Throwback Sunday

Down in the dugout on a Sunday afternoon in summer, the man and the boy sit side-by-side, tied to one another by deep history and the most ordinary of objects.

A small white ball with red stitching: And how many ageless echoes does that insignificant knick-knack stir? Across how many years and decades and generations do those echoes travel, and how is it the man and the boy can hear them exactly the same?

Because here is the boy now, holding up his pitching hand, showing the man how he grips the baseball. And here is the man holding up his pitching hand, showing the boy how he grips it.

The boy is 12 years old or so, and baseball has taken him here, to Williamsport, Pa., and the Little League World Series. The man is Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard, and he is here to show the kid that sometimes the journey only begins here.

Such an odd thing, watching the two of them together. Such an odd thing watching the Mets and the Phillies mingle with the Little Leaguers on Sunday afternoon, signing baseballs for all these young kids with their old dreams, seeing in them what they once were -- and not so many years ago, as the game measures these things.

The game, after all, has been around for more than a century-and-a-half, catching hold just before the Civil War and becoming an American obsession shortly thereafter. That kid showing Noah Syndergaard how he grips the baseball? He's speaking the same language soldiers both Union and Confederate spoke when they played the game between slaughters. A direct and unbroken line of succession stretches between one and the other.

So much is wrong with baseball these days, so out of step so often is it with the America of 2018, that sometimes we forget that long line of succession. Watching the boys and the former boys commune over it was a pleasant reminder of that; at bottom, baseball is a child's game, and even the men who play it professionally are still children caught in its spell to some degree. It may be cold business now to them, but the thrill of getting solid wood on the ball or feeling it settle into the deep pocket of your glove with a comforting thunk after a long run across the grass in pursuit of it ...

Well. Those things allowed young men to be children again in 1863, if only for a moment. And they allow young men to be children in 2018.

That was the takeaway from yesterday, and the irony, of course, is that the game being played in Williamsport this week is no longer the kids game it once was. Television has turned it into an event, with the inevitable result that some of its core essence gets stripped away. Giving 12-year-olds the full ESPN treatment has always made the Blob uncomfortable. And as the coverage has spread even to the regional level, that discomfort has only deepened.

That's because more exposure always dilutes a thing, and watching Little Leaguers play the eternal game -- and often play it impeccably -- is not something that should be diluted. And yet the more games that wind up on the TVs at your local watering hole, the less special they become. And that's a shame.

Because it is special, you see. It is a unique culture, and that culture has become global, cutting as easily across national boundaries as it does across time.

Man and boy. Comparing grips. Sitting side-by-side in a dugout, on a Sunday afternoon in summer.

Speaking the only language that has ever mattered, then and now.