What baseball does

 Maybe you had a better weekend than Joshua Baez of the St. Louis Cardinals, but I doubt it. All he did was take on baseball's entire ringing history and wrestle it to the ground.

Here's what Baez, a rookie call-up to the bigs, did on Saturday in Chicago:

He hit the first major-league pitch he ever saw almost clean out of Wrigley Field. Four-hundred forty-nine feet to dead center.

In his next at bat in the third inning, he went yard to the bleachers in left.

In his third at-bat in the sixth, just to show he played no favorites, he spanked a souvenir to right.

Three at-bats. Three home runs. Five RBI in his first MLB game, an 8-4 win for the Cards.

Also a W over history in our venerable American game, which is its history.

According to the Baseball Almanac, no one in the history of the National League -- which encompasses 22,800 other players from that day to this, according to the Almanac -- ever did what Joshua Baez did on Aug. 15, 2026. And that history goes all the way back to April 22, 1876.

Think about that for a moment.

On April 22, 1876, Ulysses S. Grant was still President of the United States.

George Armstrong Custer was still two months away from getting his at the Little Bighorn.

Cy Young was 9 years old. Henry Ford was 12. Teddy Roosevelt was 17. And Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Knute Rockne and Jim Thorpe had yet to be born.

All of that is relevant again because of what Joshua Baez did Saturday.  

This is what baseball does, in a way none of our other games can match with the possible exception of college football. And even college football, as played by Princeton and Rutgers back in 1869, resembles the modern game the way a Roman chariot resembles an F1 Ferrari.

Baseball, however, survives down the decades mostly intact. The pitcher pitches; the batter swings. Three strikes and you're out. Four balls and take your base. Three outs and your inning is over. From the pitcher's mound to homeplate is 60 feet, 6 inches.

All true in 1876. All still true today.

In his grand soliloquy in that grand valentine to baseball, "Field of Dreams," James Earl Jones' character declares that America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers, but baseball has marked the time. This is not just sentimental fluff. It is as true as true gets.

The game your grandfather watched -- even your great or great-great grandfather, depending on your age -- is at its essence the game you watch today. He yelled at the nearsighted ump who just judged an obvious strike a ball; you yell at the ump for the same reason, and probably use the same words. You both wonder, decades apart, why your crummy centerfielder can't hit the cutoff man. You both wonder, decades apart, why your favorite team is always so bleepity-bleep awful.

And if you watch enough games?

You both eventually see something you've never seen before.

Like, say, Joshua Baez's Saturday in Wrigley Field. Like that.