I love this picture so much. It's my son Jonah. Who loves baseball more than anything. At least for the moment. Trucks and trains and dinosaurs and the Wild Kratts and Harry Potter have come and gone. Now it's baseball. For a kindergartener he is pretty good. Last year in T-ball he batted lead off, it looks like he will again this year, after graduating to little league. He catches the ball when it is thrown to him. He has a good swing. He went 3 for 3 the other day, earning the game ball.
How many kids have been in similar photos - in their baseball uniforms, hair messed up, infield dirt on their hands and arms, loose toothed-grin, holding up the game ball? We went to Cooperstown last summer, and the town was full of little leaguers, and it made the whole experience better. In isolation, the Hall of Fame creates the impression that baseball is a museum artifact, something from our past, played by men, captured in old photos. But when you walk around the streets of the town, and see all the kids in their team uniforms, you know it's a living game, still played by kids, who love it.
Jonah's team is diverse - kids from different backgrounds, different races and ethnicities, one girl among all the boys. Their parents show up and cheer, and talk to one another. Like Cooperstown, an afternoon spent watching Jonah's Cardinals teammates provides a reminder that baseball is a living game, and every summer a new group of kids pick up bats and put on gloves and play the game with gleeful enthusiasm.
In the moment, while Jonah is playing, it's idyllic. The field his team plays on is a few blocks from Barack Obama's Kenwood home. I've written about this before - Hyde Park has the ability to convince you that we've made great strides, that we are no longer a nation divided by race and class and faith. But that's wrong. What I thought would be a transformative presidency has become a four-year long battle for modest progress, accompanied by some frustrating failures.
Like Jonah, I love baseball. It wasn't always easy. I never could hit. Growing up in Cleveland, through decades of horrible Indians teams, I never had anyone to cheer for. Until the 1990s, when Kenny Lofton and Albert Belle and Omar Vizquel and Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez and Carlos Baerga came along and took the Indians to the playoffs year after year. I've tried to teach Jonah that the beauty of baseball isn't the long ball; although we give a disproportionate share of attention to home runs, most runs score because players get on base, and wait for someone to drive them home. My favorite players - Kenny Lofton and Omar Vizquel and Derek Jeter and Paul Konerko- have always been situationally smart hitters.
It's useful to think of politics this way. Every now and then a slugger gets to the White House - like FDR or LBJ. But usually what we should hope for is someone who consistently gets on base, keeps his head in the game, and tries to move around to score. It turns out, that's the kind of President Obama is. Like a lot of people, I get frustrated when a rally gets snuffed out, and we go back to the dugout with nothing to show for it. We're lucky today's Republican Party is made up of sore armed losers who can't pitch. They keep serving up slow moving tosses, that Obama can easily hit out of the infield. So we stay in the game. As we look at 2012, the goal should be to take the game into extra innings. Then score a bunch of runs by playing smart, patient ball.
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