Game 7 in Three Jumps

My job is to write about baseball, which means that in large part, my job is to generate novel circumlocutions for the word “jump.” How many times can you say that somebody’s exit velocity jumped, their whiff rate jumped, their outfield jump jumped into the 82nd percentile before your editor is tempted to bludgeon you with a thesaurus? I would prefer not to find out, as I bruise easily.

I would estimate that I write the word jump about 20 times more often than I actually jump. Nobody jumps all that much on any given day. Unless you’re at the gym, unless you’re playing sports, unless you’re a child, life just doesn’t involve much jumping. This is intentional. It is a result of the way we have structured our lives. We keep things in reach. We have downstairs neighbors. We wear complicated shoes. With the notable exception of the décor at Barnes & Noble, nearly every aspect of our lives encourages us to remain seated. Jumping in jeans is a rare occurrence. All in all, this seems like a bad thing.

Every once in a while, jumping is a matter of practicality. There’s no way I’m lugging the stepladder out from the laundry room just to get this stupid cake pan off the top shelf. I’m not tracking back five blocks just because a tiny part of this walkway is blocked by a low fence. I’ve been staring at the backs of various heads for this entire concert and I just want to get one good, unobstructed look at the band. It never occurs to us at that moment, jumping out of some mixture of desperation and exasperation, that what we’re doing could be beautiful, graceful.

We’re just trying to get through the day. There’s an out to get and a baserunner in the way, so of course we wait for the hop, secure the ball and dash with everything we have at the base. Of course, we push off with all our might, hurdling the sliding runner and soaring through the air like an avenging angel in a celestial slam dunk contest before we unleash a perfect throw to first. How else are we supposed to turn the double play?

We jump because we don’t know what else to do. This is a normal way to run the bases, right? The game is all of four batters old. You’re headed from first to second. The play’s right in front of you. You’re digging hard, but you’ve got no chance to reach second before the ball does. You don’t even have a chance of getting there in time to attempt to break up the double play. But your shoes are bedazzled beyond all recognition. Might as well jump. Your feet are become dazzle, and they launch you into the air and directly into the path of the ball. You execute a full 180-degree turn, you lower your head, and for a fleeting moment, you look for all the world like the ska man from the Operation Ivy logo.

This is not baserunning 101. This is the ropes course, because you’re not some novice baserunner. You’re Thickey Henderson, the brawny baron of the basepaths, and you barely even notice when the ball clanks off your helmet and bounces a good 25 feet in the air. You play it cool. You adjust the helmet that got knocked way down over your face, you keep chewing your improbably large wad of gum, you stroll off the field like this happens all the time. You have broken up the double play in the only way you could. You used your head.

Never mind that the batter will eventually be ruled out. Never mind that your nonchalance has convinced exactly none of the six umpires that leaping directly into the throw and deflecting it with your cranium is a normal, acceptable way to run the bases and not a textbook example of interference. So what if your jump has only delayed the inevitable. That’s the whole point. Falling back down is definitional to jumping. If you never come back down, then you didn’t really jump. You took off, you lifted off, you launched. Jumping describes the act of springing off the Earth, gaining a temporary foothold in the losing battle against gravity. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.

Everybody dreams of flying. This is a thing that sounds true. Personally, I can’t recall ever having dreamed about flying. I’ve dreamed about falling. I’ve plummeted to my certain death and awakened with a start, awash in cortisol. Mostly, I’ve worried about not falling asleep.

When it’s not a means to an end, jumping is a good-mood activity. It’s a frivolity. We really do jump for joy. It’s an expression of lightness. I will touch the ceiling, I will grab this leaf as I walk by the tree. I have set a baseball in flight and lifted an entire country, and this is not the kind of feeling that can be contained. I may be bound by gravity, but inside of me are forces that cannot be held down forever. There are moments when you feel like you will never come down, brief moments when you rise above the syntax of things and the surly bonds of Earth, and they’re enough.

Everyone has to jump for the first time. We were all too young to remember it, but at one point we pushed off from the ground with all our tiny might for the very first time. Maybe we were young enough that we really didn’t know whether or not we would come down. Maybe we couldn’t yet know. We hadn’t yet spent enough time under the twin yokes of gravity and, you know, life to spend every moment bowed to the ubiquity of impossibility. Maybe we jumped and simply wondered what would happen next.