At five o'clock this morning, the Yankees and the Devil Rays -- baseball's nobility and baseball's proles, New York's finest and Florida's flimsiest, being and nothingness -- met on a Japanese diamond 12 time zones away in the first of 2004's 2,430 Major League games. "There was a time when this would have been New Year's Day," wrote Red Smith, the Babe Ruth of sports columnists, 23 years ago. He was marking baseball's Opening Day the way Opening Day should be marked: As the only New Year's Day worth the name.

It ought to be a national holiday. If the country is too miserly with days off, we could move up Thanksgiving to coincide with baseball's Opening Day, too. We stopped being thankful for having so many Indians to massacre and so much land to gobble-gobble-up years ago, having run out of both. We ought to be thankful for what matters most today, and on the right date: Having a pastime that puts things in their right perspective, beginning with perspective itself. The only dimensions that matter are the 90 feet between each base, a geometry of genius "on a par with Copernicus and Sir Isaac Newton," as Philip Roth has one of his characters put it in "The Great American Novel," baseball's equivalent of "The Odyssey." Also, the more fluid distances of outfield fences from home plate, depending on the ballpark and each city's relationship with its deities. Bigger outfields revere the pitching gods, smaller outfields revere the batting gods. Bigger fences, such as Boston's Green Monster, just mimic Babel's futility to reach for the gods. But wherever the lines are drawn, the meaning of life, so far as there is a meaning at all, begins with baseball. The rest is by the way.

So what matters isn't how many lies a president manages to stuff in the same sausage-string of official sentences or how many GIs got killed yesterday in a land of sand piles and mirages. It isn't whether Koran-wielding terrorists will manage to kaboom yet another mass of innocent infidels tomorrow or whether Medicare will still be there the day after tomorrow, when we're all me-first-wielding geezers pretending to forget how we bankrupted ourselves with tax cuts in our voting prime. It isn't about anything so uncertain, so absurd, so unchangeable as the follies of a few men at the expense of a world's attendance.

What matters, at least on this New Year's Day, is the sound of a baseball hitting a bat, each crack a big bang that realigns the possibilities of the universe on the field. It is the pattern drawn in the outfield grass, an unsung tribute to crop circles and the a cappella capabilities of leaves of grass. What matters is the only corner of American life where time isn't a hustle between necessity and productivity, where boredom is admirable, where the clock is unwelcome, and not to keep you gambling or shopping or drinking but just to keep you there, suspended from disbelief.

And of course it's about whether the Yankees will make it to another World Series and about every other team that will do its dandiest to keep them from getting there, a parallel with the fantasy of real life that seems unnecessary to point out: What so many Americans feel about the Yankees, so much of the world feels about America, although what so many Americans perfectly understand about their hatred of the Yankees, so many seem unwilling to understand about the world's hatred of them. Death tolls aside, there's no difference. Empires are resented. We have been perennial winners, we Americans, we Yankee fans. We have two King Georges (the Bush, the Steinbrenner) whose lust for power is equaled only by the arrogance they radiate from flaunting it.

But the Yankees' winning ways have been more purely American than America's. The Yankees buy their way to victory fairly corruptively only to the extent that their obscene wealth is an embodiment of America's gold-plated rule: The rich get richer and everyone else helps them along. Because baseball is more socialist than Darwinist, both in economics and competitive balance (from revenue-sharing to even the richest team's utter dependence on the poorest for profit and pride), there's always room for the occasional upstart -- Florida's entirely undeserving Marlins last year, California's steroidal Angels the year before. America's winning ways are more odious: We've decided that there are no other teams on the planet. We claim. We threaten. We conquer. Then we get bored and create a new game, letting those who stay behind count their dead or end up as mascots for our baseball teams. As an alternative reality in these unreal times -- as an American gift worth celebrating -- baseball is more appetizing, more honestly admirable. And so: Happy New Year.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net

© 2004 News-Journal Corporation

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