351. 2014 World Series, Game 7, Part 1

People, apes, one-celled animals, we Earthlings are go-getters and getters-away-from. Wayfaring is our primary passion and profession. We head toward what we want, away from what we don’t. Our minds are the navigators that plot our next steps, leaps, or slithers. Baseball is one challenging way people choose to show themselves at their best. Particularly the last game of the World Series. In this case, game 7 of this year’s match-up between the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants as it played out in Kansas City on October 29.

My interest in this game is in how the players reveal the qualities of mind that make them (and us) human. That is, how they perceive, judge, act, and engage in striving to do their best. Only one team could win the Series. The staging was in the superb mental and bodily efforts demonstrated by rivals worthy of each other in that ultimate game of the 2014 season.

Think of the situations that evolve in each player’s mind from the starting pitch that opens the first inning to the final out in the bottom of the ninth. Those situations don’t play out on the field so much as in each player’s mind from his personal point of view. It is very much the playing-out of that inner flow of situations that makes baseball the great game it is.

Behind two games to three, two out in the bottom of the ninth, runner on third, two strikes. Both game and series ride on the next pitch. Think of the hopes, fears, values, memories, associations, priorities, outlooks, intuitions, and dreams as arrayed in each player’s mind in preparation for what happens next. Not only in each player’s mind, but in the mind of every fan in the stadium and watcher on TV. If not do or die, it is win, tie, or lose that hangs in the balance. The pitcher (who happens to be the Giant’s Madison Bumgarner) winds up and throws. . . . Pablo Sandoval catches the high foul and falls to the dirt spread-eagle as if making an angel in the snow, the ball in his glove. The Giants win the game three runs to two. And Series four games to three.

Three hours back, when the outcome was latent, each player had his own hopes. Nine innings later, those hopes are decided by the sequence of events across 54 outs, each a host of situations in its own right. Baseball is each player and fan’s journey from hope to, if not destiny, certainty.

Which is the same as the journey every wayfarer makes in life and stage of life. The Force is either with or against us. The Life Force that drives us to go beyond ourselves every day of our lives. A game of baseball models our own primal strivings to do the best we can with what we’ve got in the time allowed. After that, the stadium lights go out.

(Continued next post.)