Baseball in spring a metaphor for life

In the midst of chaos and change — and we’re going through a lot of that these days — people tend to seek comfort in favorite foods, favorite movies, favorite haunts. The appetite for risk and novelty shrinks and the routine becomes a bit more precious. Instinctively, we welcome the ordinary in life, just as we would seek out a familiar face in a crowd full of strangers.

Maybe it’s because, in anxious times, the predictable and mundane reassure us that change too will be passing, that even in an era of transition some things will be eternal. Permanent things, things and people we can count on, keep us oriented in our confusion, like fixed objects on an otherwise kaleidoscopic landscape.

JAY BOOKMAN
MY OPINION

• E-mail Bookman

Recent columns:
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

For example, there’s the opening day of baseball season. Here it comes, right on schedule, just as it has for a long, long time, and just as it will for a long time yet to come.

As a boy, my landmarks of spring weren’t blooming daffodils or singing songbirds. It was baseball practice at the little park by the creek, where the last thin ice of winter still clung to the banks. It was the first crack of cold wood against thrown ball, and it would send a shock up your hands and through your entire nervous system.

You’d shake your arms, laugh at being alive, and pick up the bat again, eager for another swing.

Spring also meant skipping school and taking the bus downtown with friends for the first big-league game of the season. It meant Mom, who would ordinarily throttle you if she found out you had ducked class, quietly slipping you 10 bucks to cover the bleacher ticket and bus fare, then giving you a smile to send you on your way.

As it was back then, so it no doubt still is, only for somebody else. Today, when ballparks across America open their doors, it’ll be my time to be the adult stuck at work, and it’ll be another boy’s turn to walk through that dark tunnel out into the sunlight, with that symmetry of green spread out before him. It will be the same game I saw, only played and watched by different people. As a poet once said, spring makes everything young again except man.

Here in the adult world, the signs of a thaw and a much-desired spring will take a different form when it comes. As in baseball, numbers and statistics are watched carefully, but in this arena it’s the Dow Jones average, not Chipper Jones’ average, that draws the attention. It’s a world in which success is measured in profits and losses, not wins and losses, although there’s less difference between sport and life than we might at first think. What happens inside the confines of a ballpark is an abstracted, ritualized metaphor for the struggle that occurs outside those grounds, which is part of sports’ attraction.

But here too, the game hasn’t changed as much as we might think. It is still the same as it ever was; it’s just being played by different people. This is our turn on the field, our time at bat under tough circumstances.

Anxious as things might seem, this is not the Great Depression or World War II, although those without jobs or homes might beg to differ, and for good reason.

But all of us know now what the best history books could never tell us, how it feels to be swept up in historic, confusing, overpowering change.

I imagine that even the people supposedly in charge, in the White House, in Congress and on Wall Street, have no more sense of control over events than the rest of us do. They’re doing what we’re doing: You play the game, take your best swings, survive the rough innings and hope to get your people home safe.

After a long slump, the Dow has stabilized, as have other economic numbers. Opinion polls report an uptick of confidence and hope. To be honest, though, I don’t trust it — it feels a bit like a false spring, as if it can’t be quite this easy and the worst is yet to come.

Then again, I’m a Red Sox fan. They’ve won the World Series twice in recent years, but I’m trained by life to expect that ball to roll through Billy Buckner’s legs every time. So what do I know?