—- 30 —-

A season of watching major league baseball, one team, the 2019 Seattle Mariners at least, left some deep impressions.

I've loved the game in it first entered my consciousness, which, my earliest memory suggests was when I was nine, Willie Mays' over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series.  Since then, surely since the 1958 arrival of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in Los Angeles, much of my life has been lived with baseball as a consistent and continuing background.  It is as deeply rooted in who I am as my fanily heritage, religious faith and political affiliation.

I wondered what how an intense look at the game would impact me, in what would become my 74th year, 

I still love it.  There's more there than I realized.  My 65 years of adoration have not been wasted.  And I look forward with great anticipation to the whatever seasons I have left.

I hear the criticisms: the slow-pace of the game, the greedy owners and narcissistic players, the juiced balls, the obsession with analytics.  I even agree with them, although none strongly.  Maybe because when I took a long look at this past season, at least for one team, I saw much more than the speed of the game and the corrosiveness of free-agency.

Maybe because I came to (and into) the game when I was young, the vestiges of first-blush love are still there.  And the basic joy of playing catch with a son or daughter, so perfectly captured in Field of Dreams, is always present, just below the surface.  Maybe these earlier experiences immunize me from the gloom and doom I hear frequently expressed about the game.  And maybe, in the end, I don't care where MLB falls within the media ratings war.  I'm not sure I care if the game survives.  I'm not a big believer in the eternal existence of anything not divine.

I do know the impact the game has had on me and I am confident humans are sufficiently creative and intelligent to invent new ways to experience the joys of common social experience and carefully choreographed play that baseball has provided me.

The many layers of the game still fascinate me and this close-look through the 2019 taught me a lot.  I see more, understand better, the game at the pitch-by-pitch level.  I don’t think this idea that baseball can be seen, understood, enjoyed in terms of a game-inside-a-game-inside-a-game is unique.  Any game, certainly a team sport, can be appreciated from one level of abstraction to the next, but for me these new revelations have been the real joy of the work.

Finally, I appreciate those of you who joined me on this journey.  It was hard on all of us, but we made it through the season.

Time to look at the calendar for the February date in 2019 for pitchers and catchers to report to spring training.  I'll see you then.