“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, blossoms in the summer, and fades away in October.”

— Bart Giamatti,

“The Green Fields of the Mind” (1977)

Baseball has always been my favorite sport, though I sometimes have trouble explaining why. It goes back to childhood–to summers spent with a scuffed Rawlings glove and a sandlot brewing by late morning. I played more baseball than anything else as a kid. And I felt better equipped for baseball than for football or basketball. In the ’60s and ’70s, players on the field looked like ordinary American men, not sculpted out of marble or looming like redwoods. Baseball, at least then, felt accessible–something a wiry kid with quick hands and decent instincts could aspire to.

I followed the game fanatically from the time I was 6 years old–the glory years of the Koufax-Drysdale Dodgers–and kept that devotion burning well into the early 1990s. I can still rattle off the starting lineups of most teams between 1967 and 1978 as if they were the cast of some beloved vanished play. In the ’70s, I even played a season of what might generously be called professional baseball in Brazil, a half-forgotten adventure that lives on in fading box scores and warm memories. (I somehow lost my old jersey, a garish yellow-and-black double-knit, a few years ago. I probably donated it to charity in one of my periodic purges.)

There’s a minor-league ballpark not far from my house–Dickey-Stephens Park in North Little Rock, Ark., named in part for Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey and his younger brother Skeeter, who had a brief stint in the majors with the Chicago White Sox before settling into a journeyman’s life in the minors. It’s a modest stadium, tucked into the fabric of the Argenta neighborhood like it’s always been there. We take the dogs once or twice a year, sitting up on the berm where they can sprawl and sniff the breeze while we half-watch the game. It’s enough that when we walk them past the park on game nights, they pull at their leashes, ears alert, tails wagging. They recognize the sound of baseball–the hum of the crowd, the crack of a bat–as something joyful, something known.

Baseball rewards that kind of recognition. I think about an old Shirley Povich column where he recounted, pitch by pitch, how every player on the field–not just the pitcher and catcher, but all nine men–adjusts, prepares, reacts. The outfielders creep a few steps in. The shortstop leans toward second. The first baseman repositions for the bunt. On every single pitch, the whole field trembles with possibility. It’s not that nothing’s happening; it’s that you have to know how to look.

That lesson stays with me. Baseball, when you’re really watching, isn’t slow. It’s patient. It’s expectant. Every pitch carries a million tiny movements, a hundred invisible bets being made–this way, that way, just in case. You learn to live inside those pauses, to wait without fidgeting, to see without demanding.

Watching baseball, really watching it, feels closer to Zen meditation than to anything else in modern life. You let go of expecting. You let go of rushing. You stay present. You breathe. You pay attention to what seems like nothing until you realize it’s everything. You understand that a whole world can turn on a hanging curve ball or a lazy pickoff throw–or maybe it won’t turn at all, and that’s fine too.

Sometimes I probably bore my wife by over-explaining the finer points of the game, but I only do it because she asks–because she’s curious, and because she knows I like explaining it. Her memories of baseball go back to winning tickets to Cleveland Indians games for academic performance as a grade schooler, and sitting in the stands with her father on warm Ohio nights. Those lessons become part of the evening too–our own quiet game within the game, a shared way of noticing how much life fits inside what looks, at first glance, like nothing much at all.

When I was young, I devoured the books of John R. Tunis–stories of schoolboy heroes and sandlot dreamers, boys who fought uphill battles more often than they achieved glory. Tunis almost never wrote about winners. His heroes lost, and struggled, and learned something about dignity in the process. Baseball, in his telling, wasn’t just a sport; it was a long, often solitary walk toward becoming a better version of yourself. That mythology clings to the game even now, like dust on an old infield.

Greil Marcus once wrote about American music as a kind of “Old, Weird America,” a landscape haunted by stories half-told and songs half-remembered. I think baseball belongs to that same Old, Weird America–the country that exists somewhere just beyond the outfield fence, where time stretches and doubles back on itself and ordinary people become something more by standing still and paying attention. It’s an antique game at heart–an ancient clock still keeping time not by seconds, but by innings, by outs, by the quiet thrum of expectancy that lives inside every slow heartbeat of the field.

Maybe that’s why I love it. Maybe that’s why my dogs, without knowing the score, sense the magic. Maybe that’s why a summer evening at the ballpark–beer in hand, dogs at your feet, sun slipping low–feels like more than just a night out. It feels like practicing something essential. Like remembering how to be alive in the slow, stubborn, joyful way that baseball has always known.

Maybe, too, it’s a small tribute to my father, and the game we shared without needing to say much. Years ago, I titled my first collection of essays “The Shortstop’s Son,” a quiet acknowledgment of where I came from–and the endless, echoing fields that shaped us both.

–––––v––––––

Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com.