To my Pynchonite Bruddas & Sinisters

[Brad Schreiber]

A screaming line drive comes across the sky.

I'm delighted to read so many posts, not so much urged on but exacerbated 
by our ambivalence about the National Pasttime and Pynchon's spidery 
ambiguity. Perhaps I missed it, but in discussing baseball's alleged (and 
to my mind actual) soporific effect is the connection between baseball 
and our own perceptions of violence.

Football, hockey, basketball have repetitive (and, somewhat to their 
detriment) grinding physical contact that repulses some, excites others. 
Indeed, part of the allure of those sports, I think, is the combination 
of both prowess, speed AND the horrific glee some will experience in 
seeing that guy get high-sticked under the chin, or sensing that oncoming 
crunch when the quarterback has nowhere to go and resigns himself, body 
tucked over ball, to getting sacked, pads and plastic resounding.

But baseball is more akin to the way we really experience violence in the 
everyday realm. Our lives move forward with some level of ritual, no 
matter where our minds may wander. We may even be lulled into having 
lower expectations and then, when it happens, we are shocked by the car 
accident, the thrown punch, the irate slap to the face, or, sadly ever 
more prevalent, the gun shot. Baseball is sinister, in that one can 
consult one's neighbor, eat, keep a boxscore, look around at the crowd, 
watch the scoreboard and theoretically not miss much.

But one never can say when one might be wiping a bit of mustard off one's 
pant leg and miss the batsman hit in the head with the ball, or not see 
the fielder snag that blazing drive. Or hell, look up to see a flying bag 
of peanuts in one's face. It is that intensifed moment of action, in a 
world of seemingly mundane occurrences, that connects baseball to the 
sinister, the darkly unpredictable, and that, in some part, is a 
description of humanity's capacity for unreasoned expression, for 
unfathomable and irrational action, for one never knows when the 
screaming foul tip might plunge itself into the soft flesh of one's face 
(unless you're living life way the hell out in the bleachers.)

Brad Cyber