Listen, I am not that person anymore. I am not going to be spending hours searching for the exact frame, somewhere in yesterday’s World Baseball Classic semifinal game between Japan and Mexico — in the late innings, with Lars Nootbaar came up to the plate — that has stayed in my mind since the moment I saw it, throughout that riveting final hour and into today’s game. So, because I am lazy and retired, I’ll describe it to you instead. They were talking about Nootbaar on the broadcast, about that video of him, age 12, describing his goal of one day playing for Japan, and as they talked about him, he was there in the box, embodying his own full-circle moment in every second that he as there, but of course, he probably wasn’t thinking about that. He was probably thinking about winning the game, which Japan had not led at any point, and beyond that, he was probably just thinking about the next pitch. He held the bat up in front of his face, looked at it, took a breath. On the bat’s shiny black surface, you could see, imprinted in dirt, the outline of a baseball and its seams.
It was such a tiny thing, embedded in that familiar motion of a batter slowing down the moment, the racing of competition inevitably toward its end, a reminder to the body of what it always knows but sometimes forgets. In, out. Which foul ball, which base hit, which easy out, left its face on the bat? The ghost of it, carried around, until dirt or impact wiped it away. Even in midst of three of the most exciting innings of baseball I’ve ever watched, for a second, here was something small for you to notice: a few millimeters of twine and a small cowhide surface, long gone, whose impression nonetheless remained. In, out.
I was rooting for Japan to win the championship, obviously, and my stomach lurched as Kyle Schwarber launched foul ball after foul ball into the third deck, then dropped as he finally straightened one out; as Shohei Ohtani fired pitches past Mike Trout — fastball, fastball, then the final strike three, the slider, the ball ducking out of the bat’s path, I threw my arms in the air. I’ve been gasping all throughout these games, standing in the kitchen chopping vegetables, my laptop perched on the edge of the sink. (My partner keeps thinking I’ve cut my fingers.) I’m trying not to restrain myself in these small ways. I learned, as a teenager, that safety was a privilege earned through silence and stillness. I am trying to forget that lesson. I am moving, waving my hands, talking to the TV, as if I’m allowed to, because, of course, I am. I’m allowed to, now.
It means so much to them, they repeat on the TV broadcast, you can see how much it means to them. That’s why it’s so good.
I remember, through the fog of all the things I don’t remember, like a gasp, like the edge of a knife: the realization that this silly game could mean something. That I still knew how to see life, to take some tiny sliver of it and make it matter, because to do so made me happy. I had forgotten that, and then I remembered. Lars Nootbaar’s bat has the ghost of a baseball on it, and Shohei Ohtani struck out Mike Trout, and I remember all over again.
UPDATE 3/22: Thanks to the brilliant Davy Andrews for screenshotting the moment I wrote about. Now you, too, can enjoy the vision of the ghost of the ball on Lars Nootbaar’s bat.