Soon, as announcers like to say, he was down to his last strike, and then he hit a 98-mph fastball hard to right field. And the beauty of it was that in the instant after the ball was hit, it had a chance to be anything. He had obviously hit it well — the ball cracked off the bat — but there was no telling how well. It had a chance to be a home run. It had a chance to be an out. I have written before that there is nothing in sports like the successful Hail Mary pass in football, and the main reason I think that is that no two Hail Mary passes are alike. Sometimes they deflect from one receiver to another. Sometimes they bounce off the defenders’ hands and back to a waiting receiver. Sometimes the pass just drops into a pile and sticks in a receiver’s hands. Really, there are countless geometrical possibilities. Baseball doesn’t usually have that kind of geometry. Home runs are home runs. Singles are singles. Pop-outs are pop-outs.
But Freese’s fly was something like a Hail Mary, there was just no telling how it would end while the ball was in the air. Cruz went back on it with the cautious nature of an outfielder who is about to make a catch. This is the thing that baseball people have told me and I have told countless people — watch the outfielder. They will usually tell you the story. Cruz seemed ready to catch the ball. But this time Cruz’s apparent calm was an illusion — he had misread the wall. He thought he was a lot closer to it. I have seen the replay a dozen times now, and it seems to me that he could have caught that ball, should have caught that ball, that the wall and the moment conquered him. He leaped for the ball, but awkwardly and meagerly, like someone descending stairs in the dark who doesn’t realize that there is one more step. The ball crashed off the wall, bounced by him, and the Cardinals scored two runs to tie the game and the St. Louis crowd transformed into a jet engine.
Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That’s what you get most of the time. You stand in driver’s license lines, and watch Alfredo Aceves shake off signals, and sit through your children’s swim meets, and see bases-loaded rallies die, and fill up your car’s tires with air, and endure an inning with three pitching changes, a sacrifice bunt and an intentional walk.
But then, every now and again, something happens. Something memorable. Something magnificent. Something staggering. Your child wins the race. Your team rallies in the ninth. You get pulled over for speeding. And in that moment — awesome or lousy — you are living something that you will never forget, something that jumps out of the toneless roar of day-to-day life.
The Braves failed to score. Papelbon blew the lead. Longoria homered in the 12th. Elation. Sadness. Mayhem. Champagne. Sleepless fury. Never been a night like it. Funny, if I was trying to explain baseball to someone who had never heard of it, I wouldn’t tell them about Wednesday night. No, it seems to me that Wednesday night isn’t what makes baseball great. It’s all the years you spend waiting for Wednesday night that makes baseball great.
Barcelona’s players communicate through their passes; every pass speaks physically to their team mates. “Our grouping isn’t right,” says a ball that Xavi allows to bounce back to his passing team mate. “Wait a bit,” “Now we’re positioned just right,” “Run to this area,” “Heads up, we’re about to make a dash for goal,” “Attack!” — this is how they speak amongst themselves when they play cross passes, back passes, hard passes, diagonal passes, and passes down the pitch.
This alternation between geometry and anarchy is the allure of their style, and because the team lets this strategy playfully run wild, the repetition of the same pass patterns over and over can be rather entertaining. Nevertheless, danger always lurks behind this easy-going, relaxed façade. The strategy is meant to wear out the opponents by forcing them to run after the ball time and again; “negative running,” as the coaches call it, is demotivating. Occasionally Barcelona meet a team that can endure this mental torment, with a trainer is well-versed in psychological warfare. When this happens, the methods used to entrance and disarm opponents against a violent and sudden sprint towards goal can backfire, leading to a self-hypnosis of the Barcelona players.
At the best of times we’ve not known what kind of normal works for Pakistan: foreigner, local, doer, thinker, analyst, ex-player? And at this most delicate moment in their existence — iss naazuk mor par Pakistan Television would say — what is needed?
Shahid Afridi said something striking about Waqar the coach last year, back when Afridi had just become Test captain. “The best thing about him is that he lives outside Pakistan and so he doesn’t have an angle on anything. All the guys are the same to him. Nobody is from Sindh or Punjab — they are all one. He doesn’t give examples of his own time either, that I used to do this, or used to do that. He talks of this time.”
In a way, this is the heart of it. Waqar is still modern enough but more significantly, he is now worldly enough without being from another world. His time in county cricket and his years in Sydney — where he usually lives with his wife and family — place him as a useful species: a local foreigner, or a “glocal” in Pakistan. In a country and a cricket culture increasingly left to its own, removed from the rotation of the world outside of it, it might be the best way to be: a detached but informed observer.
I lost my virginity the night the Toronto Blue Jays won their first World Series — October 27, 1992, if you, like me, were scoring at home — and I have a scar on my head from the night they won their second. Joe Carter hit his home run off Mitch Williams over the left-field wall, and I jumped headfirst into the TV set that was suspended from our dorm room’s ceiling. Hours later, I was still running through the hallways, naked and bloody.
Love, clearly, had turned me into an idiot. Baseball, back then, wasn’t a game or a sport for me. Even passion isn’t a strong enough word. It was part of me, and I was part of it. Baseball might as well have been the ocean.
