The Chance at Failure: Updike on Baseball

Tomorrow night you can catch the Red Sox for just 10 bucks as they face off against the Pirates in Fort Myers.

Book the flight now and you can get there easy.  

I think of this because last night with sleep eluding me I read John Updike's last book, a collection of poems many of which he wrote from Massachusetts General Hospital where he was when he learned what would kill him; what did kill him very soon after.

If he could walk to the west-facing windows in those last weeks of 2008, he would have been able to see the ball park he wrote so memorably about the day of Ted Williams' last game.

He would have been able to see funny-shaped Fenway Park, built a hundred years ago now, when Babe Ruth played for the Red Sox. 

Anyway this is Updike's poem about baseball from his final collection Endpoint, from Alfred A. Knopf. It's going to be 70 degrees out there today and the birds are just exulting.

I say let's us exult a little too, in the spirit of spring peepers and line drives and those long, long summer games in the warm and velvety nights:

Baseball

It looks easy from a distance,easy and lazy, even, until you stand up to the plateand see the fastball sailing inside, an inch from your chin,or circle in the outfield straining to get a beadon a small black dota city block or more high,a dark star that could fallon your head like a leaden meteor.

The grass, the dirt, the deadly hopsbetween your feet and overeager glove:football can be learned,and basketball finessed, butthere is no hiding from baseballthe fact that some are chosenand some are not—those whose mittsfeel too left-handed,who are scared at third baseof the pulled line drive, and at first base are scaredof the shortstop's wild throwthat stretches you out like a gutted deer.

There is nowhere to hide when the ball's spotlight swivels your way,and the chatter around you falls still,and the mothers on the sidelines,your own among them, hold their breaths,and you whiff on a terrible pitchor in the infield achievesomething with the ball soridiculous you blush for years.It's easy to do. Baseball wasinvented in America, where beneath the good cheer and sly jazz the chance of failure is everybody's right, beginning with baseball.