The Ball Toss and Growing Up
"Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young." - Roger Angell.
In early 1990, I was flying home after having been away from home for over a week. At the time, my boys were nine and six. The movie on the return trip home was Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner. The film was a fantasy about an Iowa farmer who is haunted by voices imploring him to construct a baseball stadium in the middle of his cornfield. "If you build it, they will come."
To some, the movie was about the fictitious return of "Shoeless Joe Jackson," who had been unfairly banned from baseball after the Black Sox World Series fixing scandal in 1919, to play baseball once again. On a more profound level, it is about how families support each other. Baseball is often the medium within which the conventional passages of life are played out.
The young Iowa farmer, Ray Kinsella, who is the protagonist of the film, has been estranged from his father since the age of 17. Even when they disagreed, baseball used to be the one thing Ray and his father could generally discuss civilly. They could talk while tossing a baseball between them. Their estrangement was deeper than baseball, but it was an argument about baseball that symbolized their final separation. As Ray and his father parted, Ray insulted his father by wondering aloud how his father could idolize a criminal Joe Jackson. Ray's father died before they could reconcile.
At the end of the movie, old ballplayers emerge from the cornfield to play on the field Kinsella had built. One of the players was Ray's father, youthful before the worries of age had overwhelmed him. Ray reconciles with his father through the simple expediency of grabbing a mitt and tossing a ball with his dad. Anyone who would not want to immediately go home and toss the ball around with his son after seeing the movie needs a remedial parenting class.
It is often unclear whether baseball is a metaphor for life or visa versa. Nonetheless, how one tosses a baseball with his child measures the stages of a child's growth as certainly as the marks on a doorway mark a child's height. In the beginning, you sit inside with your son or daughter on a soft floor legs spread, feet touching, so you form a small, enclosed, and protected world. The simple rolling of the ball back and forth unites father and child in a common endeavor.
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