The Physics of Distance

The Physics of Distance

Hartman Kubiat Mandor

I.

The last time I saw my grandfather alive, he was sitting on a plastic chair in the backyard, drinking hot tea from a chipped mug with the Los Angeles Dodgers logo on it. The logo had been rubbed nearly smooth from years in the dishwasher, but the slanted blue “Dodgers” script still clung stubbornly, like a ghost refusing to fade.

He had never set foot in Dodger Stadium. He had never watched a live game. Yet, when he passed away, we found a stack of spiral notebooks in his closet filled with box scores he had copied out from the sports section of the Los Angeles Times. Dates, lineups, strikeouts, runs batted in. Row after row of small, neat numbers, as if he were keeping accounts for a business that would never balance.

My mother asked me if I wanted to keep the notebooks. I said yes, though I didn’t know why.

II.

My grandfather came to the U.S. in 1968 from Taiwan. He had studied physics there, teaching at a small college, but when the opportunity arose to pursue a Ph.D. in America, he left with nothing but a suitcase and a stiff wool jacket.

He had, according to my mother, almost no English when he arrived. He learned by listening to baseball on the radio.

It makes a strange kind of sense. The rhythms of baseball on AM radio—Vin Scully’s pauses, the steady cadence of balls and strikes, the measured quiet in between—are a language lesson in themselves. He learned “strike,” “ball,” “double play,” “home run.” He would repeat them to himself, mouthing the words, learning how the announcer drew out the vowels, how the consonants clipped shut like the crack of a bat.

When my mother was a girl, she remembered sitting beside him as he listened, his brow furrowed not from confusion but concentration, as though baseball were a code he could unlock.

“I think he liked that it was slow,” she told me once. “Other sports moved too fast. Baseball gave him time to translate.”

III.

I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, in a house where Mandarin and English mixed freely, though never without a kind of static in the air. My mother would speak in Mandarin, and I would answer in English. We were like outfielders waving at each other across too much distance, the ball always falling just between us.

But baseball—baseball we understood.

I was ten when I first joined Little League. My mother sat in the bleachers with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, wrapped in a sweater even on days when the California sun was sharp and bright. After games she would tell me stories of how my grandfather had explained the infield fly rule to her when she was a teenager, drawing diagrams on scrap paper at the kitchen table.

She confessed she had never quite grasped it. “But he loved explaining,” she said. “It made him happy, to teach something complicated but beautiful.”

IV.

I didn’t think much about any of this until after he died, when I took the notebooks home. I opened the first one—1982, the Dodgers’ season—and flipped through. It was eerie. He had written every game, as though copying scripture.

But what caught me was the margin notes. Little fragments of English practice:

• bunt = short hit, ground only
• stadium = place for game
• homer = four bases, all players score if on

By the later years, the notes grew more personal:

• Fernando pitched with courage today
• I feel lonely sometimes, but baseball is always here
• Someday I will take my grandson to see Dodgers play

I was that grandson. But he never did.

V.

That summer, I went to a Dodgers game alone. I sat in the upper deck, hot dog balanced on my knees, scorecard in hand. I had always dismissed scorekeeping as an anachronism, but with his notebooks in my backpack, I felt compelled.

The first pitch came in high and fast, and the crowd’s roar went up like a wave. I tried to mark the play—a strike—on the scorecard. My pencil slipped. I didn’t know the symbols.

So I did it my own way, making up codes, half remembering the neat columns of his notebooks. And as the game went on, I realized the act of recording was not about perfection. It was about presence. To write down each out was to insist the game mattered, that each small action deserved permanence.

The Dodgers lost that night, but it didn’t matter. On the train ride home, I thought maybe baseball was never about winning for him. Maybe it was about surviving in a place where words came slow, and where nine innings could make sense when the rest of the world did not.

VI.

A month later, I went to Taiwan for the first time in my adult life. My mother had decided we should bring some of his ashes back, scatter them near the village where he grew up.

The village had changed. Concrete houses where there had once been bamboo huts. Motorbikes screaming down narrow alleys. But when I stood on the small bridge by the rice paddies, I felt something loosen in me — a strange recognition, as if I had stepped into a faded photograph I didn’t remember being in.

That night, my uncle invited me to watch a CPBL game on TV. The Brothers vs. the Lions. The broadcast was noisy, the commentary rapid-fire Mandarin, impossible for me to follow. But the game itself—the rhythm of pitches, the soft thwack of the ball into the mitt, the sudden eruption of a double into the gap—was universal.

And I thought of my grandfather, hunched over a radio in Los Angeles, learning the English word “stadium” while sitting in a rented room that must have felt like another planet. Baseball was his bridge.

VII.

When I came home, I began copying his notebooks. Not just reading them, but tracing them out by hand, game after game. I would sit late at night, lamp burning, filling pages with numbers.

It felt absurd at first. Like I was chasing a ghost. But slowly I realized: the act was not about the data. It was about time. It was about giving shape to days, about fighting against the way memory erodes.

He had done it because he needed structure in a new country. I was doing it because I needed structure in grief. Different reasons, same ritual.

And as I wrote, I found myself whispering the words he had once practiced:
Strike. Ball. Home run.

I could almost hear him saying them too, our voices overlapping across time.

VIII.

One night, I dreamed I was in Dodger Stadium, but the stands were empty, the lights dim. My grandfather was sitting beside me, wearing the same wool jacket he had brought from Taiwan in 1968. He didn’t look old or frail. He looked the way he must have looked when he first arrived — thin, determined, a little lost.

We didn’t speak. We just kept score together, side by side, pencils scratching on paper, the sound filling the silence between innings.

When I woke, the pencil was still on my nightstand. The dream felt less like imagination than memory, as though I had finally sat with him at a game, fulfilling the promise he had written in the margins all those years ago.

IX.

Baseball, I’ve decided, is not about victory. It is about distance—the 90 feet between bases, the arc of a ball in flight, the gap between languages, the years that stretch between generations.

But it is also about what closes the distance: the throw that makes it to the glove, the word learned by listening, the score kept faithfully across decades.

I keep his notebooks on my desk now. Sometimes I add to them, not out of duty but because it feels good. Because it feels right.

And sometimes, in the quiet, I read his words aloud. Words written in the margins, shaky but certain:

Baseball is always here.

Hartman Kubiat Mandor is a passionate writer, author, and content strategist with an
exceptional gift for weaving knowledge-laden, inspiring, and impactful stories that cut across genres. With an instinctive ability to turn ideas into powerful narratives, Hartman writes to educate, transform, and leave a lasting impact on readers—whether they are business owners, professionals, freelance readers or everyday knowledge seekers. He is a Digital Marketing Professional and copywriter, whose work blends in-depth creativity with clarity and purpose. Whether a book, article, or marketing campaign, he meticulously crafts them to resonate with audiences and inspire meaningful actions. A proud member of the International Association of Professional Writers and Editors (IAPWE) and the Association of Self-Publishing Authors (ASPA), UK, Hartman combines articulateness, descriptive analysis and cohesive expressions to deliver quality content, making him not just a writer, but a voice that shapes ideas into movements.

Elliot Lin is a law school student who spends their free time musing about sports and how they shape or reflect identity. You can find their other sports-related illustrations here, on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.

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