DAN HARMON IS COMMUNITY
I’m crying again. Dammit Sony!
Down, 3-1. Bottom of the ninth. One on. Nobody out. The Yankees against the Minnesota Twins. Game 2 of the American League Division Series, October 2009. A-Rod is at the plate. The air has that chewy sense of hope. There is always call for a miracle.
“It’s gonna happen, Dad.”
This is what baseball can do to the soul: it has the ability to make you believe in spite of all other available evidence. My son, John Michael, is 10 years old. We are in the bleachers. He leans in to me and says that the pitch is going to come in high and fat. It’s still a new language to me. The pitch is thrown, and indeed it does — it comes in high and fat, and 94 miles per hour. A-Rod leans into it like he’s about to fell a tree and smacks the ball and it soars, that little sphere of cowhide rising up over the Bronx, and it is a moment unlike any other, when you sit with your son in the ballpark, and the ball is high in the air, you feel yourself aware of everything, the night, the neon, the very American-ness of the moment.
And then it strikes you that the ball has an endless quality of fatherhood to it.
We all know these moments. They don’t come along very often, but when they do they open up your lungs to the bursting point. It’s not simply me sitting with my son in the Bronx, but it’s my father sitting with me in London, too, and maybe him with his own father in Dublin, and it all comes back to me, the pure and reckless joy of the past, Arsenal, Stoke City, the dark corners of a nursing home, the slippery deck of a ferry boat and how every moment is carried into other moments.
I stood in the bleachers as A-Rod rounded the bases with that slightly nonchalant grin: a Dominican kid born in Washington Heights had just brought me home.
- Colum McCann
Read the rest: “What Baseball Does to the Soul”
photo by Antonelli/Daily News
life:
Let’s get this discussion started: Who do you think was the greatest all-around baseball player?
With all due respect to Aaron, Musial, and even Ruth, we think Willie Mays was the greatest all-around player baseball has ever seen. While you’re pondering on who you think is the greatest — look back at these stunning, unpublished photos of Willie Mays. (we may, or may not be trying to sway your decision here)
Pictured: A Loomis Dean photo of 22-year-old Willie Mays at spring training in Arizona in 1954, the year the Giants won the World Series — the sole championship of Mays’ long career.
The following tweets are presented in no particular order.
1. Jim Messina (campaign manager, Obama 2012): “An absolute must read”
2. Sarah Palin (former Governor of Alaska, VP candidate): “know what’s truly “dumb”? Giving a cover story to the TrigTruther conspiracy kook writer who thinks I…
dcu:
Wow. Comics Alliance found one hell of a video: test footage for an alternate Green Goblin mask for Spider-Man. This looks amazing and is far superior than the version they went with for the first movie.
Oh what could’ve been…
