to the ground from his own momentum.
In any other stadium, Wertz’ estimated 440 foot blast is a three run home run, and he is the hero of Game One. Instead, the home team Giants get the out and prevent the runs because of Willie “Say Hey” Mays’ astonishing catch.
The story doesn’t end there.
Remember the short field on the left and right field lines at the Polo Grounds? Two innings later, Dusty Rhodes enters the game for the Giants and weakly hits a pop fly down the right field line—where it somehow barely squeaks over the wall, only 258 feet away. A ball hit barely half as far as Wertz’ epic blast wins the game for the Giants.
Cleveland pitcher Bob Lemon throws his glove in frustration, causing Rhodes to quip after the game: “Lemon’s glove went further than my home run.”
Quirky asymmetry may be interesting, and beautiful; it may be more reflective of the environment and the community, and more open to it; but it is not always predictable and fair.
If baseball is perfect, it is not in its precise measurements, but in its balance.
If baseball is beautiful, it is not in its replicable sameness, but in its idiosyncratic differences which reflect (rather than flatten) the local environment it finds itself in.
In a lesson this hyper-responsible, achievement-oriented firstborn is still learning, precise perfection and predictable sameness are not attainable goals for a thriving human life. Baseball was, looking back, an excellent and relentless teacher of this truth, notwithstanding the myth of the perfect distances. In what other sport or activity do the best participants fail seven out of ten times? I should have learned the lesson long ago.
I would practice by literally fielding thousands of balls. Yet no two ever bounced precisely the same, and no amount of practice could stop a small pebble from deflecting a ball out of reach when the game was on the line. Baseball is just quirky and unpredictable, like life.
As a third baseman, I learned my teammates’ unique ways over time, and it subtly altered my own behavior as we developed a workable balance. I knew each of our pitcher’s tendencies for pitch choice when there were two strikes, and set my place on the field accordingly by moving left or right, forward or back. With a ball hit to the outfield, I knew as the relay man which outfielders needed me to go further out to meet them, and which could throw further, and I put myself in the right spot for us to be most efficient together. I was always moving, anticipating the spots to be on the field just in case a ball got past one of my teammates.
The right place for me was not prescribed by a rigid measurement, but by how we flexibly partnered together to make things better for the whole team.
I want to look at history, with baseball as an overlay, because I think the contours match up extremely well.
No, that’s not quite right.
Baseball itself, with the development of its untruthful perfection origin story and the changes in stadium design that I’ve outlined, is both shaped by AND a helpful analogy to unlock some of the changes and flaws in our American mindset over the 20th century.
The 1800’s in the Western World, and particularly in America, were defined by a relentless optimism that the natural world could be corralled and controlled through science and industry in order to create a utopian existence. The Industrial Revolution, steel, the steam engine, and so much more were ushering in humanity’s victory over nature, symbolically demonstrated with the golden spike driven into the ground to complete the transcontinental railroad and shrink the vast American continent down to human size.
The advances of science in a land of (seemingly) boundless resources meant the achievement of this utopia was only a matter of time, so the myth said. Productivity increased, wealth increased, and this rising tide was raising all boats—or at least all the boats of the ones writing the myth.
The first half of the 20th century, for baseball and for America, brought about the creation of the same myth of a perfect origin. Baseball’s ascendancy to become the national pastime, and America’s rise to become a world power through World War I and II, were explained as inevitable—they occurred because their origins were so right and precise. For America, it wasn’t Abner Doubleday and 60’6″ and 90′; rather, it was the Founding Fathers and their mountaintop experience of creating (or receiving from on high?) the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
This pattern of myth-making, of creating a perfect origin story, can be seen in other ways. One branch of Christianity takes the exact same path, and a doctrine of the origin of the Bible develops in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which had never been there before. Church leaders find themselves influential in society. Hopeful of creating God’s Kingdom on earth, seeing their own ascendancy and believing it must be because the origins of the Bible perfectly reflect the precise and strict perfection of the Triune God, the doctrine of inerrancy is born.
No longer is the phrase found in 2 Timothy 3:16 enough: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” Now, the Bible must be seen as perfect and without error in anything it speaks about, because the origin myth of perfection captures a part of Christian theology as well.
For most of the world, the Progressive Era optimism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is shattered and destroyed by Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Science has most definitely not ushered in utopia, but rather the horror and evil of humanity gains ultimate expression as technology births unprecedented death and destruction in our world. For most of the globe, eyes wide open to what humanity has made of the world, post World War II brings an end to the idea of inevitable positive progress.
But postwar White America chooses to shut our eyes and hold on tightly to the American Dream. We are, after all, the ones with the perfect origin story, the greatest country in the history of the world.
Whether we look at cookie cutter baseball stadiums, or subdivisions and strip malls in American suburbia, or Billy Graham Crusades and the building of America’s megachurches, postwar White America shows again and again that it will flatten hills, destroy uniqueness, and conquer the landscape with predictable sameness. It will try to remove difference and life in the name of fairness.
It is a choice to make our country’s defining metaphor a “melting pot,” rather than “tossed green salad.”
It is a choice to hold tightly to preserving a perfect origin myth by bulldozing anyone in our path and building with a rigid, symmetrical perfection that is blind to the existing environment or to our affect upon it.
Baseball had Camden Yards to break the myth and foster a return to asymmetrical beauty that is reflective of the environment in which it lives.
Yet White America continues to double down on “the original intent of the framers of the Constitution,” the removal of affirmative action, and the watering down of hard-won voting rights.
Evangelical Christianity continues to build rather than dismantle its myth of a rigidly perfect origin. Evangelicals are leading the erasure of anything they describe as different or other—unable to recognize that their vision of “Faithful Americans” is not generic or universal, but so reflective of one specific expression of White religion, which they try to impose on everyone else.
In ever increasing ways, I am drawn to look for, celebrate, and draw attention to the beauty and power of diversity and community. My epiphanies on my journey through baseball stadiums are once again pushing me to figure out how to embrace different ways and different peoples than my own—to open my eyes, to learn from each other and work alongside each other to create a better outcome for us all.
I need you, many of you, an ever-increasing and diverse bunch of you, to teach me and shape where I stand and how I live, so that we together can share a well-lived life. It’s a partnership, a dance, a sort of flexible balance—just like learning the tendencies of my baseball teammates, and adjusting my position accordingly.
I want to recognize how we are harming rather than partnering with the environment around us. I want to push back against a false origin of perfection based on rigidness, and find organic connectedness with people and planet.
If a life is to be well-lived, it will not be in its rigid preciseness, but in its flexible, relational, organic balance.
If a life well-lived is to be beautiful, it will not be in its replicable sameness, but in our embrace of and growth from our unique differences, which will reflect and amplify (rather than flatten) the local environment we find ourselves in.