Introduction to The Mayan Variation
I adore baseball stories. When I edited F&SF, I published a baseball issue every summer. Science fiction, fantasy and horror all blend well with baseball. Hell, even mystery and romance do.
SF has seen some wonderful baseball stories, from Esther Friesner’s “Jesus at the Bat” to W.P. Kinsella’s classic, Shoeless Joe, which was made into a classic film, Field of Dreams. The sf field doesn’t have classic football stories or classic basketball stories. Just classic baseball stories.
You’re about to read one of them.
Why is baseball the stuff literature is made of? I could wax rhapsodic about the game, but that isn’t the reason. I’m a basketball fan and I adore golf, but I really don’t want to read stories about them.
I even believe all the sports metaphors about sport being larger than life, about sport as a training ground for life, about what happens in sport sets the stage for what happens in life.
Yep. I buy all that. But I don’t want to read about it when it comes to football or hockey. Just baseball.
So what is it about baseball? What makes baseball different from all of America’s other sporting pastimes?
I think Ron Shelton explained it in the opening speech he wrote for Annie Savoy in my favorite baseball movie, Bull Durham. He compared baseball to a religion. In fact, he called baseball a religion, and for some of us, it is.
We approach it the same way. Some of us are Christmas and Easter only. Some of us attend every day. And some of us are rabid atheists, trying to prove that the religion isn’t worthy, that the church doesn’t exist.
Like Annie Savoy, I happen to believe in the Church of Baseball. The religious aspect of the game is why baseball stories work and why the current hot ticket, golf stories (even golf stories written by Bull Durham writer, Ron Shelton) don’t. Golf, while it has its own mystique (and it has a heck of a mystique for golfers; I know. I married one.), doesn’t allow its aficionados to sit in a sanctuary every day. Golf fans have to traipse all over the course. They even have to bring their own chairs.
Football fans sit on benches and are forced to wear too much clothing, because it’s usually cold. Basketball fans don’t go to the court for occasional reflection. They go for the adrenaline rush.
But baseball fans—baseball fans get a worship service every time they walk into the park (and how many other professional games are played in a park?), complete with history (the stats are flashed throughout the game, in case you didn’t remember them yourself), ritual food (hot dogs, beer, peanuts, and Crackerjacks), and ritual music (from the national anthem at the beginning of the game to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” sung in the seventh inning stretch). Ritual music that, by the way, requires its singers to stand—just like they do when they sing hymns in church.
And because we have the Church of Baseball, baseball fans react with religious fervor whenever their sport is violated. Whether the violations happen because of a rules change or because a silly owner believes a new chrome and steel stadium is better than the old ivy covered ballpark, or whether the violations happen because players get greedy and strike or because the Commissioner of Baseball shows herself to be a bigot doesn’t matter. What matters is that a violation occurred, and violations in a holy place aren’t just annoying. They’re wrong.
A violation doesn’t stop the fans from attending church, but it does change the way they feel about the game. And, someday, it will change the way the game is played.
Gardner knows this. He and his wife Susan Casper are baseball fans (although she’s a bigger fan than he is. When we started making the annual Worldcon pilgrimage to ballparks, Gardner sent me a grumpy e-mail. She’s watching games on TV again, he wrote. I put the blame solely on you. Probably because, if Susan was watching, Gardner was watching and he was getting pulled back into the church, one worship service at a time.).
In “The Mayan Variation,” Gardner’s reacted to baseball’s recent violations in a way that only a fan can react. With anger, with eloquence, and with a solution, a solution that makes sense if you think about the Church of Baseball and the way religions evolve . . .
Kristine Kathryn Rusch