December Days 23 - On Opening Day, All Teams Are Equal (The Ace of Mitts)

[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.]

The Suit of Mitts represents the ways of the heart and spirit. It is a distinct category from the mental and thinking aspects of the game, which are represented by the suit of Balls. At its purest form, the suit of Mitts is the joy of playing the game, regardless of contracts, standings, dramatics, fanatics, and even the thought of winning or losing the game itself. Pure Mitts is okay if full effort went into playing the game, and can appreciate all the parts made in the field, regardless of which team benefited from them. Mitts is the place where the worst thing that happens if the home team loses its that "it's a shame." Mitts is why you learn to keep score, so that you can remember the plays and their attendant emotions in the notations and strokes of the pencil. Mitts is caregivers and children playing catch on the lawn. (While some may think of this as "fathers and sons", the truth is that baseball really only gets gender-segregated when softball is seen as a girl sport and baseball a boy sport. We hope for mixed-gender Major League Baseball to return soon.)

This kind of pure joy that comes from the game, much like Batting 1.000, it's an ideal to strive for, but doesn't always happen a lot in the real world, as players have the reality of food, shelter, and other living expenses to handle, and meeting those needs is often tired to having a winning team of a good performance during games and seasons. At the Major League level, the salaries can seem to be ridiculous, but at the levels below that, there isn't a lot of money being paid out to the players. Plus, humans are competitive creatures, and like to win their contests, or at least be cheering for the side that wins. Which may make some of the appreciation of plays that work against them tempered or blunted somewhat. And teams that are eliminated from the playoffs early in in the season are often working on building resilience by continuing to play out the rest of their games at the high level of professionalism needed, especially those teams that are eliminated early every year. While parity initiatives and revenue sharing agreements help somewhat in trying to get everyone in the league closer to equal, the truth is that some teams are always going to be able to attract high-caliber players easily, either with big contracts or on the strength of the team's reputation for victory and quality baseball. Say what you will about buying victories, but a team with the financial freedom to lure the best players of other teams away has a distinct advantage when they need to increase their talent pool to satisfy the fanatics.

One of the promises of every sport with a season of play is that the season will end, and that no matter how well or poorly your team did, the next season is the promise of something fresh and new. In the first day of the season, everyone has the same record, every team has the potential to win it all, every player could have a stellar year. The slate is blank and ready for the players to carve what's important to them on it. Each season's beginning is a call to put away grudges, jealousies, and the downs of last year and return to hope, optimism, and the simple joys of playing the game one loves (and might be lucky enough to get paid to do).

This promise is a lot easier to handle when you have many potential seasons still left in your career than when you get close to retirement without having a team that has won a championship or made much of a playoff appearance at all. Mitts is the suit that is supposed to help with burnout, but also the suit that helps with despair and the worry that one's career hasn't been worth anything, because it lacks Signature Achievements or national knowledge or a high-profile and memorable highlight reel. Mitts promises that taking joy in the game itself, and in playing the game well, will be enough to produce satisfaction and happiness. A perspective that often works better once out of the game and able to view it from distance and with the lens of perspective, through the eyes of the coach watching their players develop and nurturing them along the way, or through the eyes of the umpire, enforcing the rules and making judgments from them without the burden of having to be favorable to one team or another. The complexity and beauty of the game stand out the most, I think, when someone is viewing it from the nonpartisan lens, to see how all the years of the game being played have shaped the rules, the designs of the stadia, the equipment, and even the songs sung at the stretch. Behind all the statistics are stories, and sport, much like other human pursuits, depends on stories and storytellers to keep the emotional and spiritual content of the game alive, as testament to the athletes and to the design of the game, that it allows for the truly spectacular to happen at any play, any day, from any player or team. Mitts always calls us back from cerebral analysis, the many hours of training that backstop the performances on the field, substance abuse, scandals, and the many horrible things humanity will do to use their power to enrich themselves at the cost of others. The game itself is enough, Mitts tells us, and if we can live and play such that the game itself is truly enough, then we will find the unshakable happiness at the core of sport.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
and gie's a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak' a right gude-willie waught,
for auld lang syne.

December Days 24 - Out of Reach (The Seven of Mitts)

[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.]

Not every hit ball will be caught. If it were, baseball would be a very boring game. (As it should have been for the super-speed-enhanced Cullen clan in Twilight.) The six fielders of the infield can cover a lot of ground, as can the three in the outfield, but there's more space available in fair territory than any fielder can totally cover. Hot shots from the bat can put a ball past the infield within a few seconds, rolling contentedly on the outfield grass until scooped up by an outfielder and thrown back in. A perfect bunt is designed to stop equally distant from all the fielders converging on it, preventing any of them from throwing to any base to collect an out. A ball that crosses the outfield fence in the air is still a home run, regardless of whether it's into the upper deck or just beyond the line.

Some of these hits are obvious that they won't be fielded for an out. Some of them end up becoming circus catches, with the accompanying cheers from the fanatics for the success of extraordinary effort. And then there are the ones that look like they could be caught, but end up just beyond the ability of the fielder's outstretched glove. Depending on how much diving, leaping, or all out effort is going on from
the fielder, the hit goes for extra bases while the backup fielder runs down the ball and gets it back into the infield. The reward potential from making the catch was great, but the risk potential for missing is similarly great. And since it's often very difficult to see the difference between a ball that will be a circus catch certain one that will be out of reach, many baseball players sacrifice knees, chests, uniforms, socks, and other body parts to try and reel in balls that are ultimately not going to be catchable. Not making that kind of effort during a game is usually a fast way to the manager's doghouse, the bench, or a trip to the other leagues as an attempt to get a player to understand their effort is lacking.

Even when fielders are putting in all the effort they can, there are some balls that are going to be out of reach because of the way they're hit. The defense can't run faster, jump higher, stretch farther, or do anything more physically to catch the ball, not unless they have some sort of mechanical advantage, a time-stopping device, or the cheat codes to reality. Everyone has to admit at some point that there will be things that are out of reach - some clearly so, others that tantalizingly hang there as they fall and taunt us, showing us the failure that is about to happen.

So this card, when it appears in your reading, is ultimately about limitations. Accept that some things are beyond you at this point and that you cannot be everything to everyone all the time. Yes, it means taking a hit, and possibly even giving up a run or more, and sometimes it means losing the game. If you can accept what your limits are right now, you will be able to play the next ball better - maybe you have to shade a little bit more one way or another to compensate for the hitter's tendencies. Maybe you have to think about self-preservation first and defense later. Maybe your first step has to be back before you can come in to catch a fly ball, just to be sure that the ball isn't hit harder than it looked. Maybe you need more practice, or to learn a new skill, before you can catch the next ball sent your way. Acknowledgement of your limits is what makes it possible to work toward overcoming them, if that's what you want to do.

The bad side to this card is the person that cannot admit that they have limits, the person that refuses to respect them when they appear, and the person that continually hurts their own self-image chasing things that are out of reach by blaming everything on themselves. None of these approaches produces a happy and stable relationship between a person and others or a person and themselves. If the first step is admitting there are limits, these people will stay stuck and increasingly frustrated that their current skills can't seem to get the job done.

Everyone has limits, even those that claim they have no limits. The right environment is necessary to acknowledge and then do the work so that someone's limits are what they have consciously chosen to accept. By putting some things out of reach, one can narrow the scope of existence (and sport) to a more manageable level.