PLAY BALL! A sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer, Delivered at First UU Congregation, Ann Arbor, MI, April 3, 2005 Star Spangled Banner's last notes are heard, and then the cry, "Play Ball!" The first professional baseball game I saw began with that music and those words shouted out by the home plate umpire. The stadium was Sulphur Dell, home of the Double A Nashville Vols. The year was 1947. I was nine; already enthralled with the game from both playing it and listening to Larry Munson describe the Vols games on the radio. As I went home that night, I decided that playing baseball was the best possible work that a man could do. I resolved to do that work. By the time I was 14, I had learned the truth of Johnny Pesky's remark that "it's such a simple game, and so hard to play." Much as I loved the game, I could not play it. The one thing I could do consistently and well was bunt, and no professional league has a role for a designated bunter. I accepted my lot in life as that of fan, and turned to a less demanding profession, ministry. In person or on radio or television, I have followed major league games, seen minor league games, enjoyed University of Michigan games, and watched my two older grandsons play whenever possible. I have also read voraciously about baseball, especially during the off-season. Blessedly, there are many writers of quality who are as devoted to this sport as I. Roger Angell, Ernest Hemenway, Bernard Malamud, Mark Twain, George Will, Bruce Catton, Marianne Moore, Stephen Jay Gould, Bart Giamatti, David Halberstam, and hosts of others have written about baseball, not to speak of legions of sportswriters like Red Smith and Roger Kahn, Fred Lieb, Lawrence S. Ritter, Thomas Boswell, and so many more of greater or lesser ability. It is noteworthy that unlike other sports-say, football, basketball, or hockey-baseball has its own volume in The Library of America series. Despite unfortunate aspects of professional baseball-greedy owners, greedy players, rampant commercialism, and the designated hitter--I still love baseball with a deep passion. Baseball, in Bruce Catton's words, "is the greatest topic of conversation America has produced." That conversation is lively not just in our country, but in many Latin American countries, in Japan, in Korea, and many other lands. From Little Leaguers to major leaguers, the players come from all over-Ryan, Chen, Lopez, Tejada, Kim, Thomas, Sauerbeck, Ichiro, Baldelli, Fontenot, Ramirez, Schilling. The central topic of conversation in America from the earliest settlers onward has been race. Originally, black players were part of the game. Then racists like the immensely talented Cap Anson persuaded the owners to bar black players. Under the iron fist of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the racial barrier was strengthened. Finally, in 1947, Jackie Robinson literally took his life in his hands to integrate baseball, the opening salvo in what became the breakdown of the Jim Crow system both south and north. Someday, maybe even women will be able to play in the professional leagues, as they now do in children's leagues and as they have always done in pick-up games on sandlot diamonds. After all, it was Katie Casey who was "baseball mad" and who told her beau she did not want to go to a show but that he could "take me out to the ball game. Take me out with the crowd..." I'd like to go out at the ball game today, opening day, the day time begins, the day one of my two favorite teams-the other one is the Chicago Cubs- begins the defense of its World Series title. What fun! But does any of this matter in the least? Of course, it does! Not for every one. Nothing matters for every one. But for a great many people, baseball matters very much indeed. How much it matters was reflected in the recent Congressional hearings into steroid use in baseball. Our elected representatives were awe-struck to be hanging out with present and former major league players like Jim Bunning, Rafael Palmeiro, and Sammy Sosa. So why does baseball matter? Here are nine reasons. Nine has the practical significance of being the number of players on a team and the number of innings required for most games. Nine has the symbolic significance of being three-a divine number in number symbolism-times three. In other words, it's a heavenly number. First, baseball is only a game. Despite all the trappings-presidents throwing out the first ball, writers declaiming that "life imitates the World Series," and much prattle about the heroics of certain players-baseball is essentially play, not real life. The difference is, as Bruce Weber put it: "baseball is fair and life is famously not." I know that fans of certain ball clubs-the Cubs, for example-might protest that baseball is not fair. I respond by saying that the game itself-not the major league version, which is only a minor part of what baseball is--is very fair. It rewards talent. It involves luck. The rules apply to everybody. At every level of play on any given day any one team can beat any other team. Life is not like that. Often the talentless are rewarded. Luck is part of real life, but so is cheating, being born in favorable circumstances, or knowing people with sufficient influence to keep us out of trouble even if we are rascals. Billy Martin was a very successful player and manager, but he had a lot of trouble with life. His life ended when he drank too much and crashed his car. Baseball is play. As children, we spend a lot of time playing. As grown-ups, we have to do more work than play. Baseball can take us back to the days of our childhood and remind us of how important play is. Baseball is played outdoors. It is played in warm weather. We rightly associate it with being out of school, being free, being unhurried. I remember, not specific games, but the way we played baseball as a child. Lay out some bases and foul lines with whatever came to hand, rocks or t- shirts or even trees. Choose up sides with the two best players choosing one boy or girl at a time. Everybody played no matter how many there were. Everybody got a turn at bat. We stopped only with darkness or too many mothers calling us in to supper. Sometime in the 1840's the first baseball game was played in New Jersey. The site was the Elysian Fields, the name of the playground of the gods in ancient Greece. I dreamed as a child of winning a game with a home run in my last at bat. I was 47 when I realized that dream at a 25th college reunion afternoon game which went on for an uncounted number of innings till a shifting lineup of players agreed we had come to the last inning. I was at bat with two out and the bases loaded, my team down by three runs. Charley Steele grooved one for me and I hit that ball hard enough that I was able to lumber around the bases behind my three teammates with the winning run. At 47, I was no kid, but I felt like one, not a middle-aged minister. Nineteen years later I am still glowing from that play. Baseball is play. As Richard Ford pus it, "when a game's over you can, if you choose, happily forget all about it without paying it an insult. It's why they call it a pastime." Baseball is play. It is also thoughtful. Michael Mandelbaum correctly observes that baseball "is less straightforward, more complicated, more cerebral, and therefore more interesting to watch, to think about, and to discuss" than any other game. Baseball fans do it endlessly, before, during, and after a game. Baseball gives us time to think. Its intricate dance has pauses when we can talk about what we have seen. There is time between pitches to discuss what the pitcher just threw and what he is likely to throw next. There is time between innings to review what has just happened and ponder what will come next. Sometimes there are rain delays that give occasion for yet more reflection. The months after the season ends are always filled with a lot of thinking about possible trades, retirements, injuries that could affect a player's career, and a careful review of the statistics that are so vital a part of the game. Just as statistics play an essential role in economics and politics and business and medicine, so too in baseball. From the scorecard on which fans can keep a running tally of the progress of the game to the box score that appears at game's end, statistics-how many runs, how many hits, how many errors, what kind of hits, etc.-help us to understand what has happened and what is likely to happen on the field. The latest version of statistical inquiry is called sabermetrics, a somewhat controversial approach to the game that uses different statistical analyses than simple batting average and pitcher's wins and losses. It is worth noting that for the past two years the preeminent sabermetrician, Bill James, has been in the employ of the Boston Red Sox. Baseball, Mark Hayes tells us, "is the game in the United States about which the most is written, whose history is studied the closest, and whose cultural roots lie the deepest. Baseball is the sport...that Americans take most seriously...We think about baseball a great deal." Fortunately it is a game that bears such scrutiny well. Thirdly there is baseball's relation to time. Baseball more than any other sport is the sport of hope. Baseball, as one observer noted, is "another calendar by which we mark time." Thomas Boswell even thinks that "time begins on opening day." Come February and the start of spring training, every baseball fan feels a quickening of the pulse. Six weeks later, on opening day, every team will have an unblemished record, every team will aspire to win it all this year. This is the next year we told ourselves to wait for after last season's losses. I know, calendars begin with January and real-life starts in September with school and folks returning from vacation. But the moment when hope is highest in the human heart is the end of winter, the easing of the cold, the coming of fertility in the ground, the start of the baseball season! Now! As Stephen Jay Gould has noted, we Americans are mostly an urban not a rural people. For us, culture more than nature tells us of the passage of time, the cycles of repetition in the year. The culture of baseball signals the beginning of the year for us. Jacques Barzun was right: "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball." Beyond this cyclical aspect of time lies another, the fact that baseball is not played to a clock. You choose how many innings you will play-nine in professional leagues, seven or six in various school leagues, more if the teams are tied at the end of that many innings. You play as long as it takes to finish the game. The timelessness of baseball is wonderfully appealing. No silly stalling as there is in basketball. No wasted time as there is football where the clock actually runs more when there is no play than it does when the players are lunging at and assaulting each other. Baseball is played in the realm of no-time, of eternity, if you will. In the Great Beyond where time is no more, the game goes on, as Moe and Sam found out. They loved baseball and made a pact that whoever died first would try to contact the other one to report on whether baseball was played in heaven. Sam died, and a few weeks later Moe heard a voice calling him in the night. It was Sam, reporting to Moe that he was in heaven and that he had both good news and bad news. Moe asked for the good news first. "Moe, there is baseball here. Our buddies are all playing. It's always a warm summer day, no rain-outs, and we can play all we want without getting tired." Moe said, "That's wonderful! But what's the bad news." "You're pitching next Tuesday." Baseball has its feet firmly planted in time and in eternity. Baseball like no other sport and like no other dimension of American life has a memory. Memory is what gives us a foothold in history. Memory enables us to see the foundation on which our lives stand. Memory is humbling and inspiring, teaching us great accomplishments of the past-like Cy Young's 511 victories, a record that will not be broken-and urging us to do better than even the great Joe Dimaggio by getting hits in 57 consecutive games. Baseball fans and players remember. We remember past performances and compare them to present performances. Barry Bonds hit more home runs in one season than Mark McGwire, who hit more than Roger Maris, who hit more than Babe Ruth. Which is the better player? What was the competition like for each of these players? What were the stadiums like? Is the ball more juiced up now than before? These arguments are grounded in history, in a knowledge of bygone days that Americans do not have for any other part of their lives. Don DeLillo, whose novel UNDERWORLD opens with an almost 100 page description of the day Bobby Thomson hit the "home run heard round the world" writes of "the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports." Few fans of other sports have any idea at all where the sport was first played. Baseball fans knew for years that the first game was played at Cooperstown, where the Hall of Fame is, until we learned that it was really played in New Jersey. We are now busy tracing the history of baseball to its probable inception in a game called rounders, with obvious associations with cricket. Baseball fans know that Babe Ruth was the greatest player ever because he mastered both the art of pitching and the enormously difficult craft of hitting. Baseball fans remember that Bob Gibson posted a 1.12 earned run average in 1968, which led to the major leagues lowering the pitcher's mound to give some advantage back to the batter. Baseball fans know about Mickey Owen dropping the third strike in the 1941 World Series and Don Larsen's perfect game in 1956. Baseball fans compare the Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig, and his strong of consecutive games played with Cal Ripken's longer streak. Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, and a few others are compared to great pitchers of old, like Warren Spahn and Christy Mathewson and Satchel Paige. The memory of great players and great teams, of baseball's racial sins and slave labor before free agency, of memorable games and of memorable owners like Bill Veeck and Charley Finley are part and parcel of what baseball is all about. Baseball is about excellence. The philosopher William J. Morgan, in an article on "Baseball and the Search for an American Moral Identity," tells us that "in the eyes of many... baseball conjured up a moral image of America at its best-a nation of strivers moved not so much by greed and crass self-interest as by a larger vision of excellence, one obtained only by arduous effort, social cooperation, and an abiding sense of fair play." Baseball is really hard to play well. No less an athlete that the great star of the Los Angeles Lakers and former Michigan State basketball star, Magic Johnson, once said that hands down, hitting a thrown baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. The physicist Robert Adair agrees. He reported a few years ago to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science that "a batter facing a 90mph fastball has less than a quarter second to see the pitch, judge its speed and location, decide what to do, then start to swing. To make contact, the bat must meet the ball within an eighth of an inch of dead center and at precisely the right millisecond as the 3-inch spinning sphere whizzes by. It is a superhuman feat that is 'clearly impossible.'" Yet, there are people who can do this with consistency, with power, and with strategic intent: Ty Cobb, George Brett, Willie Mays, Ted Williams. Pitching is not simple either. It is as much a matter of intelligence as it is of talent and training. You have to be able to throw the ball to particular spots. You have to mix up your pitches to keep the batter off-stride. You have to throw a sinker, a curve, a knuckle ball, or any one of a number of other pitches with enough regularity that batters do not hit everything you throw at them. Knowing how and when to do these things requires both training and thought. You have to have a good body and a good mind to excel. Bob Gibson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Sandy Koufax, and Fernando Valenzuela come to mind. Another aspect of the excellence of baseball is that at the highest levels of play, fielders will cleanly field the ball well over 90% of the time. If you have ever been in the field and had a ball hit hard at you, you will know that it is not as simple as it looks, whether fielding a grounder in the infield, catching a fly in the outfield, spearing a hard shot back through the pitcher's box, or catching the pitches a pitcher throws. My career in baseball, ended the day I ran in to catch a fly that soared a good 20 feet beyond where I had started. I just kept on running into the locker room to take my place in the stands where, with my slow reflexes and poor eyes, I belong. Baseball demands excellence. That means hard work and learning how to pay attention to the game at all times. Baseball is also a game that understands failure. Failure is indeed built into the very nature of the game. Christopher H. Evans and William R. Herzog II, in the concluding article of their book THE FAITH OF FIFTY MILLION: BASEBALL, RELIGION, AND AMERICAN CULTURE, point out that "baseball, in American culture, both individually and socially, is often about losing." The game between the lines is fair, no question about that, but it is so hard that few indeed can play it well all the time or even most of the time. Greg Maddux has won 15 games for 17 consecutive years, an astonishing record given that only eight other pitchers have won that many in a season for ten years or more in a row out of several thousand men who have pitched in the major leagues. Consider that hitting a baseball safely between or beyond the fielders occurs for the best batters only between three and four times that they bat. And each turn at bat can involve being fooled several times by pitches or barely getting a piece of the ball that then goes foul. Bartlett Giamatti was the president of Yale University before he was promoted to the position of president of the National League. He taught us that "Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone." Major league teams can count on losing 60 games even if they are very good. Bad teams, like the Detroit Tigers a couple of years ago, can lose as many as 120 games out of 162 played. At the end of the season in professional and collegiate ranks, all but one team at each level will either lose their last game or have a record of losses so poor that they leave the field of play earlier than others. And people play this game every day for six months in the major leagues, a little less than that in the minors, and for varying long terms in amateur leagues. Failure is part of the game, just as it is part of life. If you cannot deal with failure, you will never play or enjoy baseball-or life, for that matter. Time precludes full discussion of the next three points, which I will make only in summary, just as this sermon is a very abbreviated form of the many hours on which I would willingly speak about baseball. Baseball celebrates the individual. As Michael Mandelbaum has noted, individualism is one of "the defining features of...(baseball), the basis for its place in American culture." Each individual in the field has to be alert every time a pitch is thrown since it is not known what will be the result of that pitch-a ball hit to the field, a ball hit foul, a missed swing, a ball not swung at. Every ball in play requires the full attention of every fielder, either as a direct participant or as a back-up if something goes awry. Every time a player goes to bat, he is alone in the batter's box, every superstitious habit, every nervous tic observed by everybody , fully responsible for what he does with the pitch: swing, take, bunt. The pitcher he faces is similarly alone, responsible for making the pitch do what he wants it to, a much harder task than it looks. In baseball, every player is fully revealed in glory or shame, visible to the naked eye. Individualism is so important to the game that it is almost as though baseball is not a team sport. But it is a team sport, and this is the eighth point, that baseball builds community. You simply cannot play the game by yourself, despite the apocryphal tales of the great Negro League and later major league pitcher Satchel Paige telling his fielders to quit the field since he planned to strike out the side. Not knowing where the ball is going means each fielder has to coordinate with the others. Getting on base is good, but you almost always need the help of other batters to be able to score. With occasional exceptions, double plays could not happen without at least two players being involved who know how to coordinate their movements. Coaches give signals to batters and runners so that such plays as a hit and run, a squeeze bunt, or a steal can be accomplished. No matter how good a pitcher is, he can only pitch in a limited number of games. It takes a pitching staff of 10 or so players to be successful. Community extends beyond the players to include in the case of Little Leaguers their parents and siblings and friends. Last October the whole world became aware of a long existing phenomenon involving a whole region of this country, Red Sox Nation, members of which community were found literally all over the world. Baseball celebrates community! One final thing is the language of baseball. Ball and bat are the essentials of the sport, words that represent play everywhere. Baseball is about home- home plate, coming home, hitting home runs, home as journey's end as well as beginning. Baseball has the diamond, bases (as in fundamentals), the outfield grass, and fair play. I like what George Carlin said: "Football has the 'two-minute warning.' Baseball has the seventh inning stretch.' Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, aerial assaults, late hitting, long bombs and short bullet passes, a blitz and unnecessary roughness. Baseball has the sacrifice." As Yogi Berra said, "When you sacrifice , you stand beside your teammates, by putting them in front of yourself." The language of baseball, of the game itself, not the hideous commercial intrusions into the game, is humane and moral. Baseball is a game, but what a game! It is a thoughtful game, a game of hope because it is played without regard to time. Baseball invokes memory, strives for excellence but understands failure. Baseball celebrates the individual but is impossible without team play. The language of baseball lifts the spirit. Annie Savoy, the character played by Susan Sarandon in the movie Bull Durham, pointed out the religious dimensions of baseball: "I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I've worshiped Buddha, Allah, Shiva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that, I gave Jesus a chance...but it just didn't work out. The Lord lay too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology...I've tried them all-I really have- and the only church that truly feeds the soul day in and day out is the Church of Baseball." As Tim Russert put it, "Baseball. If there's a more beautiful word in the English language, I have yet to find it." There isn't. Copyright 2005, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved, BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Nicxholas Acocella and Donald dewey (Compilers), THE GREATEST TEAM OF ALL TIME: AS SELECTED BY BASEBALL'S IMMORTALS, FROM TY COBB TO WILLIE MAYS, Bob Adams, Inc., 1994. 2. Roger Angell, THE SUMMER GAME, Popular Library, 1976. 3. ................, FIVE SEASONS; A BASEBALL COMPANION, Popular Library, 1978. 4. ................, LATE INNINGS: A BASEBALL COMPANION, Ballantine Books, 1982. 5. ................., SEASON TICKET: A BASEBALL COMPANION, Ballantine Books, 1988. 6. ................., (Steve Kettmann (ed.), GAME TIME: A BASEBALL COMPANION, Harcoiurt, Inc. ,2003. 7. Allen Barra, CLEARING THE BASES: THE GREATEST BASEBALL DEBATES OF THE LAST CENTURY, Thomas Dunne Books, 2002. 8. Robert Benson, THE GAME: ONE MAN, NINE INNINGS, A LOVE AFFAIR WITH BSAEBALL, Jeffrey P. Tarcher.Putnam, 2001. 9. Howard Bryant, SHUT OUT: A STORY OF RACE AND BASEBALL IN BOSTON, Routledge, 2002. 10. Thomas Boswell, HOW LIFE IMITATES THE WORLD SERIES, Penguin Books, 1982. 11. ...................., WHY TIME BEGINS ON OPENING DAY, Penguin Books, 1984. 12. ..................., THE HEART OF THE ORDER, Penguin Books, 1989. 13. Eric Bronson (ed.), BASEBALL AND PHILOSOPHY, Open Court, 2004. 14. David James Duncan, THE BROTHERS K, Doubleday, 1992. 15. Charles Einstein, WILLIE'S TIME: A MEMOIR, Berkley Books, 1979. 16. Christopher H. Evans and William R. Herzog II (eds), THE FAITH OF FIFTY MILLION: BASEBALL, RELIGION, AND AMERICAN CULTURE, Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. 17. a. Bartlett Giamatti, TAKE TIME FOR PARADISE: AMERICANS AND THEIR GAMES, Summit Books, 1989. 18. Stephen Jay Gould, TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY IN MUDVILLE: A LIFELONG PASSION FOR BASEBALL, w.w. Norton and Company, 2003. 19. David Halberstam, SUMMER OF '49, William Morrow and Company, 1989. 20. ......................, OCTOBER 1964, villard books, 1994. 21. Donald Hall, FATHERS PLAYING CATCH WITH SONS: ESSAYS ON SPORT (MOSTLY BASEBALL), North Point Press, 1985. 22. Lee Heiman, Dave Weiner, and Bill Gutman, WHEN THE CHERRING STOPS: EX-MAJOR LEAGUERS TALK ABOUT THEIR GAME AND THEIR LIVES, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990. 23. Roger Kahn, THE BOYS OF SUMMER, New American Library, 1976. 24. ..............., MEMORIES OF SUMMER: WHEN BASEBALL WAS AN ART AND WRITING ABOUT IT A GAME, Hyperion, 1997. 25. W.P. Kinsella, SHOELESS JOE, Ballantine books, 1982. 26. Fred Lieb, BASEBALL AS I HAVE KNOWN IT, Tempo Books, 1977. 27. Bernard Malamud, THE NATURAL, Time Reading Program Special Edition, 1966. 28. Michael Mandelbaum, THE MEANING OS SPORTS: WHY AMERICANS WATCH BASEBALL, FOOTBALL, AND BASKETBALL AND WHAT THEY SEE WHEN THEY DO, Public Affairs, 2004. 29. Arnold Rtampersand, JACKIE ROBINSON: A BIOGRAPHY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 30. Dan Riley (ed), THE RED SOX READER (Revised Edition), Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991. 31. Lawrence S. Ritter, THE GLORY OF THEIR TIMES: THE STORY OF THE EARLY DAYS OPF BASEBALL TOLD BY THE MEAN WHO PLAYED IT, Quill William Morrow, 1984. 32. Jackie Robinson as told to Alfred Duckett, I NEVER HAD IT MADE, A Fawcett Crest Book, 1972. 33. RED SMITH ON BASEBALL: THE GAME'S GREATEST WRITER OPN THE GAME'S GREATEST YEARS, Ivan R. Dee, 2000. 34. Ron Smith, SPORTING NEWS SELECTS BASEBALL'S GREATEST PLAYERS: A CELEBRATION OF THE 20TH CENTURY'S BEST, Sporting News Publishing Company, 1998. 35. Jules Tygiel, BASEBALL'S GREAT EXPERIMENT: JACKIE ROBINSON AND HIS LEGACY, Oxford University Press, 1983. 36. Mark Vancil and Peter Hirdt (eds), AL;L CENTURY TEAM, Rare Air Books, 1999. 37. Joseph Wallace, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BASEBALL: THE INSIDE STORY FROM THE STARS WHO PLAYED THE GAME, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998. 38. Geoffrey C. Ward, BSEBALL: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 39. George Will, MEN AT WORK: THE CRAFT OF BASEBALL, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990. 40. Nancy Willard, THINGS INVISIBLE TO SEE, Bantam Books, 1985. 41. Ted Williams with John Underwood, MY TURN AT BAT: THE STORY OF MY LIFE, A Fireside Book, 1969. From Thomas Boswell's 99 REASONS WHY BASEBALL IS BETTER THAN FOOTBALL, THIS SMALL SAMPLING: 1.Baseball measures a gift for dailiness. 2.The majority of players on a football field in any game are lost and unaccountable in the middle of pileups. Confusion hides a multitude of sins. Every baseball player's performance and contribution are measured and recorded in every game. 3. Football coaches talk about character, hut checks, intensity, and reckless abandon. Tommy Lasorda said, "Managing is like holding a dove in your hand. Squeeze too hard and you kill it; not hard enough and it flies away." 4. Football's real problem is not that it glorifies violence, though it does, but that it offers no successful alternative to violence. In baseball, there is a choice of methods: the change-up or the knuckle-ball, the bunt or the hit- and-run. 5. Everything Geortge Carlin said in his famous monograph is right on. In football you blitz, bomb, spear, shiver, march, and score. In baseball, you wait for a walk, take your stretch, toe the rubber, tap your spikes, play ball, and run home. 6. Football means Winter's coming. Baseball means Spring's here." 12