Zen Baseball

A non-expert exploring the intersection of baseball and mindfulness.

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2015 TWJ “revamped” card #126 Ichiro Suzuki (special super-duper-short-unprinted card, added after the regular set was finalized)

The Writer’s Journey

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Zen Mirror

Listen to Zen Baseball | Explore the largest community of artists, bands, podcasters and creators of music & audio.

[flipflopflying]

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I've been pulled, and I've pulled.

Tommy LaSorda, commiserating with Will Ferrell after Ferrell’s one-pitch, one-out appearance for the Dodgers this Spring Training.

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Is there a human event that passes as easily as a middle-innings spring training pitch?

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"I just think it's OK not to know. Know what I mean? In our shoes, on the field, it's OK not to know what the end result is going to be. We'll find out."

A.J. Hinch to ESPN’s Jayson Stark

[openyouri]

Walker, it is in your footsteps that are the road, no more; walker, there is no road, the road is made by walking.

—Antonio Machado (via zencalendar)

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The Wave

I have, in the last few years, come to know that baseball enables me personally to look always towards the rising dawn. Some look back, toward its past, and I do to sometimes, but only in small supply. My baseball is the game tomorrow, the upcoming season, the rookie called up, the first pitch.

A baseball game feels, often times, like the only possible way to ride the crest of the emerging moment. 

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Radio Silence

Baseball on the radio. Late innings, tension wrapped like copper wire around a post, guided by voices and the crowd's electric hum. 

Game tied. Man on second. "The pitch. A deep drive to right center!"

Silence. The ball in flight, the unfolding physics, the waiting game.

In that silence, the single-sensed radio listener finds deep space: an infinite void filled to capacity.

[brewers]

Carlos Gomez would prefer if Joey Votto never homered against the Brewers again. 

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A home run is a home run until it is no longer a home run, and never was.

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Less and more

Nationals rising star Anthony Rendon on a nervous night in front of his hometown Houston friends and family:

"I was swinging a little hard," Rendon said. "I was trying to hit the ball too hard. I just slowed things down. More is less. Less is more."

via

[zenbaseball]

The very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centres of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

[openyouri]

Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day, then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past, and there is no reality apart from the here and now.

—Peter Matthiessen (via zencalendar)

in other words, Billy Hamilton.

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"In the case of archery, the hitter and the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality."

- Zen scholar DT Suzuki, intro to "Zen in the Art of Archery" by Eugen Herrigel (1953)

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How to Watch Baseball

With your eyes.

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Collision

I didn't realize it during my career as a catcher (up through D-III college baseball), but the collision at home plate is a play of extreme imbalance. The runner has all of the advantage: sees the whole play, concentrates on where to drive his shoulder into the catcher, controls his own momentum and aim, decides how violently he will engage. The catcher, looking for the ball while attempting to "protect" a static object, the plate, becomes nothing more than a target of a calculated offensive.

This is out of balance.

So much of baseball is concerned with a well-attuned balance. Balls weighted four to three against strikes; each team with an equal number of outs at their disposal; the high wall in Fenway's left field to counter-balance its proximity to the plate.

In the new rule forbidding the runner to target and crush the catcher, I feel the correction of an imbalance.

[zenbaseball]

Obstruction

What does it matter, the intent? Bodies entangled, intentions intertwined, desires pressing against each other from both directions. The rule, a charming attempt to arbitrate the chaos of ambition, says "out." 

Universal self is somewhere above the rule. Universal self is aware that there are not two teams, two desires, with an official ruling between them like a wide river. Universal self sees that all is single organism, of which each player, team, logo, color, fan is a pumping organ. The outcome of the game, the ruling on the field, another organ, a lively blood vessel.

Craig Calcaterra on last night's game:

"But then baseball happened. And baseball, no matter how much we think we know about it — no matter how much authority, earned or otherwise, we assert with respect to it — occasionally says 'ha.'"

Should we call it, then, the universal ha?