A Community of Baseball

Baseball does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in a community. Or rather, in communities.

Not the towns and cities, but a community of people. The Syracuse AAA franchise is the “Community Owned Baseball Club of CNY, Inc.” but the community is not limited to the physical location of that city, or even the physical space of that ballpark though a community exists within those walls, in those stands.

Over the years I have belonged to several different baseball communities. The larger, over-reaching community of “Fan,” but other smaller, more specialized groups, groups that rarely overlap though I know virtually any member of one of those communities would feel a connection to another member of any of the other communities, if not instantly at least more quickly than you can say “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

Each of these communities is special to me. There is, of course, the community of my ballpark. Make that ballparks. Even on the road, it is easy to slip into the local ballpark community. There is the community of those I share a box section with, the vendors, the ushers and the office personnel, even to some extent the players themselves. And there is the community I declared after my first gathering with them “my tribe,” one devoted to the study of baseball, a community which rarely addresses the game, but considers The Game as a topic of serious study and contemplation, a community that also entertains itself by joyfully playing an archaic version of the game in a cow pasture: Mind the woodchuck holes!

None of these communities is any more precious to me than my online community, a living, breathing community of relatively long standing in terms of the Internet. Because we know each other only through words on a screen, we know each other in ways that we don’t know the people we sit next to game after game, night after night. Issues that rarely get addressed in face to face situations are examined and parsed, and over time we have come to anticipate each others’ reactions. A verbal shorthand has grown up among us, inside jokes live on for years., memories of shared occurrences, the arguments and agreements, laughter and even tears. Although we haven’t, with a few exceptions, ever met face to face, do not share the same time zone or even the same continent, we are nonetheless a tight-knit community. We have shared not only baseball, from the high flights of intellectual fancy to the “did you see that hit?” ephemeral moments, we have shared what a community shares: courtship, marriage, divorce, illness, births, deaths, job losses, relocations. I spent several years caring for my mother at home as Alzheimer’s ravaged her and this baseball community provided support that got me through the most difficult seven years of my life, a saving grace that helped me survive. Sometimes the support we give is through our public discussion arena, but often it is done on the side, off-line in email. Others within the community have provided similar to support to each other, whether they know it or not. It may be explicit, it may be unspoken. Either way, it is a community I am proud to be a part of it, a community I love.