Building Community with Baseball

…carrying us to the future

Things look bleak these days. Institutions are a-crumble, Earth itself’s a-rumble, and we, as well, grope and stumble into the dark of night. Yet, if we look closely, we can see rays of a growing dawn casting light on myriad blades of grass arising from the rubble of our collapsing world.

Some of those blades take form in efforts around the globe to build and strengthen local, adaptive, resilient communities. Communities of neighborliness. Communities of compassion. Communities of peace.

I rarely, if ever, read the sports section. A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, however, caught my eye. It was about community-based baseball springing up in Oakland. The minor league Oakland Ballers have come to town to fill the pro baseball void left when the major league Athletics took a gamble on winning bigger bucks in Vegas. This week, 4200 fans came to the baseball field within a city park to cheer and literally mingle with the community-crowdfunded Ballers as they hosted the Ogden Raptors. For the A’s, the Oakland Coliseum could seat a crowd over 10 times as big. One fan commented, “It just feels less contrived…It’s just the sport for the sport.”

Yes. The sport for the sport. Not so much for the money.

I love words. Especially the origin of words, their etymology. “Sport” was a verb before it became a noun. (In one context, it is still a verb, but that’s beside the point here.) From Etymonline, we have this:

sport(v.)

c. 1400, sporten, "take pleasure, enjoy or amuse oneself," from Old French desporter, deporter "to divert, amuse, please, play; to seek amusement," etymologically "carry away" (the mind from serious matters), from des- "away" (see dis-) + porter "to carry," from Latin portare "to carry" (from PIE root *per- (2) "to lead, pass over").

Hence, sports can cast rays of dawn to divert us from the day’s darkness and help carry us away to a brighter future. (All right. Go ahead and groan!)

I also love baseball.

When I was a kid, my Dad, who had played shortstop in high school and college, would play catch with my brother Gary and me in the street. Further, there was no Little League in Studio City in those early days of the newly suburbanizing San Fernando Valley. So, soon after we moved there, Dad took the initiative, got other dads together, and started a team. I enjoyed suiting up and tried my hand at pitching and first base. Nevertheless, even though Dad was the coach, my playing prowess meant that I spent most of my time on the bench. When I aged out of Little League, Dad went into action again and got a Pony League and team going. Once more, I enjoyed getting into uniform, clickety-clacking around in cleated shoes, and, once in a great while, fielding fly balls in the outfield. Once more, though Dad was the coach, I spent most of my time watching from the sidelines while making myself useful as the team’s official scorekeeper.

The Pacific Coast League, an almost-major minor league, was the only source of pro baseball this far out in the Wild West hinterlands (as East Coasters no doubt thought of us in those long ago days). There were two Pacific Coast League teams in Los Angeles – the Hollywood Stars and the Los Angeles Angels, who were of course archrivals. Dad was a Hollywood Stars fan and would often take Gary and me to see a Stars game at Gilmore Field, located just east of L.A.’s Fairfax district and farmer’s market.

To this day, I relive with relish the amalgamated aromas of hot dogs with mustard, cigars swirling smoke, bags of buttered popcorn, pink clouds of cotton candy, and the leathered gloves we’d bring in hopes of snagging a passing pop foul as it flew over the screen on the first base side of home plate. I felt a special thrill one day as I scrambled over rows of seats to just below the radio broadcast booth and watched Mark Scott calling the action for the folks at home. And, oh, the incessant sounds of the game! Especially satisfying was the smack of a successfully swung bat, of ash meeting horsehide, sending the cheering crowd as one to its feet and the ball soaring out of sight into space over the left field fence!

But, as always, we grow up, and things change. In this case, the major league Dodgers came to town, the Hollywood Stars faded into history (i.e., Wikipedia), and we became dedicated Dodgers fans. But neither the vast L.A. Coliseum nor (after the 1962 move) Dodger Stadium could provide the same homey feel as Gilmore Field, where we could get close to the field, walk among the players, and stare at the radio announcers. And, akin to the Stars giving way to the Dodgers, Gilmore Field was razed to make way for a CBS Television City parking lot for the cars of other stars.

And the game itself has changed. At least, the MLB shape of it has. Now more about money than sport, even rules of how a game is played have been modified to suit commercial interests.

Maybe the Ballers can be a baseball blade of grass growing in Oakland’s Raimondi Park.