The poetry of losing

Baseball is the only sport to which The New Yorker dedicates one of their regular contributors; likewise, I venture to guess that The New Yorker is the only literary, or even general interest magazine that dedicates a writer to baseball.

That writer, Roger Angell, has been illuminating the mysteries of the sport for decades (as well as its less mysterious aspects), writing delightful pieces that don't lapse into the cliches (those "timeless" "field of dreams" where "men are playing a boy's game") that are so common (and gagifying) when "literary types" enthuse about the game.

He recently brought that touch to a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece that finds great joy in the losing/hitless streak with which the Yankees opened the season.

"Red Sox fans and local Yankee haters (there are a lot of these) exulted but also shook their heads: geez, what’s wrong with those guys? You could blame injuries (Bernie had missed most of spring training) or age (the Yanks are the oldest team in the majors) or jet lag from the season-opening series against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays that was played in Tokyo, but it was the beautiful and eloquent unpredictability of baseball itself that was making this happen: the sport once again showing us that statistical unlikelihood can come in bursts and bunches, a virus from nowhere, and for a time sever the game and its players from all expectation. Think of Mel Gibson taking up the harp, President Bush being late for a Cabinet meeting while he finishes “The Ambassadors”: this was better."

Planet Steinbrenner, knocked a-kilter by some random meteorite (well, not so random), has since righted itself, hopefully.