How Baseball Marks the Time

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON AT WRIGLEY FIELD, a 23-year-old named Joshua Báez stepped to the plate for the St. Louis Cardinals for the first time in his major-league career. The very first pitch he saw, he belted 449 feet into the center-field seats. That was in the first inning. In the fourth inning, he did it again, this time to the left-field bleachers. And then, impossibly, in the sixth, he did it a third time, to right field.

Three home runs in his first three major-league at-bats. No player in the long history of Major League Baseball had ever done that before. Báez drove in five runs as the Cardinals beat the Cubs, 8–4, and somewhere along the way, a baseball game in August became something people will remember.

I certainly will.

Maybe I am especially susceptible to baseball nostalgia at the moment because the “Field of Dreams” game had been played in Iowa last week, and my wife and I once again watched the 1989 movie that inspired it. Like many baseball fans, I’ve seen that film more times than I can count. And every time, James Earl Jones’s magnificent speech gets me: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.” America changes, he says, but baseball “has marked the time.”

For me, that time has been marked by being a fan of the team with the birds on the bat. I’ve been a Cardinals fan since I was a boy, and when I think about my life, I can mark parts of it by home runs.

I was listening on KMOX radio as a boy of 11 in 1964 when Ken Boyer hit his grand slam against the Yankees in Game 4 of the World Series, turning a 3–0 deficit into a 4–3 Cardinals victory. Three years later, Bob Gibson—my boyhood hero—did something that somehow seemed perfectly normal for Bob Gibson: He pitched a complete-game victory in Game 7 of the World Series at Fenway Park, struck out ten, and hit a home run, too.

By 1982, I was an Army officer, married with children, when rookie Willie McGee hit two home runs in Game 3 of the World Series—and robbed Milwaukee’s Gorman Thomas of one. Baseball had marked the time.

Then came Mark McGwire. Any baseball fan old enough to remember 1998 will recall the anticipation as he and the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa approached Roger Maris’s record of 61 home runs, and the explosion at Busch Stadium when McGwire’s number 62 barely cleared the left-field wall. Today we know much more about baseball’s steroids era, and that complicates the record. But it doesn’t erase the memory of that night—or the extraordinary summer when seemingly everyone was watching baseball, and the game had been reborn in American society.

Another unique event, and still a major-league record, happened in 1999 at Dodger Stadium: The Cards’ Fernando Tatís (senior) became the first—and still the only—player in Major League history to hit two grand slams in the same inning. Both came off the same pitcher, Dodgers starter Chan Ho Park.

Who can forget Albert Pujols, nicknamed “El Hombre” as a nod to Cards legend Stan “The Man” Musial from a half-century earlier. Albert was a master, but when he hit an almost unbelievable home run off Brad Lidge in Houston—two outs in the ninth, with the Cardinals facing elimination—he became a legend. The ball landed above the train tracks at Minute Maid Park. One of the most intimidating HRs I’ve ever seen. Then his three home runs in Game 3 of the 2011 World Series, a feat previously accomplished in the Series only by Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson.

All Cardinals fans remember David Freese’s two-out, two-strike triple in the ninth inning of a later game in that same 2011 World Series in which Pujols worked his magic. And then, in the eleventh inning, Freese came up again and this time drove the ball over the center-field wall, winning the game. Joe Buck’s call echoed his father’s famous 1991 World Series call: “We will see you tomorrow night.” The Cardinals won Game 7 and their eleventh championship.

There have been so many other great memories. Fan favorite Adam Wainwright homering on the first pitch of his first major-league at-bat at the start of a masterful pitching career. Yadier Molina breaking a ninth-inning tie against the Mets in Game 7 of the 2006 NLCS. Pujols—who had left the Cardinals for the Angels—returning in 2022 for one final, magical season and reaching 703. Each is connected in my mind not simply with where the ball landed but with where I was in life when it did. Like the changing of the seasons, like the birthdays and anniversaries and holidays that dot the calendar, the pacing of baseball—the pitches and outs, the games and series, the seasons and careers—mark a life over time.

That’s the magic of Field of Dreams, too. The movie isn’t really about Shoeless Joe Jackson, or a crazy ballfield in an Iowa cornfield, or even, ultimately, baseball. It’s about fathers and sons, growing older, memory, reconciliation, and the things that somehow remain constant while everything in America changes.

Saturday, Joshua Báez added another marker.

I don’t know what kind of career he will have. That’s another of the beautiful things about baseball: There are no guarantees. But I know that decades from now, some Cardinals fan will remember the Saturday afternoon at Wrigley when a 23-year-old rookie, making his major-league debut, swung at the first pitch he ever saw—and started making history.