Alex Wong: Returning to baseball

So the American president stood on the mound, kicking the rubber. He spent a few pensive moments grinding the ball between his fingers, finding the seams, doing his best imitation of a major league hurler.

If you've ever been to a game, you know that the night sky above the ballpark seems closer to you. It feels so close that you could almost reach up from your seat and touch it -- touch that black velvet stretching from horizon to horizon.

Last Thursday night, with the president throwing out the first pitch and opening World Series play in New York, no one had to reach up. That night sky came down upon Yankee Stadium -- upon the president -- and enveloped him the way the cheers of 50,000 fans enveloped him.

This single man, dwarfed by both the immensity of the field he stood on and the historic mission upon his shoulders, stood defiantly. He didn't have to be there that night. He didn't have to put himself in the open air. He didn't have to give one would-be assassin a clear shot under the stadium's hot lights.

But he was there. And because of that, what he put forth was a vision of surity, one as sure as the strike he threw across the plate.

In the sea of doubt and disillusion that has flowed from Sept. 11, what the president's throw said was that baseball is still here, even in the city of our greatest pain. And because baseball is still here, it's an undeniable symbol that we all -- as a nation -- are still here.

Baseball players will tell you that they feel small during these times, that they're just playing a boy's game in a cruel world which, at the end of the day, will mean little if anything at all.

But the players are wrong. Short of picking up a gun and shipping out, there is nothing more important they could be doing. One could say they're getting on with their lives just like any other working man, but it's more than that.

Because these athletes are not just playing for themselves. They're playing for every young boy who dreams to be where they are. They're playing for every man who still lives out the dreams he abandoned long ago in his mind. They play to keep these dreams going.

As bombs cut through the Afghanistan sky, Tino, Jeter and Brosius were sending their own bombs into the New York night, destroying despair and any notion of inner surrender to fear.

Because, in America, we still have heroes, we still have triumphs and we'll never run out of things to cheer for. Baseball reminds us of that.

The all of baseball history is a continuum. From spring to spring, from summer to summer and from autumn to autumn, it's as eternal a cycle as you'll find in our protean culture. We are a nation obsessed with newness, with leaving things not remembered for things soon to be forgotten.

But baseball is a sure thing, as sure as the sound of a home run as it leaves the bat. These teams, these players -- the story of one baseball season -- always stay the same. It's only the faces that change.

Today's Derek Jeter was yesterday's Joe Carter. Before that, it was Pudge Fisk.

Koufax and Drysdale have become Johnson and Schilling.

Rollie Fingers is not gone. Because he's still there on the mound, in Mariano Rivera, still closing out the ninth.

This genealogy stretches back too far and spreads too wide for my young mind to chart. But it doesn't need to be charted. Because what every generation before me witnessed is here again, happening again. The history of baseball truly -- and wonderfully -- repeats itself.

Those bottom-of-the-ninth shots launched into the New York night were less miracles than they were echoes. Echoes rippling from a thousand nights like these World Series nights when the hopes and dreams of a nation were poured into one game, one at-bat -- one marvelous hit.

The echoes keep coming back. They move throughout the country and grow in volume. They reach into every home with a TV set tuned to the game. They reach into every heart hinged to balls and strikes. We cling to the continuity they offer. It's a gauge by which we know who we are, a gauge which reminds us that we are not about to change.

We always return to baseball.

We return to it like a monument. We pass it down like an heirloom. We cherish it like an old family story that never seems old.

After two months of horror, Arizona and New York gave us a week of wonder. But it wasn't magic driving these games.

It was history. A baseball century moving undeniably into the next. The American Spirit moving right beside it. Alex Wong is a senior English major from Wyckoff, N.J.

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