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The Final Past Time
Anthony Esolen on What Baseball Could Have Taught the Greeks About Death
On a sunny afternoon in October, many years ago, there came to me the first intimations of the bittersweetness of this passing life. I was sitting on the floor of our small living room, stationed in front of a black-and-white television, my father watching over my shoulder from the sofa. It was the seventh game of the World Series, with the Detroit Tigers playing the defending champions, my beloved St. Louis Cardinals.
It was inconceivable to me that they could lose. They had, it is true, blown a three-games-to-one lead, and had been routed 13–1 the day before. My mother, God bless her, had picked me up from school that day so that I’d miss as little of the action as possible. I remember feeling queasy, listening on the car radio as Jim Northrup hit a grand slam. I could well have missed that.
They Could Not Lose
But now Bob Gibson was on the mound, and Gibson was unhittable. That year he had given up a paltry 38 earned runs in over 300 innings, the finest ERA since almost the turn of the century. He had thrown 13 shutouts, some of them lasting into extra innings. He had shut out the Tigers in Game One, striking out a World Series record 17 men. He had shut them down 10–1 in Game Four, striking out 10 and hitting a home run for good measure.
He was the fiercest competitor of his generation—a man who glowered at his opponents, who would sit them on their fannies with a fastball under the chin if they leaned out over the plate, his territory. He confessed that he could not even let his daughter win at checkers. This proud man was on the mound before the home crowd in St. Louis, pitching with three days’ rest, while his opponent, the pudgy Mickey Lolich, was pitching with two. The Cardinals could not lose.
The game was still scoreless in the top of the seventh inning, and Gibson, who till then had given up only one scratch hit, was clearly tiring. But I, in my youth, knew nothing about “tiring.” Children know that there are old people, but of the mystery of becoming old—of one day learning, with some mild surprise, that the hill up the woods behind the house has grown steeper—they know nothing at all. Gibson had to win. It was a law of the universe.
He gave up two singles. With two outs, Northrup came to bat, a decent hitter but nothing special. He hit a long fly ball to center field. Curt Flood, who once went a season and a half without making an error, broke in on the ball, saw his mistake, turned around and . . . fell. The ball landed behind him, bouncing carelessly away for a two-run triple. The next batter singled, and that, basically, was the ballgame.
I watched in astonishment. “Those runs are unearned!” I pleaded with my father. “He should have caught that ball!”
“He should have caught the ball,” said my father. “But it was a mental mistake, not a mistake with the glove. Mental mistakes are not scored as errors, so the runs are earned.” Ah, the correctness, and implacability, of baseball justice.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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