THE LIGHT OF WINTER COMING

By Roger Rosenblatt

This is the second summer of the baseball season, the one that reveals the game's complete nature. The second summer does not have the blithe optimism of the first half of the season. From now until the Series a sense of mortality begins to lower over the game like a suspicion, which by late September will deepen to a certain knowledge that something that was bright, lusty and overflowing with possibility can come to an end.

The beauty of the game is that it traces the arc of life. Until mid-August, baseball was a boy in shorts whooping it up in the fat grass. Now it becomes a leery veteran with a sunbaked neck, whose main concern is to protect the plate. In its second summer, baseball is about fouling off death.

Sadaharu Oh, the Babe Ruth of Japanese baseball, wrote an ode to his sport:

The sound of the crowd The clear color of the sky The warmth of the sun The light of winter coming

But the whole point of baseball is to hold off the light of winter coming, at least to give it a shot. Only last week the Yankees' Darryl Strawberry, slumping and in need of personal redemption, hit three home runs in a row in a game with the White Sox, and was redeemed. First and last, baseball is about the individual. In other sports it is the ball that does the scoring. In baseball the person scores. The game was designed to center on people in their individual strivings.

The runner on first has a notion to steal second. The first baseman has a notion to slip behind him. The pitcher has a notion to pick him off, but he delivers to the plate where the batter swings to protect the runner who decides to go now, and the second baseman braces himself to make the tag if only the catcher can rise to the occasion and put a low, hard peg inside the bag.

Fans cling to the glory moments of the game's history because they preserve everybody's summer light. Hey. Will you ever forget Yogi Berra fastened to Don Larsen's chest after Larsen's perfect game? Hey. Bobby Thomson's three-run homer against the Dodgers, Ted Williams' homer in his last at bat. Say hey. Willie Mays' catch of Vic Wertz's drive to center in the Polo Grounds.

Bring out the photo album of recollected parts: Bob Gibson's scowl, Stan Musial's shy smile, Junior Gilliam's wrists, Mickey Mantle's back, Don Mattingly's sloping shoulders.

Play back the voice of Mel Allen, who died this year, his very name a river of l's rolling out over the radio on an eternal afternoon. "Hello, everybody. This is Mel Allen."

All meld into emotions that attempt to live forever. It was not only that Willie turned his back and took off. It was the green continent of grass on which he ran and the waiting to see if he would catch up with the ball and the reek of your sweat and of everyone who sat like Seurat dots in the stadium, in the carved-out bowl of a planet that shines pale in daylight, bright purple and emerald at night.

Always it comes down to the fundamental confrontation of pitcher and batter, with the catcher involved as the only player who faces the field and sees the whole game; he presides as a masked god squatting. The pitcher's role is slyer than the batter's, but the batter's is more human. The pitcher plays offense and defense simultaneously. He labors to tempt and to deceive. The batter cannot know what is coming. He can go down swinging or looking and be made to look the fool. Yet he has a bat in his hands. And if all goes well and he can accomplish that most difficult feat in sports by hitting a 90-m.p.h. sphere with a heavy rounded stick, well then, fate is thwarted for a moment and the power over life is his.

The question ought not to be: Why do the greatest hitters connect successfully only a third of the time? It ought to be: How do they get a hit at all?

So it goes for as many seasons as one is allowed; then the ability to play wanes. But things often get best just before the end. They say that 41-year-old Ozzie Smith, the great Cardinals shortstop, should have quit last year before having to suffer the sight of a better, younger fielder taking his place. Watching the All-Star game last month, one might have agreed when Ozzie let a high chopper play him that he would have charged without blinking a few years ago. But then he made a classic double-play pivot in the sixth and beamed like a kid.

There is the early summer and the light of winter coming, and baseball embraces both. The musical Damn Yankees is the story of an old man named Joe who barters his soul to the devil to be made young again and help the Washington Senators win the pennant. As usually happens in such bargains, he changes his mind in the end, and the devil turns Joe old again just at the moment he is running after a high drive sailing for the stands. He was a young man when he started out after the ball and he was an old man when he caught up with it. But he caught up with it.