After watching the Milwaukee Brewers win the World Series last night, I remembered how my first freelance writing gig after college was writing for the sports section of a local weekly newspaper. It was Little League and high school games I got to write about, not World Series games, although there was that one time I got to cover a polo match at the Myopia Hunt Club and nervously interviewed a famous Argentine polo player, whose name I’ve forgotten, as the clippings are lost.
Now all these years later, I’ve been pondering what Roger Angell wrote about how it might seem foolish to care about baseball and the “haphazardous flight of a distant ball.” The dismissive non-fan fails to consider that baseball helps us with “the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.”
The thing about caring about baseball is that as a fan I have no control over the outcome or that little round ball. Brewers catcher William Contreras wrote last year: “OK — so there is this saying in football (“soccer” here). It goes: The ball is round. And what it means is: The game is unpredictable. … Once the real season starts, once the ball starts bouncing? ANYTHING can happen. … You can’t explain it, can’t predict it, can’t pay for it … you can only go out there and play.”
Contreras was speaking of soccer, but it actually describes a much older concept. Black Elk said “everything tries to be round” because “the Power of the World always works in circles” (p. 121, Black Elk Speaks) a book I read because C. G. Jung referred to it.
As it turns out, up above there was another round ball getting in on the action. During the Full Moon in Taurus earlier this week, the Brewers scored eight runs in one inning during game three of the World Series. A commercial just before that inning referred to last season’s baseball stats and claimed that comebacks and blowouts increase significantly under Full Moons.
I was very invested in the Brewers winning, and was a nervous wreck during the close games, because I knew how much a World Series championship would have meant to my late father. He started following the team shortly after its inception in 1970, and was a fan all during their lean years of no glory when I was not yet paying attention to the Brewers.
In my memory this month, the ball bounced back to when I was in high school and played softball. I was an average player at best, and have no recollection of how many games we won and lost. I only remember the feeling of the coach caring about me, which was a rare feeling during high school. Brewers manager Pat Murphy has spoken often about how he was a bad coach until he realized he needed to love his players, not just discipline them. So it’s love and a feeling of unity—the “power of friendship” that the Brewers are always talking about—that ultimately makes the ball go around.
Jungian analyst Helen Luke observed that, “The enormous popularity of sports is a symptom of the deep yearning in all of us for the spirit of play” and that until our lives are infused with “the joy and laughter of play for its own sake—never for the sake of gain—we are not truly alive at all.” (The Way of Woman).
That spirit of play may be why I find myself sitting here, hurriedly writing this like a sportswriter on deadline, so I can publish it the day after the World Series win, even though there isn’t an editor waiting on it. Play ball.
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In depth,
Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com
