TLDR: The End of “GBA”

I wonder if that is ever going change.

“That is never going to change,” says Yankees supreme exchequer Randy Levine.

Fine.

“That” refers to the playing of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium. And “that” is too bad.

I could argue that songs oozing religious certainties have no place in the public square (we the taxed mostly pay for these ballparks, after all). I could even argue that Mr. Berlin’s “GBA” is a saccharine load that sounds like it was composed on a low-end Casio. And I could absolutely submit that the Yankees were creepy “Dear Leader” types about the whole thing for far too long.

But mostly it’s the idea of making a baseball game — a light, airy thing when not intense for reasons independent of world events — into something solemn. That’s why “GBA” should go away. Dead-ass Bin Laden is enriching the sea floor and being stripped for parts by gilled beasts. The Arab Spring, to continue the metaphor, flowers apace. So after almost 10 years of this, where’s the harm in letting baseball be baseball? Is it that we’ll … forget?

A decade ago, some nihilist ghouls slaughtered thousands of innocents. We were brought low by it, and this century was irrevocably defined even as it began. Forgetting that is an impossibility. It is beyond anyone’s reach. If we could see to the impossible task of forgetting, then we probably would. But since we cannot, let baseball be what we’ve come to love about it — it’s a sunny, beery escape, and sometimes the best way we know to get by.

It’s far too tidy, too cinematic (and too Mitch Albom-y and Rick Reilly-y!) to say that baseball rescued any of us from those awful hours. But it did provide a consoling, if temporary, distraction. It’s not the first time baseball has played such a role, of course.

Even in the game’s antediluvian days, Civil War soldiers played a rudimentary form to distract them from the horrors about them. After the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Seals and the PCL somehow soldiered on. “… The fans who attended the games,” wrote our beloved William J. Slattery, “did so after their usual custom, forgetting, in their glee, that the ashes of the city were still hot.”

Some 12 years later, baseball was being shut down because of the American sashay into the first World War. The first and only September World Series would be played, and then the able-bodied would soon report to the front lines in Europe or to stateside ordnance factories as part of the “Work or Fight” edict. At Detroit’s Navin Park, however, some spontaneity lifted the pall from the Labor Day doubleheaders. Prior to the second game against the White Sox, former Tiger star Davy Jones, who was in the stands near the home dugout, struck up a conversation with Detroit coach and former major-league pitcher Bill Donovan. The crowd was braying for Donovan to pitch the second game. Donovan agreed to do so, but only if Jones would suit up and play the outfield. He did. Donovan shook off the rust and gave up only one run in five innings of work. Jones recorded the final out of the game, and Tigers manager Hughie Jennings, age 49, played third base for latter half of the game, again at the urging of the home crowd. Historian Dan Holmes called the game “a farcical diversion from the headlines dominated by war.”

Babe Ruth’s “called shot” game in the 1932 World Series holds much significance in terms of America’s need for myth and uplift during the Great Depression. Also in the 1930s, the East-West All-Star Game became more than just a cavalcade of the Negro Leagues’ greatest players. Against the backdrop of bruising segregation, it was an opportunity for blacks to celebrate and, if only for a brief time, rise above the miseries inflicted upon them. Fans traveled to Chicago by rail car from all over the country. They saw the great black entertainers of the day in the South Side’s legendary clubs. They wore their finest clothes and did as they pleased in that swath of Chicago, the cradle of the Great Migration, that had become the “capital of Black America.” Davarian Baldwin wrote that blacks used East-West weekend, “to express black dignity, distinction, and even defiance of black bodily certitude.”

President Roosevelt addressed to Judge Landis his famed “Green Light Letter,” in which he implored baseball to keep going even as World War II unfurled. Mere months after the assassination of President Kennedy, the Mets opened gleaming, state-of-the-art Shea Stadium (yes, Shea once gleamed and constituted art) in conjunction with the World’s Fair in New York. For a nation still reeling, it was an example of American resolve and ingenuity. The Tigers’ championship season of 1968 was salve of a kind for a city sundered by race riots. And then, of course, there was that night in September 2001, when the Metropolitans gave us something for which we were starved …

Yep: We’ve done this before. Through wars, natural disasters, economic blight, political martyrdom, and murderous acts of terrorism, baseball does what it does.

Is this much ado about a little harmless symbolism? Of course. But as long as the subject is harmless symbolism, know that there is something defiant about rising in the seventh inning, even as the world about us roils, and belting out what sounds like an Irish drinking song rather than what sounds like a funeral dirge. In a way, it’s a subtle, shrewd “fuck you” to the sub-humans out there in need of same — those who would very much like it if we died in flames or at the very least never enjoyed ourselves again.

“GBA,” meanwhile, has become a sort of a talisman of our willingness to let 9/11 invade every corner of our lives. “Nine-Eleven changed everything,” is a common refrain among those somewhat invested in having it change everything. And, yes, 9/11 necessarily remade much about American society, but the rest? The rest we allowed it to change. The seventh-inning stretch, and, by extension, baseball number among those things.

So no more “GBA.” Let “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” — both for the escapism and the raised middle finger it evokes — reign.

Besides, if soaring hymns to the nation-state are your thing, then you may have noticed that we’ve already got a pretty nifty tune that plays before every sporting event …