[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, there's still plenty of space. Leave a comment with a prompt. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]
This one is for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nanila, who wanted to know about the break in between the top and bottom halves of the seventh inning.
How is everyone doing so far? Is this interesting? Informative? Helpful? Should we continue?
It's time to take a break. Unlike other timed sports that have ends of quarters, periods, or half-time, or even an official tea break scheduled in at specific times, baseball continues on at its own pace - there are miniature breaks when the defense records three outs and the offense and defense change places, sure, but they're not defined by a certain amount of time, and it's never enough to take a jaunt up to the concession stands and collect food. (Totally like all other sports, however, both the stands hustlers and the concourse vendors will make you pay a lot for food or drink.)
These days, the in-between time is often filled with commercials (on TV) or odd promotions or traditions (such as the Presidential Race for the Nationals of Washington, D.C.) for the live game, just so that the audience doesn't get bored. Because they might just turn to their neighbor or family member and talk about the game that's unfolding in front if them.
On average, though, baseball games tend to take between 2 and 2.5 hours - sitting in uncomfortable seats for that long, even with an entertaining game, without a break requires the same sort of stamina people who see the Ring Cycle in a week need. It could also be a reflection of the English sports that baseball derives from, but the truth of the matter is that baseball, lacking those regular breaks of other sports, needs an occasion for the fans to stand up, shake their legs out, and otherwise prevent bad things that happen when sitting too long. If the home team is behind, this gives them a little time to recuperate and decide on new strategy. If ahead, they have time to think about how to finish our the game ahead. Of course, the plan rarely survives contact with the rest of the game.
So we have the Seventh Inning Stretch, a time which used to be punctuated with mass singing of a time all about having a good time at the ballpark - Take Me Out To The Ballgame. While the peanuts and Cracker Jack of the song would probably induce allergy worries in our times, the song itself is a request to be able to ignore the world outside for the length of a baseball game.
And then the world intruded rather rudely on 11 September 2001. It was no longer possible to ignore the fact that large gatherings of people anywhere, including sport competitions, could be the site of the next attack. Whether one rooted for or against the Damn Yankees or for (or against) the Metropolitans, the return of baseball to the city was one of the surest signs that things would be able to resume where they left off. With a lot more thought about the security of various venues.
The Tarot card that comes with this is Reflection, and in a more standard deck it would be called The Hermit. The Seventh-Inning Stretch is a time for the body to digest and stretch, but also for the mind to do so, to begin the change from the immersion of the game back to the reality outside, whether the immediate realities of leaving the parking in such a way as to get on the proper roads or public transit lines as to get home safely, to the questions of work, home life, money, and the reality of the daily pressures. It's also a time to reflect on the game itself, what has transpired in this unique instance, whether or not it will connect to a bigger theme for the season, or whether the rules will need yet more talking after an obvious bug in the system has appeared or it seems that the competitive balance is slanted too much in favor of the offense or the defense. Reflection is also about the fact that all ball games end at some point, whether being played in the stadium or out in life, and that retirement comes for us all in the end. Wisdom is often sought at the ball game, not just by the players and coaches, but by the fanatics that go and root for the home team. By stepping back for a moment and considering a wider perspective, many things that weren't clear become much easier to pick out from the crowd. And by analyzing the game (and keeping score, a skill all baseball fans should know how to do), not only can you gain wisdom, but you can start to predict a few things, too.
It should be no surprise to anyone, based on the stretch being about wisdom and synthesis, that I detest the jingoistic decision to change the seventh-inning stretch song from Take Me Out To The Ballgame to God Bless America. And not just because of the high Latin American-born population in Major League Baseball, but because the changing of the song (and the now near-universal decision to carry it on television broadcasts, where only some carried the previous song) reflects a lack of wisdom. We got hurt, a hurt, if not of our own making, one that we certainly contributed to, and our reaction is to have our national pastime (ish) respond with bellicose verse of how great the United States is, such that what used to be a performance of sport, given the respect accorded to sport, has now become sport with a Two Minutes Hate in the middle of the seventh. It inserts politics into sport in the most ham-fisted manner possible, and co-opts what was a shared expression of fandom into an expected performance of superficial patriotism.
We need Reflection and Wisdom in our games and our lives now more than ever, and that's not just on the superficial things like performance-enhancing drugs. All things change. Mone Davis demonstrated that baseball could handle having a girl as the star fireballer of a Little League team at the Little League World Series. The day will come when the Commissioner of Baseball will have to make a decision about the gender barrier. Maybe not for Mone (because she wants to play basketball), but for someone who will have already had to fight their university for a spot on that team.
Or the day when someone suffers a fatal head injury when the ball they threw comes back to them much faster than when they threw it. Or the part where athletes need to have a backup plan in case they never make it to The Show, because most of them won't. And many other things that baseball must come to grips with if it hopes to continue and stay in the national consciousness in the next century.
This one is for
nanila, who wanted to know about the break in between the top and bottom halves of the seventh inning.How is everyone doing so far? Is this interesting? Informative? Helpful? Should we continue?
It's time to take a break. Unlike other timed sports that have ends of quarters, periods, or half-time, or even an official tea break scheduled in at specific times, baseball continues on at its own pace - there are miniature breaks when the defense records three outs and the offense and defense change places, sure, but they're not defined by a certain amount of time, and it's never enough to take a jaunt up to the concession stands and collect food. (Totally like all other sports, however, both the stands hustlers and the concourse vendors will make you pay a lot for food or drink.)
These days, the in-between time is often filled with commercials (on TV) or odd promotions or traditions (such as the Presidential Race for the Nationals of Washington, D.C.) for the live game, just so that the audience doesn't get bored. Because they might just turn to their neighbor or family member and talk about the game that's unfolding in front if them.
On average, though, baseball games tend to take between 2 and 2.5 hours - sitting in uncomfortable seats for that long, even with an entertaining game, without a break requires the same sort of stamina people who see the Ring Cycle in a week need. It could also be a reflection of the English sports that baseball derives from, but the truth of the matter is that baseball, lacking those regular breaks of other sports, needs an occasion for the fans to stand up, shake their legs out, and otherwise prevent bad things that happen when sitting too long. If the home team is behind, this gives them a little time to recuperate and decide on new strategy. If ahead, they have time to think about how to finish our the game ahead. Of course, the plan rarely survives contact with the rest of the game.
So we have the Seventh Inning Stretch, a time which used to be punctuated with mass singing of a time all about having a good time at the ballpark - Take Me Out To The Ballgame. While the peanuts and Cracker Jack of the song would probably induce allergy worries in our times, the song itself is a request to be able to ignore the world outside for the length of a baseball game.
And then the world intruded rather rudely on 11 September 2001. It was no longer possible to ignore the fact that large gatherings of people anywhere, including sport competitions, could be the site of the next attack. Whether one rooted for or against the Damn Yankees or for (or against) the Metropolitans, the return of baseball to the city was one of the surest signs that things would be able to resume where they left off. With a lot more thought about the security of various venues.
The Tarot card that comes with this is Reflection, and in a more standard deck it would be called The Hermit. The Seventh-Inning Stretch is a time for the body to digest and stretch, but also for the mind to do so, to begin the change from the immersion of the game back to the reality outside, whether the immediate realities of leaving the parking in such a way as to get on the proper roads or public transit lines as to get home safely, to the questions of work, home life, money, and the reality of the daily pressures. It's also a time to reflect on the game itself, what has transpired in this unique instance, whether or not it will connect to a bigger theme for the season, or whether the rules will need yet more talking after an obvious bug in the system has appeared or it seems that the competitive balance is slanted too much in favor of the offense or the defense. Reflection is also about the fact that all ball games end at some point, whether being played in the stadium or out in life, and that retirement comes for us all in the end. Wisdom is often sought at the ball game, not just by the players and coaches, but by the fanatics that go and root for the home team. By stepping back for a moment and considering a wider perspective, many things that weren't clear become much easier to pick out from the crowd. And by analyzing the game (and keeping score, a skill all baseball fans should know how to do), not only can you gain wisdom, but you can start to predict a few things, too.
It should be no surprise to anyone, based on the stretch being about wisdom and synthesis, that I detest the jingoistic decision to change the seventh-inning stretch song from Take Me Out To The Ballgame to God Bless America. And not just because of the high Latin American-born population in Major League Baseball, but because the changing of the song (and the now near-universal decision to carry it on television broadcasts, where only some carried the previous song) reflects a lack of wisdom. We got hurt, a hurt, if not of our own making, one that we certainly contributed to, and our reaction is to have our national pastime (ish) respond with bellicose verse of how great the United States is, such that what used to be a performance of sport, given the respect accorded to sport, has now become sport with a Two Minutes Hate in the middle of the seventh. It inserts politics into sport in the most ham-fisted manner possible, and co-opts what was a shared expression of fandom into an expected performance of superficial patriotism.
We need Reflection and Wisdom in our games and our lives now more than ever, and that's not just on the superficial things like performance-enhancing drugs. All things change. Mone Davis demonstrated that baseball could handle having a girl as the star fireballer of a Little League team at the Little League World Series. The day will come when the Commissioner of Baseball will have to make a decision about the gender barrier. Maybe not for Mone (because she wants to play basketball), but for someone who will have already had to fight their university for a spot on that team.
Or the day when someone suffers a fatal head injury when the ball they threw comes back to them much faster than when they threw it. Or the part where athletes need to have a backup plan in case they never make it to The Show, because most of them won't. And many other things that baseball must come to grips with if it hopes to continue and stay in the national consciousness in the next century.
