Jardineros

Jardineros
       You have to love the Spanish word that Mexicans gave to outfielders in baseball. Jardineros. Outfielders are that. They, and not the pitchers, not the batters even, not the infielders for God´s sake...they are the heart of baseball. They plow the outfield. They nurture their space and wait patiently.They check the wind. They look to see where the sun is in the sky, where the clouds might surprise them, or where the light standards for their artificial garden don´t throw enough light on their land. They are the gardeners.
        Baseball is a came of patience and one wonders how the hell Americans ever could have claimed it their national pastime. And the truth is they don´t any more. We have too many distractions. We are not who we were and I do not say that nostalgically. It's over between baseball and us. Football rules! Basketball, soccer, tennis, ...hell beach volleyball, all now have a place and there is neither the time nor the patience for baseball. And I get it.
       We are a frenetic lot. When one sees how baseball appeared in the nineteenth century, I still marvel at how it took hold among us. But really the architecture created the attachment. We were looking for an organization and it provided a form and structure that settled our fears after a very frightening and debilitating civil war.
         But it is also important to remember that we were a nation created at a time when modern nations were created. We came to be when the idea of the imagined community that Benedict Anderson talks about was in fact being realized in many places in the world. So to us, this little off-shoot of an English game played on stoops in front of nineteenth century American tenements, that involved an individual, but also a team's concerted effort to win in life, was our imagination of an ideal. We were gardeners, tending our fields, but trying to grow something monumental at the same time. And of course we had fucked up.
          We had created a nation based on an ideal that many of us in reality did not believe in. We were a pseudo-people, who claimed one thing and did another. But the game we invented, and rounders and cricket notwithstanding we did invent it, was not a game at all in the end. It was real. It was our true creation. The Constitution enshrined slavery of individuals, Native Americans were driven from their homes, and when we stretched from ocean to ocean we decided that was not enough. But baseball knew better. Nine innings (more if you need them, but you have to pay the peanut man overtime), three outs an inning,...and three strikes and you´re out! No sudden death overtime. No penalty shots. No shoot outs. And no ties (unless it goes to the runner). It is our meme, as Richard Dawkins would say and I for one think it may be the greatest gift we have ever given to humanity.