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[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.]
Ask anyone who is about to engage in a physical activity, and they will tell you an important part of staying safe during those activities is proper warm-up and cool-down technique. Doing stretches, light activities, and preparation work allows the muscles to loosen, stretch, and be ready for the strenuous activity that is about to be placed on them. Most sport consists of, at the least, sudden stops and starts, hard turns, use of the arms and hands in violent motions, and sometimes collisions or physical contact with other players. (Unsurprisingly, a large number of sport fouls consist of describing inappropriate contact between players.)
Pitchers have an additional warm up component, where before coming in to the game, they will throw practice pitches as a way of getting their arms into the right form for pitching. Most of the throwing is at gentle speeds, meant mostly to check form and gradually increase velocity to some fraction of the maximum, so that the muscles are purposely relaxed and worked in anticipation of the actual game work. Thus, a synonym for warming up a relief pitcher in the bullpen is to say that they are getting loose.
For all the players, warming up involves throwing and running and fielding practice, to get the body ready and the mind to remember all the experience accumulated so far, so that when the game is on, the responses will be automatic, apparent matters of instinct and reaction bred by repetition and drill over and over and over again until completed to the satisfaction of the coaches. It forms the first layer of the armor between the thinking and the doing, such that the doing doesn't have to rise to the level of the conscious thinking.
The second layer of armor is a bit more individualized. As has been mentioned before, baseball is often a game of superstitions. Striking a round ball with a round bat creates imperfect results for even the best of players, and all the rest of the fielders and rules of the game add to the potential for chaos as they remove certain actions from the field of legal plays.
Against such likelihood of randomness develop lucky charms and actions intended, through practices that probably have the same intent as magic incantations, to make the results a little more predictable, and a little more in favor of your side.
A hitter in the batter box that undoes and redoes their batting gloves after every pitch, a pitcher that takes a short circuit about the pitching mound after every pitch, other hitters that cross themselves before stepping in, the idle spin of the bat before the pitcher goes into their windup, the measured pace of the baserunner taking their lead, always the same, down to the last step. The coaches, managers, and players that always step over the foul line on their way to or from the dugout. To the impatient sure, or the untrained one, many of these rituals and superstitions seem to be efforts in wasting time, and a good argument for why baseball should obtain some form of time limit so as to speed along the game and prevent so much of the time from being spent watching something other than actual action. The thing is, those rituals, superstitions processes, and other apparent time-wasters have a purpose for the player than engages with them - like any ritual, they're there to help get someone into the correct frame of mind.
This is where the card drawn for today, the Ace of Balls, finally enters the picture. Aces in each suit represent beginnings in the domain that the suit represents. Where the Ace of Bats represented beginnings of action, best exemplified by the hit and run, the Ace of Balls represent mental beginnings. (Which makes sense - the pitcher with the ball in hand is the either the defender most in their head during the game or the second most, depending on how much the catcher calling the game is in theirs.)
Mental beginnings often precede the physical ones, and the success of the mental preparations can directly influence the successes of the physical ones. By starting things in the same way, by getting into the same mental frame every time, the mind influences the body to do things the same way as well. With the increasing speed of a baseball game, as athletes get stronger, some players, including the pitcher, are put in a position where they no longer have time to think about the high-speed orb flying at them and make a decision - they can only react. For catchers and umpires, it's going to hurt a lot if they catch a batted ball with the body, but they at least get some of the sting taken out by having armor on. The pitcher, however, has no such protection and is relying solely on their reflexes to save them should a batted ball come back their way. Without proper mental preparation and body preparation, there are a lot more injuries all around.
The presence of this card in a reading indicates a need for new ways of thinking or is talking about new ways of thinking underway. They're uncertain and not quite fully formed, but if you can get into the habit, they will serve you well. One of the best ways of making new mental states stick is to develop rituals that help prepare the mind. They don't have to be elaborate ones - a deep breath before presenting, ten minutes of the Super Hero pose to boost confidence before a meeting, and so forth.
If there's a downside to this card, it's when the ritual is substituted for what the ritual is supposed to help with, the preference of style over substance, or chasing new things just for their novelty rather than because they might hold something useful. Paradoxically, the way to beat those problems is, well, by starting again with new mental beginnings. The ability to always start again is important for both baseball and life. So give that hitter with the absurdly complex page ritual a little slack - it's their way of getting into the right mindset for the hit the fanatics will be cheering for.
Ask anyone who is about to engage in a physical activity, and they will tell you an important part of staying safe during those activities is proper warm-up and cool-down technique. Doing stretches, light activities, and preparation work allows the muscles to loosen, stretch, and be ready for the strenuous activity that is about to be placed on them. Most sport consists of, at the least, sudden stops and starts, hard turns, use of the arms and hands in violent motions, and sometimes collisions or physical contact with other players. (Unsurprisingly, a large number of sport fouls consist of describing inappropriate contact between players.)
Pitchers have an additional warm up component, where before coming in to the game, they will throw practice pitches as a way of getting their arms into the right form for pitching. Most of the throwing is at gentle speeds, meant mostly to check form and gradually increase velocity to some fraction of the maximum, so that the muscles are purposely relaxed and worked in anticipation of the actual game work. Thus, a synonym for warming up a relief pitcher in the bullpen is to say that they are getting loose.
For all the players, warming up involves throwing and running and fielding practice, to get the body ready and the mind to remember all the experience accumulated so far, so that when the game is on, the responses will be automatic, apparent matters of instinct and reaction bred by repetition and drill over and over and over again until completed to the satisfaction of the coaches. It forms the first layer of the armor between the thinking and the doing, such that the doing doesn't have to rise to the level of the conscious thinking.
The second layer of armor is a bit more individualized. As has been mentioned before, baseball is often a game of superstitions. Striking a round ball with a round bat creates imperfect results for even the best of players, and all the rest of the fielders and rules of the game add to the potential for chaos as they remove certain actions from the field of legal plays.
Against such likelihood of randomness develop lucky charms and actions intended, through practices that probably have the same intent as magic incantations, to make the results a little more predictable, and a little more in favor of your side.
A hitter in the batter box that undoes and redoes their batting gloves after every pitch, a pitcher that takes a short circuit about the pitching mound after every pitch, other hitters that cross themselves before stepping in, the idle spin of the bat before the pitcher goes into their windup, the measured pace of the baserunner taking their lead, always the same, down to the last step. The coaches, managers, and players that always step over the foul line on their way to or from the dugout. To the impatient sure, or the untrained one, many of these rituals and superstitions seem to be efforts in wasting time, and a good argument for why baseball should obtain some form of time limit so as to speed along the game and prevent so much of the time from being spent watching something other than actual action. The thing is, those rituals, superstitions processes, and other apparent time-wasters have a purpose for the player than engages with them - like any ritual, they're there to help get someone into the correct frame of mind.
This is where the card drawn for today, the Ace of Balls, finally enters the picture. Aces in each suit represent beginnings in the domain that the suit represents. Where the Ace of Bats represented beginnings of action, best exemplified by the hit and run, the Ace of Balls represent mental beginnings. (Which makes sense - the pitcher with the ball in hand is the either the defender most in their head during the game or the second most, depending on how much the catcher calling the game is in theirs.)
Mental beginnings often precede the physical ones, and the success of the mental preparations can directly influence the successes of the physical ones. By starting things in the same way, by getting into the same mental frame every time, the mind influences the body to do things the same way as well. With the increasing speed of a baseball game, as athletes get stronger, some players, including the pitcher, are put in a position where they no longer have time to think about the high-speed orb flying at them and make a decision - they can only react. For catchers and umpires, it's going to hurt a lot if they catch a batted ball with the body, but they at least get some of the sting taken out by having armor on. The pitcher, however, has no such protection and is relying solely on their reflexes to save them should a batted ball come back their way. Without proper mental preparation and body preparation, there are a lot more injuries all around.
The presence of this card in a reading indicates a need for new ways of thinking or is talking about new ways of thinking underway. They're uncertain and not quite fully formed, but if you can get into the habit, they will serve you well. One of the best ways of making new mental states stick is to develop rituals that help prepare the mind. They don't have to be elaborate ones - a deep breath before presenting, ten minutes of the Super Hero pose to boost confidence before a meeting, and so forth.
If there's a downside to this card, it's when the ritual is substituted for what the ritual is supposed to help with, the preference of style over substance, or chasing new things just for their novelty rather than because they might hold something useful. Paradoxically, the way to beat those problems is, well, by starting again with new mental beginnings. The ability to always start again is important for both baseball and life. So give that hitter with the absurdly complex page ritual a little slack - it's their way of getting into the right mindset for the hit the fanatics will be cheering for.
