Baseball: An Alphabetical Personal Essay in 26 Innings

Baseball: An Alphabetical Personal Essay in 26 Innings

Barrie Cole

A is for all of it. After trying it a few times, and after watching it, and listening to people go on about it, it all just seemed boring to me; so, so, terribly and impossibly boring that there is almost nothing I would have rather done than it: play it, watch it, or have conversations about it.  No, no, and no. 

B is for basis. What was baseball based on? French cooking is based upon butter and that is easy to understand, but baseball seems to be based on a great deal more. There is the ball, yes, with its stitches, as if the ball cut itself chopping onions. And the bats which are like hookless, strangely thick, heavy canes. There is also a lot of running around to these small stages, these platforms, these resting mats, these foot perches, which, of course, are known as bases, where the player feels safe or is safe from getting out. So that all makes sense, but what doesn’t make sense is why wouldn’t you want to get out? Why would you want to stay in when you have to steal and hit and run while you are in?

C is for the crux of the game seems to be about going home after your journey. In The Wizard of Oz, everyone is trying to get home. Home is the bass line and the baseline. It’s important to get there because that’s how you score so you have to run fast and steal sometimes and hurry and run back. And in the game, a person can have a lot of public feelings about what it’s like to try to get home when other people are trying to stop you. You can stomp around and even make a performance of the stomping. You can chew gum and adjust your cap over and over again and do a series of back-and-forth made-up yoga exercises. You can be very still and display your powers of concentration and hope people are looking at your butt. You can even spit.

D is for dugout which sounds to me like the gout. D is for diamond too. I like that in baseball there is a baseball diamond and also how a diamond shape is really just a tilted square. I do think though, that it would be better if baseball diamonds looked more like actual diamonds. It would be especially great if all baseball diamonds sparkled. Night games would be especially dazzling to behold.

E is for exciting. There seems to be this need in baseball to make it more exciting by talking about it over a loudspeaker while the game is being played. Unless a person listens to the game on the radio and needs the play-by-play in order to make sense of it in their imaginations, having someone tell you what is happening when you are already there feels like someone narrating a movie even though you can see it on the screen. Why would they ever do that? 

F is for figuring out what is fun and what is not fun. Fun, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. It’s a “to each their own” situation. For example, I hated sleepover camp. I’d attended at ages 8 and 9 and 10 and 11 and I just wanted to stay home and read. “I won’t bother you. I’ll stay in the backyard,” I told my mother. “I’ll just need a sandwich and some water or even just the water would be fine with me.” She would have none of it, but she said I could go to a day camp called Tween Trails. I agreed because anything was better than sleepover camp. What Tween Trails really ended up being was not a camp at all, but a bus that would pick me up and take me along with 50 other kids to the mall, the zoo, a forest preserve, a beach, and once a week, a minor league baseball game. Those games were so sad, sadder than rodeo clowns or lost pet parakeets. We all sat and watched a field of dreams not come true. Everything was dry and thirsty there. 

G is for game. Sometimes people care a great deal about games and baseball is no exception. Though at times I cannot tell if their caring about what they do is a spectacle of caring or actual caring. Like when a vegan talks to the cheese person at the farmers market for a really long time about cheese even though they will never eat any of it themselves. Do they really care about cheese?

H is for Hailey, my friend in middle school explained to me about the bases as they related to sex. She had a 15-year-old sister named Kathleen who’d say things like, “So did you get to first? You did? Oh my God? What kind of first? Tongue? Oh my God. Did he try to get to second? Do you think you’ll go all the way?” These sex bases were terribly hetero-normative and it always seemed to me that 3rd base really had so much included in it, too much really, and 1st, 2nd, and 4th were just one thing each and that didn’t make sense and it was always the boy getting to the bases so I guess, if you think about it, the girls were the bases! And isn’t baseball more or less the same? There aren’t any women playing, although I bet some wish they could. And women couldn’t even just hang out as fans at baseball games without getting harassed unless they went to special Ladies’ Days events until the 1970s. And even at those events they were expected to have a male chaperone.

I is for before I was married and definitely before I wasn’t married anymore, but when I was dating my former husband, he once took me to a suburb called Buffalo Grove where he’d grown up. Well, there were no buffalo present in Buffalo Grove, but I pictured some anyway, in my mind’s eye. We were there so he could play a yearly baseball game with his high school buddies. I didn’t really want to go, but I’d felt obligated and I also wanted to be supportive. So, I stood there with the other girlfriends, some of whom were already wives and watched the men play baseball and I felt exactly how I’d felt the time I went on a fishing trip with my parents in a remote place in Canada. It was a feeling of such profound discomfort and horrible boredom. It was the kind of boredom that if made to endure for too long, could grab your soul and shake it out from you like one of those Chinese yoyo toys.

J is for jerseys with numbers on the back. The numbers are a secret language and so are the colors of the jerseys. If you know the numbers and colors you can recognize people who also know what you know.  Then, you can talk about baseball at length with people you’ve never met. Jerseys are a club without the need for a clubhouse. 

K is for knuckleball. Knuckleball is a great word. I’ll give baseball points for a word like that. Knuckleballs also prove that throwing is something to marvel at, something that could even have some cool tricks up its own metaphorical sleeves. 

L for liking. The only time I remember liking baseball is the one time in PE when I swung the bat and it actually made contact with the ball. I fouled, but still, the thwack sound was so satisfying. And, looking back, I can almost understand why someone would want to experience that over and over again. The thwack is baseball jazz. I also like the pause right after a player hits but, but before he runs. It’s the comma of baseball. 

M is for my childhood friends, twins, who lived around the corner and played softball which appeared to be the same game as baseball, only with a ball that was large and felt like a nice round loaf of leathery bread, heavy and soft. Sometimes, I’d get a little hungry watching them play catch.

N is for nope, no baseball for me. See, I liked kite flying and balancing peacock feathers on my head. I liked hula-hooping, biking with no hands, and pogo sticking. I liked stilts and roller skates. I liked hide and seek. It was fun to hide in the dark and wait to be found while giggling silently and knowing that eventually I would be.

O is for the outfield. When forced to play baseball in P.E, I would head directly to the outfield wherein, I’d either daydream, panic, or participate in both activities at once. 

P is for panicking. Panicking took place because I could never seem to determine under what circumstances I should attempt to catch the ball should it come my way. Or, if I did happen to catch it, what was I supposed to do with it? Should I run while holding it, or was I supposed to just stand there? Was I supposed to throw it to someone else? If so, someone close or someone farther away? How was I supposed to know which team was which when everyone was wearing the same yellow shirts and blue shorts regardless of which team they were on? The few times I did catch the ball were disasters. And this is precisely why I find it hard to relate to the typical happy ending in baseball films wherein the person in the outfield is able to save the whole game and secure an important win for their team. Nothing remotely like that ever happened to me.

Q is for a quick pitch. A quick pitch is the elevator speech of baseball. Think about it.

R is for run home. That’s what Amelia Bedelia did in one of the Amelia Bedelia books when she played baseball. She ran to her actual home. She also made cookie batter when they said batter up and poured juice from a pitcher. She had homonym problems. That was her silly, relatable shtick.

 S is for shortstop. I have asked about what a shortstop is from time to time and about what his role is and how he is integral to the game. I’ve wondered if a shortstop is required to have a short stature. short temper, or be shortsighted, or none or all of the above. When it is explained to me, as it has been, I believe I get it, and am happy to know, but then I forget again. Interesting how I never forget what a short stack is because I like pancakes, so there’s that.  

T is for Tee-ball which definitely has nothing at all to do with drinking tea, but I’m sure if people did drink tea at a Tee-ball game it would not be frowned upon because little kids usually don’t care about such matters. At age six, adults and their beverages are still mysteries.

U is for umpire. There is a baseball stadium in Australia called Empire Ballpark. When the umpires who work there are asked what they do for work, they can really say, “I’m an umpire at the Empire.” I believe this would be a bonafide perk of the job. 

V is for view. I like the stadium view. Sometimes in baseball movies they’ll show an empty stadium and it fills up the whole screen. There will be the green field too and the scoreboard and the camera will climb up and up the bleachers; seemingly infinitely up. There is something mythic, wide, and theatrical, something blank and rich. A baseball field is a kind of sky on the ground.

W is for when. When I was 14 I had my first kiss. I got to first base with him and he got to first base with me. The base expanded then and everything changed. It took a while to work up the courage for it, but talk about a sky! I could not believe how great it was. I’d thought it would be more like something to get through, like Tween Trails day camp, like childhood itself, but this was something to stay in and learn about what it offered. It seemed to offer quite a bit. And the braces didn’t matter. Braces, on our teeth, not bases on a field, but this field was a new vista of pleasure and if baseball is as thrilling as kissing to some people, then I get it. 

X is for extra innings. Please give them to me with things that I like and none where I do not. I will take extra innings with books. Wouldn’t it be great to find out that there were more chapters in Middlemarch or The Brothers Karamazov? Or, when you are a guest at someone’s home for dinner and the dinner appears to be over but then the host says, “Oops I almost forgot about dessert and they come out with something warm and delicious with raspberries and chocolate. I do not like extra innings when I am going on an errand and the original errand turns into way too many errands because of whatever else happens to be located nearby.

Y is for yelling. Baseball games are good places for yelling. And if you don’t like yelling, you can still enjoy the roar of the crowd because a roaring crowd is a type of lion. 

Z is for zone. So, there is a document called the A to Z Epic Sport Baseball Glossary and it’s a thrilling PDF. So many words and terms: Around the horn, Backdoor slider, Baltimore Chop, Breaking ball, Bronx cheer, Can of Corn, Hot corner, Sacrifice bunt, Uncle Charlie. And then, there is my favorite: wheelhouse. Definition of wheelhouse? A wheelhouse is a hitter’s sweet spot, in other words, their zone. And who doesn’t want to find their sweet spot, their zone? I know I do.

Barrie Cole is a Chicago-based writer who has written more than 15 plays as well as numerous essays, poems, and short stories. Most recently her work has appeared in Airplane Reading and Half of One. Her first book: Lacquer is a Thrilling Word, a collection of poems and short works will be released in the Spring of 2026 by Finishing Line Press.

Andy Lattimer is a gay guy who lives in Southern California. He makes comics, most of which are about baseball. You can read them on his website, andylattimer.com

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