Baseball, which is near and dear to my heart, takes the field as today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp issued on June 12, 1939, issued in conjunction with the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown NY. The stamp commemorates what was alleged to be the 100-year anniversary of the beginning of baseball. While other forms of the game had been played for years before the 1839 date, Abner Doubleday is credited with formalizing the rules of baseball in Cooperstown.

Baseball, of course, has its own terrible history of racial discrimination, exemplified for me by the fact that my beloved Boston Red Sox managed to pass on the opportunity to sign both Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, both of whom are in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s also exemplified by the virulent racism of Ty Cobb, who along with Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson, was one of the first five people elected to the Hall pf Fame.

But today, I choose not to go there. Instead I remember the many joys (and frequent heartbreaks) I’ve had as a baseball fan. I also remember an amazing day, sometime in the mid to late 1960s, when, having dropped by older brother off at Camp Najerog in southern Vermont (and sent my older sister off to Girl Scout camp as well), my parents detoured to Cooperstown and let me spend a day, alone, in the Baseball Hall of Fame while they did whatever they did. I was, as I recall, happy as a pig in shit. I believe they also did make sure I found a painting by William Luberoff, one of my father’s cousins, who also drew many cover illustrations for pulp magazines before producing a well known array of Christian oriented paintings in the 1960s. (He’s from the Catholic wing of the family, which later included family that lived in New Providence, the town next to Summit, where I grew up).

So today I won’t go into baseball’s troubled history. Instead, I stand with Terrence Mann, the character played by James Earl Jones in “Field of Dreams” who, near the end of the movie, famously said:

“People will come, Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn into your driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door, as innocent as children, longing for the past. ‘Of course, we won’t mind if you look around,” you’ll say, “It’s only twenty dollars per person.’ And they’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it, for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they’ll walk off to the bleachers and sit in their short sleeves on a perfect afternoon. And find they have reserved seats somewhere along the baselines where they sat when they were children. And cheer their heroes. And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.

People will come, Ray. The one constant through all the years Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”

I believe we will find ways to come together. And I believe that baseball will somehow be part of that process.

Stay safe, be well, fight for justice and work for peace.