On Sept. 28, 1960, Ted Williams – 42 years old, magnificent and faintly terrifying, a man assembled by God with no apparent purpose other than the destruction of incoming baseballs – stepped to the plate at Fenway Park for the last time, regarded a fastball with the contempt reserved for things beneath him, and deposited it in the bleachers. He did not tip his cap. John Updike was in the stands and wrote about it afterward for the New Yorker in prose that makes young men want to become authors.
This is not that essay.
This is about last week’s Congressional Baseball Game at Nationals Park. Held annually since 1909, the event is older than the Soviet Union, the designated hitter, and the last time Congress agreed on anything before midnight.
I had a seat a few rows back from the first-base dugout, on the Republican side. The weather had achieved mercy after a rainy morning: blue skies, a cooperative breeze. Vendors circulated. Swag materialized from every direction. A woman offered me a C-SPAN baseball cap with the sincerity of someone who genuinely believes such a thing is wanted. I declined. There are limits.
The game commenced with Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) stepping to the plate.
Understand what that costs. In 2017, at a practice for this very event, a man arrived with a rifle and opened fire on the Republican players. Scalise was shot through the hip, airlifted, operated upon, and spent weeks in intensive care. And here he was, nine years later, striding up to the plate to lead off as if the whole improbable venture were starting fresh.
On the mound stood Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), who, in a baseball uniform and a new beard, looked genuinely credible. Washington normally performs the opposite transformation, taking vigorous men and converting them into upholstered furniture.
Then Deluzio threw his first pitch. Ball, outside, not close. The umpire called it a strike.
I’m no naïf. But I was not prepared for this umpire’s flexible jurisprudence. In the major leagues, there are robot appellate judges, challenge systems and an accountability infrastructure. At Nationals Park this evening, there was, instead, a man behind the plate making calls that would have embarrassed a Little League parent.
The second pitch was so far outside that it nearly hit the batboy. Ball, obviously. The third pitch was up and in, what polite people call chin music. Strike, ruled the umpire, apparently auditioning for a position in a less reputable branch of government.
Scalise, who has survived worse, swung at the 1-2 pitch because he had determined – correctly, I submit – that Mr. Ump would call anything a strike that landed within the zip code. He missed. On the jumbotron, his lips shaped what appeared to be a short editorial comment that would not, could not, appear in the Congressional Record.
And then everything reversed.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) walked. Deluzio had attempted to remove his head with a wild pitch that not even this umpire could call a strike. A sacrifice fly. A hit. A run. By the fourth inning, the Republicans had scored eight runs in a single frame.
The game’s finest moment belonged to Schmitt, and it came in the third inning when Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-Md.) – lefty, both in his politics and in his batting stance, a man operating on the port side of every available spectrum – hit a ball down the leftfield line that had base hit written all over it.
Schmitt ran. He ran as men do when they have decided they are going to get there, regardless of what their knees have to say about the matter. He dove. He stretched out full-length in the grass, face-first, coming up with the ball in a dirt-streaked uniform punctuated by blood from his nose, yet his expression was that of someone with no regrets whatsoever.
The Republicans have now won six consecutive Congressional Baseball Games. Six. This is not a fluke; it’s a dynasty of a very specific and limited kind, one built on the ancient and underrated virtues of competition, hustle, and the genuine belief that the other team would like to beat you.
It was also, this particular evening, the summer of the Semiquincentennial, 250 years since a group of argumentative colonial lawyers decided that certain truths were self-evident and that a king 3,000-plus miles away was not among them. The Republican fans filled the evening with periodic chants of “USA, USA, USA,” an uncomplicated patriotism that requires no footnote, no asterisk, no seminar. It rang out over the diamond in the summer air and seemed, frankly, to be having a wonderful time.
None of this is Ted Williams. There was no Updike in the stands. No one will teach in a college course this evening. The men on the field are legislators, not athletes, and the gulf between those two categories is, in baseball terms, approximately the distance between Nationals Park and Jupiter.
But here’s what I will tell you: when Schmitt dove headfirst into the grass with his nose bleeding and his uniform ruined and the ball in his glove, he looked – briefly, perfectly – like a ballplayer. And the crowd that watched him, sun-warm and loud and happy, looked like an America that was, at least for seven innings, having an absolutely fine time of it.
Williams, in his last at-bat, did not tip his cap. He could not bring himself, Updike wrote, to acknowledge the crowd’s love.
The Republicans had no such difficulty.
And the score was not even close.
Allen Mendenhall is a Senior Advisor for the Free Enterprise Initiative and a Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. A lawyer with a Ph.D. in English from Auburn University, he has taught at multiple colleges and universities across Alabama and is the author or editor of nine books. Learn more at AllenMendenhall.com.
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