December Days 04 - Line Drive (The Seven of Bats)

[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, all the rest of the month is available for your curiosity, about either baseball or Tarot. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]

A line drive is a ball struck solidly with the bat that moves with very little arc and a lot of velocity through the air. Unlike the pop fly, which has a lot of arc and some velocity, and the ground ball, which has all the velocity but no arc at all, line drives are usually tests of defensive reaction times and abilities. A line drive usually takes about the time an infield defender has to take a step and a leap in the direction of the ball before the ball passes beyond the defender and into the outfield as a hit. Of the defender can make a play on the ball, that's good. An out is nearly a guarantee that the play will show up in the highlight show that night, and two outs will surely be one of the plays talked about as pivotal for the game itself.

Line drives are earnest and straightforward - catch me if you can, watch me if you can't.

If the line drive shows up in the reading, is generally a call for direct communication and action, without artifice, deception, or obfuscation. If you're batting and you see it, be direct. Hit the ball hard and try to drive it where you want it to go - force the defense to make a good play to stop you from achieving your goal. Playing for line drives, though, means you're occasionally going to hit the ball at someone and they'll make an easy out with it. Every now and then, the direct approach doesn't actually work for you. Try something else in your toolbox to see if you can get a hit next time.

If you're fielding a line drive, understand that time is short if you want to stop or deflect this direct attack. You won't have enough time to get into a better fielding position - a few steps and a leap is all you're going to be able to do. Your first instinct will have to be moving in the right direction to be able to field this. If you come up with the ball and can make a play, more power to you, but remember that someone else had a hand in making sure you were close enough to be able to make the play. Tip your cap to the defensive coordinator behind the plate for their help. If it isn't going to happen, you'll have to let it go by and be ready for the next batter. What separates the good players from the better players is the ability to know, from the moment the ball jumps off the bat, whether or not a play can be made on the drive. Woe and angry fanatics come to those who lay out to try and catch a ball, only to have it go past them, turning what would have been a single into an extra base hit.

December Days 05 - With One Swing Of The Bat (XVI - Whole New Ball Game)

[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, all the rest of the month is available for your curiosity, about either baseball or Tarot. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]

As Yogi Berra, master of aphorism and malapropism in equal quantities, said about baseball, "It ain't over until it's over." A baseball game is not concluded until the final out is recorded or the home team scores enough to win in the bottom half of the ninth or subsequent innings. And unlike other sports, baseball has no clock, which means that at any time, either team can spark and sustain a sequence of hits and runs that lasts until three out safe obtained by the defense. Every inning has the potential for something incredibly powerful.

It can still be tempting to write of a game as won or lost based on the presence of one big inning for either side. Admittedly, many games do turn out as expected - 8-1, 12-0, 15-5. Not all of them, though. Sometimes it helps to remember that some teams win games despite giving up more than ten hits - because none of those hits score runs. And that teams lose games despite giving up only one hit (or none, as we learned earlier) because one was enough. Game-changing moments are always right there in baseball, ready to come into being with just one swing of the bat. When those moments arrive, everyone is changed, as the old ways of thinking no longer work and new ideas and focus must come to the fore as we play a whole new ballgame.

This manifests in all sorts of ways - the Walk-Off, the Two-Out Rally, a bases-clearing double, the Hit and Run, stealing home, walking in a run, a wild pitch, All of these things and more can start the prices or be the catalyst to change everyone's understanding of the game being played. Sometimes the disruptive power lies in an individual and their phenomenal skill. Sometimes it's in a new technology introduced, like baseball deciding to let in replay technology and see if the camera crews responsible for telecasting the game are good enough to always have a lens pointing at the right angle to get definitive proof that a call is correct or wrong. As it turns out, the camera crews are pretty good at getting it right.

The Rider-Waite Tarot equivalent of this card is The Tower, a card with some seriously negative imagery in popular culture and on its card, depicting a crumbling tower struck by lightning and people fleeing the structure's destruction. The imagery for this card in the Baseball Tarot depicts a defensive player staring back at the scoreboard beyond the outfield fence, which has updated with the number of runs scored in the bottom half of the inning to give the home team a one run lead. In the background, lightning steaks across the sky.

This card represents a shaking-up. Things that were true and looked to stay true have changed. New knowledge, new situations, and new ideas are arriving at a disruptive pace, often brought on by one event that seems like it came out of the blue, but has instead been building to this point, in subtle and obvious ways. If you take a look at the events of this year, disruption was a key point of many of them. Police violence protests, marriage equality, and yes, even the mass shootings, whether at Charlie Hebdo, schools, Planned Parenthood, mosques, or by someone claiming to be involuntarily celibate, are all designed to produce an upheaval. The idea is to force your mind into accepting that the world you have built for yourself, and any rules that you may believe are real, only exist and continue to exist because there is nobody currently doing the unthinkable to you or that world. When living in a world where there appears to be no way to guarantee one's own longevity, safety, security, or anything else, the temptation to retreat to what seems safe and understandable is great. The temptation to give into despair is great. I salute those who can manage to live in that reality and not develop or exacerbate mental illnesses to the point of nonfunction.

Sport is, in many ways, a microcosm of the unpredictability of the universe, as well as an excellent example of how small things become big unexpectedly. One hit, by itself, without context, is not anything important or noteworthy. One hit that sparks a rally, or that drives in the winning run, or that breaks a record, is very important. But you can't always tell which of those hits is going to be the big one before it happens. Or the last one before the game is done. The best we can do is keep trying to score runs until we room out of outs.

The presence of this card in your reading means there will be disruption coming. Old ways of thinking or comfortable patterns are about to be shattered or presented with information that will unavoidably alter them. The way things were is no longer going to work. So long as you can ride out the changes, and then integrate the new knowledge constructively, the change will be good. Difficult, painful, and a major drain on your resources and cope, but ultimately good and positive in the end. After these shifts, going back to what was, or desiring to go back to what was, requires wilfully refusing to acknowledge the new reality. Ignoring things is easy at first, but as the new stuff becomes the default, it becomes much more difficult to screen it out and not acknowledge it. The longer you wait, the more painful it will be.

One swing changes everything. Those that can adjust to the new situation benefit far more than those who don't.