Opinion

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Editorial

The Flight Of Baseball

E

rnie Harwell is no
longer on the Major
League Baseball air-
waves to give his annual reading
from the Song of Songs (2:11,
12) to officially mark the start of
spring training:
"For, lo, the winter is past, the
rain is over and gone. The flow-
ers appear on the earth. The time
of singing is come, and the voice
of the turtle is heard in our land."
But the renewal of baseball in
Florida and Arizona remains the
certain demarcation of the sea-
sons, an assurance that the dark-
est days of winter are behind us.
The role that baseball played
in the Americanization of Jewish
immigrants in the 20th century
has been recounted many times.
It was one of the great forces
that speeded the transition from
greenhorn to Yankee (although,
not necessarily, of the New York
variety).
In the American Jewish
memory, the accomplishments
of Hank Greenberg and Sandy
Koufax, Larry Sherry and Buddy
Myer, Kenny Holtzman and Moe
Berg, rest on an unshakeable

pedestal.
Now the game is gaining a
foothold in the Jewish homeland,
too.
•
The Israel Baseball League
(IBL) announced last month that
it is promoting a plan to build
community diamonds through-
out the country, establish a sum-
mer baseball camp that will open
this July and, eventually, to form
a professional league.

Now the game is
gaining a foot-
hold in the Jewish
homeland, too.

The Jewish National Fund is
even helping out, securing par-
cels of land in Tel Aviv, Netanya
and Beersheva for baseball fields.
According to IBL founder
Larry Baras, more than 2,000
players have joined organized
leagues in the country and Israel
is sending teams to international
tournaments.

The decision to drop baseball
and softball from the Olympics
is a setback, but enthusiasm for
the game is still growing. This
can only be interpreted as a good
thing.
For many years, baseball was
seen as the most intrinsically
American sport. It was equally
at home in rural cow pastures
and on urban streets. It placed
an emphasis on deception and
cunning, but always within the
confines of accepted rules. Its
violence was implied — the
brushback pitch and the hard
slide — rather than overt.
But its appeal has become no
less strong in countries that do
not share the same cultural set-
ting — from Japan to Venezuela
to Australia.
It is heartening to see it take
root in Israel, too, and we hope
its special enchantment will find
soil there in which to grow. ❑

Dry Bones CHASE SCENE

ISRAELI POLICE, WITH1 THE VEHICLE WAS 411
GUNS DRAWN, STORMED DELIVERING EXPLO-
SIVES FOR A TERROR
A VEHICLE ON THE
ATTACK.
MAIN JERUSALEM-TA
HIGHWAY

More information on the
IBL is available by
contacting Larry Baras at
info@israelbaseballleague.com .

PP

A VEHICLE DEGIVERIA
EXPLOSIVES FOR A
TERROR ATTACK WAS
DRIVING ON THE AkIN
JERUSALEM-TA
HIGHWAY

www.drybonesblog.com

Reality Check

A Face In The Crowd

I

n a recent magazine article,
Israeli writer Hillel Halkin
said that on his first visit to
London, the first place he wanted
to see was the home of John
Keats.
It took me a few trips
to London before I made
that pilgrimage, too; on the
Underground to the Hampstead
stop, then a short walk to the
modest house of a poet who died
young and long ago.
Anyone who treasures the pos-
sibilities of the English language
should make the visit.
Keats' most famous work is
"Ode to a Grecian Urn," which
contains the much-quoted line:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty."
But my favorite is a sonnet he
wrote about a woman he had
glimpsed for a few moments at
London's Vauxhall Gardens.
Five years had passed since

then, the poet wrote, and they
never so much as spoke. All
he had seen was a glove being
slipped from her hand. Yet he
could not shake her beauty from
his memory.
How well the old masters
knew human nature. Who hasn't
shared an experience like this?
Maybe it's an off-hand remark
you overheard years ago. If you
asked the speaker today he prob-
ably wouldn't even remember
having said it. But it somehow
stuck in your mind, and in ways
too subtle to recount shaped a
perception.
Maybe it's a fragment of a mel-
ody, so distant that you some-
times feel it came in a dream.
Always hovering just beyond the
limits of conscious memory.
Or a face seen for a fleeting
moment across a room.
When I was in a freshman

saw her again. That
history class at Wayne
was in the spring
State, I briefly made
of 1959, but the
eye contact with a
memory of that
young woman seated
brief instant of eye
several rows away. I
contact still skulks
never learned her first
about my mind.
name. But her last
I get the same
name was Schuster and
sensation when I
I figured she was prob-
Georg e Cantor
listen to a satellite
ably Jewish.
Col umnist
radio station that
Not from Murnford.
plays popular songs
I'd have known her in
from the 1940s. I love the music
that case. Maybe Oak Park.
from the last few years of the
I resolved that I would strike
decade because that is the very
up a conversation sometime
limit my memory can reach.
during the semester. But as the
Every once in a while, they
weeks passed, I could never quite
play a song I know I've heard
muster up the nerve to do it —.
being a rather backward youth in before, a long time ago, in
matters of this nature. The meet- another place, but cannot give a
name to.
ing I had hoped for as a back-up
Instantly, I am transported
plan, in which I rescued her from
back to our apartment on LaSalle
a pirate raid, never materialized,
Boulevard as I sit by the radio
either.
in the failing light of winter
The class ended, and I never

afternoons, waiting for Tom Mix
or Captain Midnight to come on
the air. My mother always set the
dial to Jack the Bellboy or Make
Believe Ballroom, and these were
the songs they played.
"Thou dost eclipse every
delight with sweet remember-
ing," wrote Keats about the lady
at Vauxhall. And grief unto my
darling joys doth bring."
I wouldn't go that far. But then,
I'm not a poet. Just an aging
child, with a distant face and
some half-forgotten songs in his
_memory. ❑ •

George Cantor's e-mail address is

gcantor614@aol.com.

March 30 2006

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