Diamonds are Forever

Dirt Diamonds

Boy, do I love diamonds. Not the typical kind though; not the ones you’re most likely thinking about. You know, the ones that are featured in songs and have a spot reserved for them on the left hands of married women throughout the world. “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” or so they say. As famous as they are, those aren’t the kind of diamonds I love. Although, as you’ll learn throughout this piece, there are a lot of similarities between real diamonds and the ones I love. The diamonds I love are in the infields of baseball stadiums.

I like to believe the diamond moniker stuck because most of the action in a baseball game happens at home plate, the start of the diamond. Standing at home plate and taking a look at the rest of the field, you can see the diamond shape form in the dirt of the infield. The other three corners of the diamond are marked by white bags referred to as bases. Inside the diamond is made up of grass with the very center being home to the pitcher’s mound, which is an elevated bump where the pitcher will throw his pitches. The rest of the field outside of the infield is referred to as the outfield, which is also made primarily of grass, but there’s a slim area at the farthest edges of the outfield that signals to players that the outfield wall is near. This area is called the warning track and it’ll normally be made up of the same material used in the infield where the lines are painted.

That’s pretty much where the similarities of stadiums end. I won’t go into too much detail now, as I mention it later on, but the one constant on every baseball field is the diamond.

The Four C’s

It’s the opposite in the world of high-end jewelry. Every diamond is different. They come in different cuts, colours, have different levels of clarity, and weigh different carats. Despite this, every diamond is still a diamond. In baseball, every diamond is the same in terms of dimensions. The fields that house them, however, are all different.

Each Major League Stadium is unique, unlike the other major North American sports leagues. Similar to the four C’s that categorize diamonds, there are a few traits that make it easy to differentiate fields.

Of course, all fields need to follow league-mandated minimums and certain aspects, like the infield and the minimum distance from home plate to the outfield walls, for example, must be uniform across the league. The rest is left up to the teams to decide. Teams can choose to play indoors, outdoors, or both (with retractable roofs like my beloved Blue Jays). Not every team has a symmetrical field. Some teams have walls of varying heights in their outfield. Others have walls further back than others. Even the type of grass and the mixture of dirt can vary from team to team. It’s this level of uniqueness that makes me love the game of baseball.

Diversity isn’t just limited to the playing field dimensions either. It can be found everywhere in the game. Baseball is a sport for everyone after all. Players in the major leagues hail from all over the world! How many other North American sports leagues have players from Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia all on the same field at the same time?

Playstyles also vary widely throughout the game. There are power hitters with bigger frames and less athleticism playing alongside speedsters who wreak havoc on the basepaths. Look no further than the finalists for the 2017 American League MVP award for an indication of just how diverse the game of baseball is. Sign-stealing scandal aside, Jose Altuve is 168cm tall and weighs 74kg (that’s 5’7” and 165lb). Meanwhile, his fellow finalist Aaron Judge comes in at 201 cm tall and 127kg (6’7” and 282lb). Quite the difference between players fighting for the honour to be called most valuable.

There are also aspects of the game that cater to different types of fans. If you enjoy precision and technique, you’d love watching how pitchers handle their craft. Fans of action would enjoy the increasing number of home runs being hit. Those seeking strategy and masterful gameplans would appreciate the level of detail put into each scouting report, which essentially outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team. These reports are then used to determine the best way to be successful from a game-to-game basis. For the sake of this piece, this is oversimplifying the game, but I think it gets my point across well.

A Diamond in the Rough

It’s not easy getting your hands on a diamond. Made famous by a De Beers marketing campaign, a common unwritten rule for buying diamonds is that you should save up two months’ worth of salary. For many people, this is, like the rocks themselves, tough. I bring this up because it helps illustrate another reason why I love the game of baseball so much. To me, the game itself is a reflection of life.

Like saving up for a diamond can be, life is tough. It’s hard to be successful. You need to work day in and day out. Even then, nothing is guaranteed. Everybody that you see with any sliver of success has gone through countless amounts of failure — just like in baseball.

Nothing highlights this more in professional sports than hitting in baseball. The greatest hitters in the history of the game have career batting averages hovering in the .300 (read as “three hundred”) range. It’s widely considered that anything above this mark is absolutely elite. Especially if he keeps it up over long periods. To translate for people who aren’t familiar with baseball statistics, a batting average is a simple way to calculate how often a player gets a hit for every at-bat they take. So, an average of .300 means that a batter is getting a hit just 30% of the time. Meaning that for every 10 at-bats, the best hitters in the game are registering outs 70% of the time. They work hard day in and day out only to fail far more than they succeed. And yet, they’re still revered as great.

Every hitter strikes out, every pitcher gives up runs, every defender makes errors, and every team loses. Failure is a crucial part of any success story and I love how much this is highlighted in baseball.

Making a Diamond

The last thing I want to say about my love for the game is that it truly is the definition of a team sport. It takes much more than having the best players to win in the major leagues. Take the Los Angeles Angels for example. They have Mike Trout, who’s widely regarded as the best player in the game today. He’s also well on his way to possibly being the best player ever. Despite this, the Angels have only made the playoffs once in his nine-year career. Just because Trout is as good as he is, doesn’t automatically make his team a winner. Like the player in the game needs a good team to support him, people need strong support systems to support them.

This concept of having a strong team and support system can be highlighted by looking at how diamonds are made. Not only does it take an enormous amount of pressure from the Earth to create diamonds in the first place, but it takes a lot of resources to craft them into their final form.

Some things that are often overlooked in the industry are the transportation, storage, security, marketing, and salesmanship that go into delivering diamonds to consumers. Without all of these aspects working, like a team, towards a common goal, diamonds don’t become the luxury they are today. And finally, in the spirit of wrapping up my overused analogy, winning in baseball and making the diamond such a coveted jewel both take tremendous amounts of hard work from a lot of people. Kind of like life.