Baseball Transcends Time In A 50 Inning Game

Baseball is timeless. There is no set number of minutes to be played. A game could last nine innings or it could last 50, like it did last Saturday when we split into two teams and played a 50 inning game to raise money for our spring trip to Florida.

We began at 9 am. A pitching machine was rolled out to the mound and everybody on the team, including pitchers, came to the plate more than 20 times. We played different positions in the field; positions we had never played before but always dreamt about playing. Left-handed pitchers played shortstop and outfielders played infield. It was a day not only for us to raise money, but also recapture the youthful innocence of playing baseball.

Because, you see, baseball transcends time in another sense as well. As reclusive author Terrance Mann says in Field of Dreams, “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.”

Indeed, when we sit and watch a game at Wrigley Field on a warm July day in the year 2009, we may as well be watching the same game on that same July day in 1989. We can see our childhood heroes running those same 90 feet between bases that the players of today run. The game hasn’t changed. It has remained timeless. And it revitalizes the child within.