Weekly Column: Greenfield, Baseball and Hope

In Greenfield, Ohio many of the jobs are related to the automotive industry and the families there are already feeling the impact. Estimates as high as 500 jobs – “or 70 percent of the town’s industrial employment – are expected to be gone.”

Almost the same number of kids (450) ages 5-16 have seen their summer baseball leagues threatened.

But the town has rallied.

With grocery raffles, pancake suppers to raise money and hundreds of volunteer hours to plant, mow, paint and repair, the adults of Greenfield are determined that their kids will play baseball this summer.

The news has spread and donations of bats, balls and other equipment have been coming from various fans of baseball across the country.

In tough economic times – why baseball?

Laura Saylor, a Greenfield parent whose daughter plays baseball said, “This kind of gives them hope, too, because when the parents don’t have hope, what do you have?”

The former commissioner of major league baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti, would have understood and agreed with Ms. Saylor.

In a little book titled “Take Time for Paradise – Americans and Their Games,” Giamatti wrote:

• Much of what we love later in a sport is what it recalls to us about ourselves at our earliest. And those memories, now smoothed and bending away from us in the interior of ourselves, are not simply of childhood or of a childhood game. They are memories of our best hopes. They are memories of a time when all that would be better was before us, as a hope, and the hope was fastened to a game. One hoped not so much to be the best who ever played as simply to stay in the game . . .

• It has long been my conviction that we can learn far more about the conditions, and values, of a society by contemplating how it chooses to play, to use its free time, to take its leisure, than by examining how it goes about its work.

• Winning for player or spectator is not simply outscoring; it is a way of talking about betterment, about making oneself, one’s fellows, one’s city, one’s adherents, more noble . . .

• Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community . . .

Washington Post
Associated Press