The Game Doesn’t Have to End
The Game Doesn’t Have to End
By Ben Cosman
The game doesn’t have to end, and it hasn’t. It’s been going year after year, day after day, inning after inning, hundreds of thousands of them, since back when they still started baseball games. Though no one alive remembers first pitch, obviously. One day, we suppose, no one alive will remember the last pitch, should it ever come—today, perhaps. Someday no one alive will remember today.
Yes, today our game, our unending game, could end: there’s a man on third.
The longest baseball game ever, in other words, though at some point that moniker became insufficient. First it was remarkable, then historic, then absurd, then mundane, then unnaturally natural, like an eternal season. Will it be something else, again, if it ends? Will it still be our game?
Not that we’re nervous.
No, we’re always like this, generations of us in the stands, worked up about something, like the inning—did this or that inning happen, actually, or was it a scorekeeping error?—or the score—honestly it’s been so long since anyone scored, all runs at this point are apocryphal—yes, we’ve always been like this, generations of us in the stands, quarrelsome and testy and territorial isn’t the right word, exactly, but it is our game, after all, our unending game.
It’s hot today, there’s a big sun on us. There’s a garish reflection off our faces as we watch to see. The players, too, and they’re fidgety, it looks like. We’re all hot and eager. We can all feel the heat, within and without. Inky sweat stains stretch across our guts, but we’re here. Everyone’s assembled as we were yesterday, when gameplay was called for the night.
It’s the bottom of the inning, whichever inning we think it is; one run would end our game. It’s been a long time since someone scored, as mentioned before, the dearth of runs being necessary to maintain the tied and thus ongoing nature of our game. No one’s gaze strays from third base long on days like these.
The speedy center fielder stretching at third base, lunging toward his toes, hopping around on them in the dirt, limbering. Waiting for someone to drive him in. We wonder what he’s thinking. A long ninety feet, as they say. A lot could happen. Or, he could score. He wants to score, we can tell.
Certain protocols had to be developed, of course. We never play more than nine innings in a day, out of respect for the game.
The stands we sit in have been rebuilt gradually over time, piece by piece, so as to not disrupt the playing of our game, but the unending nature of our game has necessitated repairs—not all things are intended to last forever, not like our game, so every so often a bench has been replaced, and then another, and with as many years as we have the whole place has been replaced, re-placed, but it’s still the same ballpark, our ballpark remains the same, like that hypothetical ship.
The game is also a little bit like that, we suppose.
Generations of us on the field, too, positions inherited like jewelry and land and genetic dispositions, and once a widow’s dog manned right field which was funny until it ran away.
Though it’s frowned upon for a child, once grown, to play for the opposite team of its parents. Nontraditional. That’s not to say we don’t allow it, but certain remunerations are made, typically.
How many outs are there, someone asks rhetorically. Before we can answer, two, rhetorically, there’s a commotion down in the far corner of the stands. Somebody overeager escorted out. We get it, the agitation, but it’s a shame, they’ll miss it.
There was a time we buried players’ bodies underneath the outfield, then the dirt of the diamond and the pitcher’s mound, but room ran out. Now they’re buried in the graveyards with everyone else.
A second game was attempted, once, as a means of distraction, variety. It didn’t last long.
We talk about these sorts of things as we watch, because not a lot happens during the game as we watch, there being no runs in years, so we talk about the things that have happened, before.
But sometimes things happen. It rarely happens, but sometimes a man threatens to end the game, like today. Never has yet, obviously, but any time there’s a man on third we squirm. No one talks about it, but we know we’re all thinking about the man on third, wondering. We think and watch, ready.
They’re about to begin today’s play and we all clench and lean forward, pulled toward the diamond. The umpires convened at home, discussing, probably planning for what should happen, should the man on third score.
Once, during a war, the children played, and a kid, a young kid, maybe ten, would’ve scored but dinner was called so they all went home before he could score, he cut off halfway home, and that night there was an accident. After some deliberation we agreed his pinch runner had to go back to third and of course the inning ended with him there.
There’s some debate whether it would’ve counted, anyway.
Today again, as we’ve said, there’s a man on third who could score. We watch him take his tentative lead, something nervous in his steps.
And then just like that the game resumes, so the pitcher winds and hurls the first pitch of the day and the jittery batter swings at the first pitch of the day and makes good enough contact, by luck we say, that the ball skids past the infield and deep enough to give the speedy man on third plenty of time to make it home, to break the tie, to walk off, and so we burst from the stands, we descend, we crawl and swarm with instinct, this is what we have been waiting for, the whole mob of us, reaching with our hands, snatching at the center fielder as he runs toward the end of the game.
Ben Cosman is a writer originally from Rochester, New York. His fiction has been published by The Baffler and Hobart, and he’s also written for The Millions, Mental Floss, and others.
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