Baseball Drama Soothes U.S. Soul

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 (UPI) -- Yet another catchphrase to sum up the transformation of America since the terrorist slaughters of Sept. 11 -- Everything Old is New Again.

And nowhere was that shown with more drama, tears and heart than in the truly unforgettable Game 7 of the World Series Sunday night in Phoenix when the Arizona Diamondbacks scored twice in the ninth to beat the New York Yankees.

In facing the unparalleled and unanticipated horrors of the 21st century, cool, yuppie, free market, swinging America has found itself stumbling back to many of the basic verities of the 19th. As my UPI colleague Jim Chapin has noted, hard-hat, traditional virtuous, macho, masculine law-and-order values and careers like fireman, rescue worker and cop are suddenly in fashion. Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal celebrates the return of the "manly" man while Arianna Stassinopoulos counters by pointing out the return of the practical, prudent, providing, stabilizing "motherly" woman.

And baseball is back.

It was not supposed to be. It had become passé for almost three decades, when the rising Baby Boomer generation deserted it in their scores of millions for the more brutal, sensational and unrefined but tele-visual and action-packed pleasures of American football. Then the rise of basketball in the 1970s and 80s seemed to demote baseball permanently to third place, if not far worse, in the American sports pantheon. How could it ever dare to hold its head up high again when faced with the deeply satisfying delights of, for example, NASCAR?

Yet here we are at the beginning of the 21st century, with the United States facing a time of unexampled national emergency in the nearly century and a half since the Civil War. And suddenly, baseball is back again.

Many things contributed to its return to the core of the American soul over the past few years, most widely noted, but some not at all.

First, came Cal Ripkin's now legendary "streak" of thousands of consecutive game splayed, breaking the almost six decades old record of the revered "Iron Man", Lou Gehrig himself. Ripkin suddenly emerged as the first of a new generation of wholesome, modest baseball hero that had supposedly vanished with the retirement of Joe DiMaggio around 45 years before.

"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away," Simon and Garfunkel memorably sang in the troubled 60s. Well, indeed he had. But in the incarnations of the quiet, gentlemanly, impeccable Ripkin, the beloved Chicago Cubs hitter Sammy Sosa, and an astonishing array of New Age Lovable New Yankees in the Era of Manager Joe Torre, suddenly he was back.

This development was aided and abetted by the very generation that had buried King Baseball in the 60s by turning their backs on it. The Baby Boomers now grown middle aged and nostalgic with young or teenage children born late after the long extended adolescence of their own "Thirtysomething" era in the 1980s and 90s.

And the Spirits of Baseball, like long-forgotten Christian saints or pagan gods slumbering and forgotten, but still potent with their old healing powers, responded mightily.

Three years ago came the Summer of '98 as Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa competed feverishly to break Roger Maris' 1961 record of 60 homers swatted out of the ballpark in one regular season. Baseball had seen nothing like it for 37 years. Never again in those intervening decades had baseball gripped the generation of an entire generation of Americans through a long and carefree summer as McGuire and Sosa did then. And they were even far more admirable fellows and role models than the unloved and unlovable Maris or the beloved, roistering but self-destructive and unstable Mantle of '61.

In the event, they both did it, and with runs to spare, Eventually, McGuire set the new homes-swatted-in-season record at 70, a full 10 above the legendary 1928 benchmark established by Babe Ruth himself, for two generations until Maris regarded as the most unachievable records icon in American sports. And McGuire and Sosa both were a welcome relief from the bitter, reclusive Maris, who had gone to an early grave lamenting that the worst day of his life was when he broke the Babe's record.

So baseball was already well on the upswing before this World Series and its astonishing finish, as heart-breaking, emotionally draining and satisfying as only the purest of Major League Baseball can ever be.

Sosa went on to top the Babe's 60-homer count in two more seasons, the first and so far only man in history ever to do it. Last year's World Series was a classic Subway Series shoot-out -- a show-down between two great New York teams not seen since the Yankees last confronted the Dodgers back when they were still the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s. It was a clash and contrast between the aging Yankee dynasty and their for so-long despised hard-hat rivals of the Mets over in Shea Stadium. The Yankees won, but every game was a nail-biting, down-to-the-wire classic with never more than a run or two in it.

Before the horrors of Sept. 11 transformed everything, 2001 was already looking to be a season for the ages anyway. Barry Bonds broke Mark McGuire's homers-in-a-season record, setting the new benchmark at 73. And the Seattle Mariners won 116 games in a single season, the most ever in history and quite possibly a record that will never be matched -- though it is always unwise to say that with any certainty about anything in baseball.

But even those fabulous Mariners finally fell, as did another hundred-victories-in-the-regular-season team, the Oakland As, to the post-season, October magic of the old Yankees who themselves had set the previous benchmark record of 114 wins in a season only three years before in that Summer of '98, the year they appeared more sweetly, supreme in baseball than even the Yankees' own Murderers Row hitters of 1928.

On Sunday night, in a sudden desert electrical storm, the Yankees finally passed the golden chalice of baseball to the Diamondbacks, a team that did not even exist six years. It was, for a sports-crazed New York City still mourning the thousands dead of Sept.11, a cathartic experience, shatteringly disappointing and yet deeply, sweetly moving and strangely comforting and healing at the same time. And it was an experience when, as the great Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell noted, baseball reestablished itself as America's game, the nation's game, a game for a wounded and threatened nation suddenly thrown back on recognizing the true treasures of its own tremendous past.

As my New Jersey-born wife, a lifelong Yankees fanatic, always says, "Who'd a thunk it?"