Passing It On

Baseball is a generational game.

It's known for being passed down from father to son, parent to child, grandparent to child. It is part of what makes baseball what it is, stories passed along, so that it becomes one long continual communion. We know about Babe Ruth, about Merkle's Boner, about Wally Pipp, about Country Slaughter's Mad Dash. Those of us in Red Sox Nation may be just a bit more aware of historical context than other parts of the baseball world, though Yankee Territory is just as steeped in the interconnection of generations.

Passing it on is one of the joys of baseball for me. Sparky and Statman's young daughters receive baseball story books and tiny team socks as early totems. Grace and her sister Mellow come to the ballpark with me, experiencing the Game as a real thing, not an artifical television event, learning to love the beauty of the game, its intricacies and its simplicities. (Grace could confidently explain the Infield Fly Rule at age 15.) They have been doing this long enough that they talk about the guys they used to watch and wonder where they are playing now. (We've made a deal to watch last year's group of Guys this season when they visit nearby at the AAA level .)

This past week I gave a condensed version of my classroom presentation on Women in Baseball for a noontime program at the community college where I work. Being able to pass the Game along in the classroom is good; I team-teach a social science course on Baseball in American Culture. But this presentation was particularly special for me. In the classroom, sometimes it feels like we're just spouting info and students are silently aborbing it, or perhaps it is bouncing off, unheeded. In this setting, it was a small group who displayed avid interest in the subject, including a history instructor and her student who wants to do a paper on women in baseball. There were questions and comments aplenty throughout my talk, and a long discussion at the end, touching on many of the cultural aspects addressed, or at least alluded to, in the presentation. The history instructor afterward told me she hadn't realized how far back in time women had been actively involved in baseball, to what extent, and where they stood today, at all levels of the game on and off the field, and that she was taking away knowledge she would be using in her classroom. The student went away feeling confident about doing her paper, that it was a subject worthy of serious study. The talk allowed the opportunity to pass along Baseball, in a way most people may not even consider, and to pass along cultural history of women, things that as younger women they may not even have been aware of previously.

At my aunt's funeral over the weekend, the priest spoke about sharing stories of her with the generations present and those yet to come. One of the things I enjoy most about gathering with other baseball junkies is the sharing of stories. Almost everyone can tell one about a baseball memory that stands out from their childhood , stories that are not so much the stories of the players, but of themselves connecting to the game. I collect these stories, make them part of the treasure trove of baseball.

The desire, the need to connect the past to the future is part of what makes us who we are, and makes Baseball what it is.