Baseball is boring. Until it isn’t. Even with the new pitch clock working its magic, there’s still a lot of standing around. There’s time between each half-inning to chat. Before the bottom of the seventh, the entire crowd stands up and sings Take Me Out to the Ballgame — a wonderfully anachronistic moment of civic harmony.

America needs more communal singing.

Unlike basketball and football, baseball is a game of perspective. It moves at a leisurely pace. Players, umpires, and fans have time to talk, get to know each other, and tell stories.

Nobody tells a better baseball story than Joe Posnanski.

Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments (2023) by Joe Posnanski may not be the most important book you’ll read this year, but if you care at all about the game this will be the book you’ll cherish. This is a love letter of the best kind, bringing together the long history of the game with the uniqueness of the moment when someone — player, umpire, coach, fan, sportswriter, or even you — fell in love with baseball, all told with Posnanski’s “trademark wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and acute observations.” These forever moments are magical or, to use Posnanski’s “favorite definition of magical: ‘beautiful or delightful in such a way as to seem removed from everyday life.'”

I hate it when George Will is right, but he perfectly captures the essence of the author when he says, “Posnanski must have already lived more than two hundred years . . . how else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories.”

The book title promises 50 special moments in the game’s history, but Posnanski admits that there’s more. He occasionally interrupts his countdown to the top moment in baseball history to insert five bonus memories so he can highlight trick plays, meltdowns, memories that are absolutely guaranteed to bring a tear to your eye, and more.

In all, there are 108 moments and memories. Even that number is magical. There are 108 stitches on one side of a baseball. The Cubs’ World Series drought lasted 108 years. Some physicists did a study and determined that Nolan Ryan threw the fastest pitch ever recorded at 108 mph. The Big Red Machine — the 1975 Reds — is, I believe, the greatest team of them all. They won 108 games.

Why We Love Baseball includes fictional moments from film, moments from the dead ball era before Babe Ruth forever changed the game, moments from players in the Negro and Japanese Leagues, and moments from our childhood. In fact, the book begins with Posnanski as a 10-year-old, when Cleveland’s Duane Kuiper is his favorite player. The Indians’ second baseman hit one home run in his career, but he was Posnanski’s hero because he always played the game with “verve and love.” The description of listening to that home run call on the radio is priceless. And there’s a beautiful postscript where Kuip, by then a beloved broadcaster for the San Francisco Giants, sends Posnanski an authentic game-used Duane Kuiper bat and cap out of the blue. That’s why we love baseball.

Posnanski finds Joe Niekro teaching the eight-year-old Chelsea Baker how to throw a knuckleball, which at age thirteen made her the best Little League pitcher in the country. You’ll discover why Mariners fans suffer endlessly “in exchange for the mere possibility of sublime rapture,” as with “The Double” in the 1995 ALDS versus the Yankees. “Sometimes we even get it.”

Joe helps us relive the “exuberant, carefree, exhilarating” Javy Baez no-look tag on Nelson Cruz in the 2017 World Baseball Classic. We read of old Sid Bream chugging home to score for Atlanta in the 1992 NLCS, a memory where in real time I ran screaming around the house as Skip Carey yelled BRAVES WIN! BRAVES WIN! There’s the marvelous set-up, telling, and then coda to George Brett’s epic pine tar home run meltdown. Most don’t remember that the call was overturned, the Yankees took the case to court where they were represented by the infamous Roy Cohn, the judge threw out their case with a two-word decision — “Play Ball” — and the Royals eventually won the game.

Those who have crafted the words that feed our memories also come in for praise. Vin Scully’s call of the final inning of Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game is included, with the perfect line, “[T]here’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.” John Updike, writing “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” in the New Yorker about Ted Williams’ failure to take a curtain call after a final home run, comes up with the classic, “Gods do not answer letters.”

Every moment you remember (and then some) are included: Giambi fails to slide. Galarraga’s imperfect game and his grace afterwards. Don Larsen, who may have had too much to drink the night before the day when “The imperfect man pitched a perfect game.” The ball conks off Jose Canseco’s head for a home run (and I’m still doubled over in laughter).

My personal favorite: Howie Kendrick’s go-ahead home run for the Nationals in Game 7 of the 2019 World Series.

I don’t have any quibbles with Joe’s top 5 moments, but I’ll only mention one so as not to spoil the ending. I’ve written about it before. It is “The Catch” — Willie Mays’ incredible catch and throw in the 1954 World Series. The catch itself was amazing, but Mays stops in full stride, “whirled and threw ‘like some olden statue of a Greek javelin hurler,’ the novelist Arnold Hano would write.”

Baseball is all about perspective. We love it, and yet it also breaks our heart. A. Bartlett Giamatti said it best.

It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

Why We Love Baseball — which I’ll pick up again and again — may help postpone that heartbreak this winter.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Clay Brown on Unsplash