As American As Summer Itself
Summer does not arrive on the calendar. It slips in quietly. One day, it is chilly and gray. The next day, flags stir in the breeze. The crack of a bat rings out over a neighborhood diamond. And the sound of a ball popping into a leather glove carries across backyards and ball fields like a hymn.
That is when you know the season has changed. Summer has come. And so has baseball.
In a time when headlines shout, leaders falter, and the culture feels as if it is coming apart at the seams, the game remains. It does not ask you for your opinion. It does not care how you vote. It only asks: can you run, throw, hit, and endure?
Baseball does not just remind us of who we are. It reminds us of what we are supposed to be.
I Don’t Blame You If You Turned Away
Let me say this plainly: if you walked away from baseball, I get it. I really do.
Maybe it was the 1994 strike, maybe it was the billionaire owners crying poor while locking out the players, maybe it was the steroids, scandals, and analytics sucking the soul out of strategy, or maybe it was the onslaught of corporate messaging and causes that turned the national pastime into just another battleground in the culture war.
You are not wrong to be angry or to feel betrayed. Baseball broke a lot of hearts.
The game has not always been good to its people. It has priced out families, shoved out tradition, and turned loyal fans into background noise for TV revenue deals and political marketing. There is a reason some stadiums look full only in the luxury boxes.
But here’s my truth: I still love it.
Not the bureaucracy, not the owners, not the virtue signaling, the gimmicks, or the stadium sushi. I love the real game, the one I played as a kid until my legs ached and the sun went down, and the one I followed on the AM radio while fishing with my dad and brother.
It is not nostalgia. It is reverence. Baseball is part of this country’s living history. Walking onto a ball field as a player or coach, I feel something sacred under my feet, something shared by sandlots and stadiums alike, something no commissioner can trademark and no marketing campaign can fake.
Baseball, at its best, has never been about who owns the team.
It is about who remembers the game.
The Game They Keep Trying to Fix
The league has tried to reinvent the game. It tinkers with the rules, shortens the pace, places ghost runners on second, rushes the pitcher with a clock, and leans into causes and branding campaigns, hoping to sell a piece of baseball to everyone but the people who have loved it all along.
Meanwhile, the super-teams on the coast scoop up talent like commodities. The Yankees and Dodgers play financial chess while small-town clubs stitch together miracles with grit and prayer.
But the heart of baseball does not live in billion-dollar contracts. It lives in the bleachers. In the dugouts. In the voice of a parent yelling from the sidelines. In the kid learning to field a grounder on a gravel field.
That is where the game survives. That is where it is still sacred.
As James Earl Jones said in "Field of Dreams":
"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time."
Jones could have been quoting scripture.
Because when all else fades, the game remains.
“Game Called," But Only for a While
Grantland Rice, the great sportswriter, once captured the spirit of baseball, not with analysis, but with poetry. In his 1910 work "Game Called," he memorialized a fallen hero of the diamond. But his words speak to something more profound. They speak to the permanence of the game and the way it endures through our darkest seasons.
“Game Called by darkness – let the curtain fall.
No more remembered thunder sweeps the field.
No more the ancient echoes hear the call
To one who wore them valiantly, and yield.”
Even in sorrow, Rice knew that the game was not over. Not truly. Not for long.
Baseball pauses. It reflects. But it does not surrender.
That same truth applies today. When politics fails, institutions lose our trust, and the nation cannot agree on much.
We still have four bases, ninety feet apart, a bat, a ball, and a belief in second chances.
The lights may go out. But they always come back on.
They Still Come
They come with lawn chairs and coolers. They come with gloves that are worn softly over time. They come in flannel shirts in April, tank tops in July, and jackets again by October.
They come to the big cities, where modern coliseums rise into the skyline. They come to the small towns, where high school fields sit underwater towers and next to grain silos. They come because the game is not a product. It is a promise.
It promises that failure is part of the journey that falling short is not the end of the story, that a man who strikes out three times can still win the game with one swing, and that a kid cut from the team one year might make varsity the next.
Where else in life does failure seventy percent of the time earn your immortality?
Only here.
Baseball mirrors the country from which it was born. It is sometimes slow to change and maddening, but it offers room for grace, growth, and the long game. It teaches us that the best things in life are earned not in a moment, but in a season.
A Voice That Still Echoes
And here in Wisconsin, that game has a voice. It is Bob Uecker.
For generations of Brewers fans, Uecker was more than a broadcaster. He had been summer itself. He has been the laughter on the lake, the companion on the drive home, the storyteller who made us believe that baseball was not just a sport, but a shared memory unfolding one pitch at a time.
He could make you laugh until your ribs ached. He could call a walk-off as if he were ten years old again. He made losing seasons bearable and winning seasons unforgettable.
And in between the innings and the jokes, he showed us what joy sounded like. What loyalty looked like. What it meant to love the game deeply, no matter where you sat in the standings.
Uecker was never just behind the mic. He was beside us. On porches. In garages. At cookouts. In hospital rooms. In the lonely quiet of the night, a game on the radio made the world feel right again.
His voice no longer fills the airwaves, but it will never leave us, because Bob Uecker did more than call baseball games. He called us home.
The Lights Always Come Back On
Say what you want about the state of our country. Yes, we argue too much. Yes, the loudest voices often drown out the wisest. Yes, even the national pastime has sometimes stumbled trying to follow the cultural winds.
But look deeper.
Look at the dad tossing soft grounders to his son or daughter in the backyard. Look at the veterans being honored between innings. Look at the mother scoring a Little League game with a pencil and a clipboard, teaching her kids the box score as if it were a secret language.
These moments still happen. Every day. Everywhere.
Baseball is not just about the past, but about remembering what is still possible.
The innings begin again. The anthem still plays. The lights return.
And the voice cries, Play ball.
America needs that voice now.
Baseball is not just a game, but our great American constant.
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