Deirdre Moore | April 2013

The Art of Baseball

Although it feels un-American to admit it, I am not a baseball fan.

In fact, I was not even aware that it was opening day for the Padres in San Diego yesterday until I heard an interesting radio program about the theater of baseball announcing.  Even though I may not be a fan of baseball, I bet there are many students out there who are.  By taking a look at the theater of baseball we educators just might make baseball more accessible to the literature and arts lovers in our classrooms and help some sports fans find a new way to connect to the arts.

I had never before considered or appreciated the skill and artistry involved in calling a baseball game for fans who, for whatever reason in our highly visual and connected world, only have access to an audio presentation of a game.  Listening to the radio program as I drove along in my car (there’s one reason someone might be listening to a baseball game rather than watching!) my interest was piqued by the description of radio announcing of a baseball game given by Lee “Hacksaw” Hamilton, a co-cohost of a radio program in San Diego.

Baseball is theater on radio.  You paint a color, you draw a picture, you get the analysis…. It’s a 3 hour and fifteen minute painting, that’s how long the games are, it’s 3 hours and 15 minutes to write an essay, to tell a story, to add color to the painting.  There’s so many things that you can weave into the fabric of the broadcast that makes it so vibrant…. Because it’s a canvas that covers 3 hours and 15 minutes, I just think it’s a spectacular place to tell stories and paint pictures.

So there it is; baseball is theater, literature, painting, weaving and storytelling all wrapped up in one.  As I listened to a replay of Russ Hodges calling the National League Pennant game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951, the change in tempo and pitch of his voice as the pace and level of excitement changed in the ballgame became a musical experience for me – one I could imagine dancers interpreting through movement.  I see the impact of the repetition of the words translating into repeated movements, the rise and fall of his voice into level changes, the jubilation in his voice a bouncy, free movement energy.

The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant, and they’re goin’ crazy, they’re goin’ crazy, wa-hoo! I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it, Bobby Thompson hit a line drive into the lower decks of the left-field stands and the place is goin’ crazy … The Giants won it by a score of 5 to 4 and they’re pickin’ Bobby Thompson up and carrying him off the field.

Intrigued, when I arrived home, I found a website that archives audio footage and actually sat and listened to over 10 minutes of a baseball game that happened on September 9, 1965.  I was completely drawn into the literary description of the human drama in Vin Scully’s call of the 9th inning of pitcher Sandy Koufax’s perfect game (which means no batters made it to base for those of you out there as ignorant as I!).

…and you can almost taste the pressure now….  There’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies…. and it begins to get tough to be a teammate and sit in the dugout and have to watch…. all the boys in the bullpen straining to get a better look as they look through the wire fence in left field…. A lot of people in the ballpark now are starting to see the pitches with their hearts…. I would think that the mound at Dodger’s stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world.

Doesn’t that make you want to watch a baseball game?  Or hear one called on the radio?  That’s just a little evidence that art can be found anywhere and connections between such seemingly disparate topics as baseball and art are there for the making.  That’s our challenge as educators – to help our students find an access point into learning about the world around them, to help them make connections, and to make them curious to know more.  And we might find more ways to connect to the world around us in the process!