Baseball Frees the Imagination

Rockwell, illus. for Thurber's "You Can Look It Up"

Rockwell, illus. for Thurber’s “You Can Look It Up”

Sports Saturday

Back in the 1960s in his book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan divided different forms of media into hot and cool. To quote from his Wikipedia entry, hot media “favor analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear and logical,” while cool media “require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts.” Hot media include print, radio, film, photography and lectures while cool media include television, seminars, and cartoons. If he were writing today, McLuhan would undoubtedly add videogames to his cool list.

I remember reading an article long ago—I can’t remember where—that applied this same distinction to sports. Baseball, the article argued, is linear and therefore is a hot sport while football, which involves a “simultaneous comprehension of all parts,” is a cool one. The article further argued, in the spirit of McLuhan, that because we live in an increasingly complex and global world with stimuli flying as us from all different directions, immersive football has superseded linear baseball as America’s favorite sport.

Incidentally, I recall McLuhan making a similar observation about those who play sports. Intellectuals, he says, being linear thinking hot types, can’t play tennis as well as cool types, who don’t think so much as react. As an intellectual who plays tennis, I see truth in this observation.

Anyway, McLuhan’s argument upset a lot of literature teachers back in the day since he seemed to be relegating us to the dustbin of history. Baseball fans would have been similarly upset at the way that their sport was seen as an outdated relic of the past.

The advantage of being hot, however, is that there is far more opportunity to exercise the imagination. The following poem wonderfully makes this point as hot print comes together with a hot sport to tickle our imaginations. One of the special qualities of baseball is that its many action gaps allow our thoughts to run wild. Of course, literature, the coolest of all the media, allows encourages this to happen–I regularly daydream as I read in ways that I cannot when I am watching television or, for that matter, a film. Have fun as you watch Philip Dacey start out with routine baseball plays and then track them into the realm of mystery:

Mystery Baseball

By Philip Dacey

No one knows the man who throws out the season’s first ball.
His face has never appeared in the newspapers,
except in crowd scenes, blurred.
Asked his name, he mumbles something
about loneliness,
about the beginning of hard times.

Each team fields an extra, tenth man.
This is the invisible player,
assigned to no particular position.
Runners edging off base feel a tap on their shoulders,
turn, see no one.
Or a batter, the count against him, will hear whispered
in his ear vague, dark
rumors of his wife, and go down.

Vendors move through the stands
selling unmarked sacks,
never disclosing their contents,
never having been told.
People buy, hoping.

Pitchers stay busy
getting signs.
They are everywhere.

One man rounds third base, pumping hard,
and is never seen again.
Teammates and relatives wait years at the plate,
uneasy, fearful.

An outfielder goes for a ball on the warning track.
He leaps into the air and keeps rising,
beyond himself, past
the limp flag.
Days later he is discovered,
descended, wandering dazed
in centerfield.

Deep under second base lives an old man,
bearded, said to be
a hundred. All through the game,
players pull at the bills of their caps,
acknowledging him.

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