The Resisters

by Gish Jen

But if baseball took on a hallowed meaning, it took on that meaning in our American dreams. For was this not the level playing field we envisioned? The field on which people could show what they were made of? And didn’t we Americans believe above all that everyone should have a real chance at bat? Didn’t we believe that with the good of the team at heart, something in us might just hit a ball off our shoetops and send it sailing clear out of the park? If Gwen’s teammates were playing ChinRussia for something, I thought, it was for this—for a chance to show, my mother would have said, that even if we returned to the dirt and the wind and the rain like the plants and the animals, we had a bigness in us. Something beyond algorithms and beyond Upgrades—something we were proud to call human. Or so it seemed to me.

“I love all those threes in baseball—three strikes, nine innings, nine players. It’s as if it’s a code written in base three,” I at least knew that base three wasn’t third base. You’ll be happy to hear, too, Dad, that I knew what Coach meant when he said he thought baseball stitched together the agricultural south and the manufacturing north of long-ago America—that I understood what he meant when he said, “One of the beauties of baseball is that there’s no clock. We go back and forth from the field, working as we did in our farming days, namely until the job was done. And yet there’s something clockwork about it, too—the players making their way around a clockface, or trying to. Backward, as if they’re still a little confused about this time thing. And all the fans with their stats—don’t they harken back to factory days, when people loved numbers and believed in them? When numbers were oracular? It’s arithmetic’s last stand.”