Baseball And The Clock

After I learned about baseball, I can remember a moment where I considered the possibility of a never-ending baseball game. Younger then, I always assumed all of the fans would stay for every pitch. Job absences would be forgiven by authority of baseball. Children and pets would move to different houses. The game would play on, sometimes with matched innings of big scoring, mostly with zeroes filling up the scoreboard.

I remembered this at the Twins game last night, when the New York team -- mostly Alex Rodriguez -- placed the game perilously close to the spiral of a dance with infinity in the extra innings. I should have worried more about a total collapse and another painful, pin-striped gut punch.

Maybe it was because we were playing the Yankees, but thinking about a game played without time limits made me think of the timelessness of the game itself. We baseball romantics love to think of the game as being a neatly preserved time capsule from over a century ago. Is it still so romantic when a clock keeps both teams from wasting precious time and the man destroying your team at the plate may have benefited from scientific discoveries unheard of a hundred years ago?

Are the people in the stands the same people, or just a similar type of people? I watched an older man having trouble finding his way back to his seat. I saw couples on dates ignoring each other to check in with other people on their smart phones. I saw players on both teams making enough money that their entire families would never work again, while their past counterparts needed employment between seasons. We all judged each other's T-shirt slogans.

Twins fans came as cultural refugees on a glorious July night, to hide in a game we can at least pretend is pure from the taint of decades of upsetting and frightening change - however we personally define upsetting. The runners keep going around the bases and we can pretend we aren't still outraged about the thing that just happened to our country.

Except we're still checking our social media to make sure our side is still winning. In fact, if we eavesdrop, we can hear someone saying the exact same things we blocked three people to avoid reading last week. We could text someone official for help silencing them, but how timeless would that be?

In times like these, even the Yankees don't seem like miserable wretches. Except Alex Rodriguez still does, because he hit three home runs against the hometown heroes and such things are timelessly deplorable.

-- Axel