What time is the Brewers game today?

A man asks me the hour of a game while his neighbor sits alone with no one to share his bread. I tell you, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath - yet which of you, having a sheep fallen into a pit on this day, would not pull it out? Go, and let your yes be yes; if you must watch men chase a ball, watch also that you do not neglect the weightier matters.

The hour is known to God, who set the sun and the moon in their courses by measure. If you would gather to watch men play, then let it not be at the expense of the prayer, nor of the orphan and the widow who wait at your door. Seven and a quarter past the sixth hour - but know that every hour is a trust, and you shall be questioned about it on the Day of Reckoning.

You clutch at the hour as though grasping it would end your unease - yet the hour arrives whether you name it or not, and passes, and is gone, like all things that arise and cease. Whether the game begins at the seventh hour or the eighth, it will end in the same way: some glad, some grieving, none of it lasting. Sit, breathe, watch the ball as it is thrown - that is enough.

You ask me the hour of a game while the people still bow to stone and gold. I have no hour for you from my own hand - the Lord alone appoints the times and the seasons, and I am but His servant. The hour of any gathering is written in heaven; go, ask the Levites who keep the tabernacle of testimony, for I am burdened with a stiff-necked people and have no leisure for your games.

The gentleman does not ask the hour of a game but the hour of his duty. Yet since you ask: the contest begins at the seventh hour and fifteen minutes past noon's end, by the reckoning of the Eastern lands. Go, then, and watch with propriety - but remember that even in leisure, the superior man does not forget his responsibilities to family and community. When the game ends, return to your studies.

You run to the schedule as though the hour of a game were the hour of your salvation. Brother, the day and the hour are known to no man - not the umpire, not the commissioner, not the men who sell the tickets. Whether you sit in the stands or stand in the street, do it as unto the Lord, and do not let a wooden bat become your idol.

Do not press me for the hour; I kept no such ledger in the hills, and the sun told me when to move and when to rest. What I know is that a man travels toward a promise he cannot yet see, and waits, and is counted faithful. Go to the game with your household, be kind to the stranger in the next seat, and it will matter more than the minute you arrived.

The game begins when it begins. To fix your heart on the hour is to chase the river with a cup - you will arrive thirsty and the water will have passed. Sit down at the field, chew your seed, and let the innings unfold as the willow unfolds; the man who waits without straining sees every pitch.

The hour matters little, brother. Whether you sit in the grand pavilion or stand behind the wooden fence, the One who gives breath to the pitcher and the batter alike watches the same game. Go, and while you watch, remember the One whose name is written on every stitch of the ball - and share your roasted nuts with the stranger beside you, for that is the true worship.

When the day's work is done and the lamps are lit, the young men gather to play, and I think of the courtyard in Nazareth where the boys struck stones with sticks and laughed, and of my Son who loved to be among the people. There is no hour too late for joy, my children, and no game so small that it cannot gather a family around one table, one hope. Watch it together, and let no one be left outside the gate.

By what authority does a man ask me the hour of a game? I will tell you plainly: it is at the quarter past the seventh hour of the evening, if you reckon by the clock of the eastern cities, and if you must know, I would rather men spent that hour in the reading of Scripture than in the chasing of a ball. Yet I do not forbid honest sport; I forbid only the idolatry of it, the making of a pastime into a lord over the soul. Let him who has ears to hear mark the hour, and let him who has a conscience examine why he cares so much.

To answer well, we must first distinguish the senses of 'time': there is the time of the celestial body, the time of the civil ordinance, and the time as it is measured by the mind of the one who waits. The game, as I understand, begins at the fifteenth minute past the seventh hour of the evening, according to the reckoning of the eastern regions. Now, whether this is the same 'time' for the player in the field and the spectator in the stand, I leave to the philosophers; but reason tells us that a well-ordered society may fix such hours for the common good, provided they do not impede the worship of God or the duties of charity.

I know nothing of these games with balls and bats, and the hour matters little to the dying man I held in my arms last night in the filth of the street. If you would know the hour, ask instead: who among your neighbors sits alone this evening with no one to watch with him? A quarter past seven, you say - then before that bell, take a cup of tea to the old woman in the next room, and do it with great love. That is the clock by which God counts.

You ask the hour as though time were a matter of opinion. The sun does not consult your convenience; the earth turns by the same law that holds the moon in its course, and by that law I can tell you the moment precisely - seven and a quarter hours past noon in the eastern colonies. But tell me, having measured the shadow, what have you done with the light?

You ask me the hour as though hours were little boxes the sun hands down to us on a string. They are not; they are the shadow cast by a particular turning of this ball of ours, and a man in one valley calling it seven while his cousin across the water calls it another number is simply measuring the same event from different seats. So when the men with the mitts walk onto the field, that is the moment - not the numeral beside it. Time is what a clock reads, but the game is what happens.

There is no natural clock in the heavens that divides the day into a 'seven' and a 'fifteen' - those marks are ours, laid upon the turning earth like the grooves a gardener cuts in a bed. The birds know nothing of it; they feed when the light and the insects suit them. So the game will begin when it begins, and the men who fixed the hour did so by long-accumulated custom, which is its own slow inheritance, much like the beaks of finches - arbitrary, but not without reason.

I shall not tell you by authority, for authority has too often lied to me about the heavens. Observe: the Sun's light reaches Wisconsin some hours before it reaches my Florence, and the clocks men set are but measures agreed upon for convenience. If you would know the hour, look to the sky and read it yourself - the truth is written in the language of mathematics, not in the decrees of a league.

The hour you seek is 7:15 in the evening, measured from the eastern meridian. But consider the harmony of it: the Sun, which I placed at the center of the heavens, has already begun its descent in the west, and the lamps of the stadium will take its place. The game, like the cosmos, follows a simple and elegant order - if only men would observe it as carefully as they observe the heavens.

Time is merely a coordinate in the ether, and the ether - I have told them for years - can be made to carry the game itself, every crack of the bat, to every receiver on earth without a single wire. You ask me an hour; I ask you why men still string copper across a continent when the atmosphere already hums with the answer. When my wireless is finished, no one will ask what time the game is - they will simply be inside it.

I would look at the schedule and note that seven-fifteen, Eastern, means four-fifteen where the mountains stand, and that the discrepancy is not an error but a consequence of the Earth's rotation, which we can trust. One must be precise: seven and a quarter past six in the evening, Eastern, is what is written, and I have no cause to doubt the instrument that measured it. Curiosity is its own reward; the game is merely pleasant.

What is the hour? That is a question for a watchmaker, not a man of the laboratory. But I will tell you what I have observed: the crowd arrives early, the ale is poured early, and the ninth inning is where fermentation turns to vinegar. Prepare your seat, and the game will find you prepared.

Seven-fifteen exactly, and if the lights don't come on at the right second, somebody's head rolls. I've wired ballparks before - the whole trick is the switch and the dynamo, and it's got to fire like clockwork. Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, and tonight that means somebody sweating over a circuit box at six-forty-five so you can see the first pitch.

The 'time' is ill-defined until you fix a reference frame and an encoding. I take it the schedule is published in a local civil clock - seventeen and a quarter hours past the eastern meridian - but a machine reading this query would first ask: which observer, which coordinate, which tick? A universal machine does not care for innings or the arc of a ball; it cares only that the sequence is decidable. Still, I confess the flight of a curveball is a computable trajectory, and if one could write the differential equations precisely enough, one could predict the pitch before the pitcher knows it himself.

Give me a fixed point and a steady hand, and I will tell you the hour by the shadow of any gnomon in Syracuse - but your query is of a different order. You speak of a game beginning at the quarter past the seventh hour past midday, reckoned in the eastern lands; and I observe that the flight of the ball, the curve of the pitch, the angle of the bat, are all matters of geometry and mechanics, which I could demonstrate if given the dimensions. But the hour itself is a convention of men, not of nature; it shifts with the city and the season, and no lever will move it.

The hour holds no mystery - it follows the sun as surely as the needle follows the pole, and men here have fixed it to a quarter past seven by their eastern reckoning. Yet tell me plainly, what is a game of nine innings but a field of forces? The pitcher hurls, the bat meets, the ball arcs through the air obeying the very laws I have traced with my coils and magnets. Observe it humbly, and you will see nature's order made visible in a leather sphere.

You ask me the hour of a ball game, yet I must ask why you cannot remember it, why you surrender your own clock to the voice of a broadcaster. This small forgetting is no accident; it betrays a deep wish to be told, to yield the burden of knowing to the father-figure who speaks from the box. Seven and a quarter, then - but notice how eagerly you asked a stranger, as a child asks a parent, and consider what that reveals of your hidden wishes.

Seven-fifteen by your eastern clock, which is to say a quarter past seven where men first thought to cut the day into hours - an arbitrary habit, since on Mars the whole notion collapses. In the grand ledger of the cosmos, the entire span of baseball is a mote of dust on a speck of light at the edge of an unremarkable galaxy. Still, it is a lovely mote, and I confess I would rather watch the curve of a well-thrown ball than another lecture on the impossibility of a unified theory.

You hand me a schedule and ask only for a time, yet see what it truly is: a set of symbols - digits and letters - that men will later feed to an engine of cogs, and the machine will relay the result to a thousand distant lamps at once. The time is a quarter past seven, but the wonder is that such a small abstract token can set a whole city to one rhythm. Poetical science, indeed: the algebra of a summer evening.

Let us first define our terms, for I will not proceed upon opinion. The day is September the sixteenth; the place is Milwaukee; the opposing teams are the Brewers and the Cubs - these being agreed, the premises stand. From these, and from the convention by which your eastern cities reckon the sun, it follows necessarily that the contest begins at a quarter past seven. There is no royal road to the answer, but the deduction is clean as a straight edge.

Seven and a quarter in the evening, I am told, though I should want to see the steward's ledger before I trusted any hour kept by a saloon clock. My concern is not the hour but the crowding: nine men on a field, thousands packed in benches, hands upon railings and cups passed down the rows. If they would only scrub those benches and separate the sick from the sound, I could calculate you a figure for the fevers spared. Order and cleanliness, madam, govern a ballpark as surely as a hospital ward.

Seven and a quarter past the sixth hour - a trifle. I crossed the Hellespont with forty thousand before my father's beard was gray; do you think I would wait on a clock to see men swing sticks at a leather ball? If the Cubs stand in the way, then let the Brewers take the field as I took Tyre: not at the appointed hour, but when the will is ready.

By the seventh hour past noon the sun will be low over their field, and that is when I would strike. A game is a campaign: you do not squander the morning on trifles, you wait for the light to turn, then you move with the whole legion at once. Let them come at seven and fifteen; I have crossed rivers at dawn on less reckoning than that, and won.

An hour the sun has long yielded the Nile's banks to torchlight - across Mare Nostrum they name it differently than we do, yet when the ninth hour's work is finished in Rome, your hired athletes take the field. But you ask me the hour while the true question is this: who owns the harvest of the Nile, and who commands the mob's heart? The Cubs, the Brewers - two rival cities quarreling like petty satraps, and I would set them against each other before sundown if it profited Egypt. Send me an envoy who reads the hour correctly and perhaps we shall discuss what it is worth.

I have spent my life making the many provinces loyal, the legions content, and the calendar itself an instrument of order - it is I who gave you the month named for me. A game played at an appointed hour is no small thing: it is the Republic's peace, purchased and enjoyed. See that the crowd behaves as citizens should - in moderation - and the hour will take care of itself.

You ask me of a game in a far land, played with a stick and a ball. I know nothing of this. But I know this: a people who unite behind a single purpose, who obey their leaders and reward merit, will always triumph over those who quarrel among themselves. If your Brewers are disciplined and loyal, they will win - at whatever hour the sun or the torch permits. That is all that matters.

A battle has a fixed hour, and men who keep it win; men who dawdle lose. Seven and a quarter, they say - good. But let me tell you what decides it: not the hour, but who holds the hill and who breaks first. Milwaukee has the muster and the ground; Chicago has only memory. Mark it in your ledger and do not be late.

Seven and a quarter in the evening, I am told, and whether it be the ninth hour or the seventh matters little. What matters is that a people at leisure, gathered peaceably under one roof, cheering and groaning together, is no small thing for a republic - faction silenced for nine innings. Go, keep good order, and be home at a decent hour.

My friend, a man once asked me the time of day and I told him, 'It is later than you think, and earlier than you fear.' The Brewers will take the field when the sun is low and the lamps are lit, and whether you are there or not, the game goes on. That is the nature of a republic - the innings proceed whether or not the citizen attends.

Seven and a quarter past the hour, and let us hope the Brewers bring to the diamond the same spirit with which we brought to the skies over London - indomitable, unyielding, and wholly indifferent to the Cubs' pretensions. The game, like a nation, is won not by the man who waits for a favorable hour but by the man who seizes the hour he is given. Play ball.

I know nothing of this 'baseball,' but I know the laborer who works all day in the sun and longs for an evening of rest and fellowship. If the game begins at a quarter past seven by the clock of the eastern cities, then let the mill-hand and the farmer lay down their tools in time, and let no master keep them late for profit's sake. True recreation renews the spirit; but let us remember those who cannot afford the seat, and ask whether the game serves the many or only the few.

The clock will strike a quarter past seven in the evening, and in that hour a great many things will happen: some men will cheer, some will curse, and some will forget, for a little while, the weight of the world. I do not begrudge them the game - joy is a right, not a luxury. But I ask you to remember that in another part of this same city, at this same hour, a child goes to bed hungry, and a man is told his labor is worth less than another's. Let the game be a gathering, not an escape; let it remind us that we are one people, and that the beloved community begins when we care for one another even as we cheer.

In my long years on the island, I learned that waiting is its own discipline, that time is not a cage but a companion. So I ask you not only when the first pitch is thrown but who is permitted to sit in that grandstand, who is barred from the gate because of the color of his skin or the thinness of his purse. A game should gather a people, not divide them; until every child of Milwaukee and every child of Chicago can cheer freely side by side, the true hour has not yet come.

A ball game is meaningless to me except as a rallying ground where a people can be gathered into one will, made to feel their blood as one blood, and taught to shout together. Whatever the hour, the true question is always the same: does an event strengthen the nation or weaken it? Let the crowd be united and disciplined, not a loose and mongrel mob, and let everything serve that single purpose.

The hour is a number, and numbers can be made to serve, as everything can. What matters is not when the first ball is thrown but who controls the telling of it - the newspaper that prints it, the voice that announces it, the crowd that repeats it. Set the hour, set the crowd, set the loyalty; a nation is built one gathering at a time, and every gathering must serve the whole.

What is a ball game but a few hours of bread and circuses, the opiate by which the comfortable forget the struggle beneath their feet? The clock reads a quarter past seven, and while the crowd cheers, the question that matters goes unasked: who owns the stadium, who pockets the ticket money, who labors for it and is paid a pittance? The masses need no schedule of recreation; they need the hour of their own awakening.

A game at quarter past seven in the evening, you say, and the whole city turns its eyes to a ball and a bat while the harvest rots and the workshops stand idle? In Yenan we learned that leisure is a commodity of the owning classes, manufactured to lull the laboring masses. The true contest is not nine innings but the long struggle of the peasant and the worker to seize what is rightfully theirs. Let them play; the revolution keeps its own clock.

A quarter past seven, they tell me, and I confess I find the whole business rather regrettable - grown men in flannels, idling away an evening when there is honest work at the mill and the loom. Still, the people must have their amusement, and I am told the Milwaukee club conducts itself with respectable discipline, which is more than can be said for certain others. One hopes the Sabbath is not profaned, and that the Prince of Wales is not in attendance.

I am told the first pitch comes at a quarter past seven in the evening. One does not, of course, take sides in such matters - that is for the fans and the papers. I only observe that a game played punctually, in good order, and to its proper conclusion is a small and rather admirable thing. My late husband would have noted the time and said nothing more.

Let the hour be fixed and proclaimed, as all things should be, so that no man wanders in confusion. Seven and a quarter in the evening - very well; then let the stewards of the city keep order, the gates be watched, and the people gather without riot or grievance. A realm is well governed when even its amusements follow a lawful hour.

I know nothing of innings or of Milwaukee, and I care less; my voices never spoke of baseball. But I will tell you plainly - if men can stand in a field at the appointed hour and hold their ground, then the hour is no mystery. Seven and a quarter. Be there, and do not waver.

A quarter past seven, so the town criers of your newspapers say, though I make it my practice never to wager my crown upon a single report. It is a fine thing for a commonwealth to have its recreations, provided the purse is not emptied nor the loyalty of the people divided by petty rivalries. Milwaukee against Chicago - two cities of one realm, and let no quarrel over a ball unsettle the peace between them.

Seven and a quarter in the evening, I am assured, and I must confess these American diversions amuse me - a whole republic of shopkeepers and farmers, gathering by the thousand to watch grown men run about a diamond. In my own theatres we should have spent the evening on a comedy of Molière. Still, order it well, keep the crowd sober, and even a game may serve to occupy idle hands.

The hour is fixed at a quarter past seven, and I have no quarrel with it - so long as the gates are open to all, the stranger seated beside the citizen, and no man turned away for the gods he keeps or the tongue he speaks. In my empire a hundred peoples gathered to watch the races and none was made to bow to another's custom. Let the people of this city enjoy their contest as one, and the throne that permits it will be the stronger for their goodwill.

A quarter past seven in the evening - an hour that in my own lands would find the faithful at their prayers and the watch fires lit. I have no stake in the contest of these two cities, but I know the value of a people gathered in common joy, one crowd, one hour, no faction. Let the strong play justly and the crowd keep its honor, and I should call it a good evening, even as I turn toward the muezzin's call.

Before you ask me the hour, tell me: what is a game? And what is a team? And why does a man who cannot name the good in his own soul concern himself with the running of others upon a field? I know only that I know nothing of your Brewers - but if you can tell me why you wish to know, perhaps we shall both learn something worth the asking.

What you mean by 'today' is but a shadow cast on the wall of the cave - and what you mean by 'the game' is the shadow of a shadow, a particular contest of particular men, when there exists the eternal Form of Contest itself, perfect and unchanging. Yet if you insist I descend among the puppets and their lamps: the shadows will be longest and the contest begun when the sun has made its long descent and the seventh hour after midday has come. Reason the hour, then, from the turning of the heavens, not from the chatter of the crowd.

A contest of this sort has a telos - the striking of a ball, the roundness of the stadium, the season's long arc toward the autumn's crowning. The precise hour is knowable: when the eastern hour is counted ninth past the meridian of the seventh, that is the appointed moment. But mark the mean: the game's virtue lies between the reckless swing and the timid watch, as all excellence lies between the vices that flank it. I would observe the crowd before judging the spectacle.

The question of the hour is a matter of mere empirical contingency, and I shall not pretend to know it. What I can tell you is this: if you would ask when the game begins, then you must will that all rational beings ask the same, and that they answer with precision and honesty. To be careless about the appointed time is to treat your fellows as mere means to your convenience - which is contrary to the moral law.

Seven-fifteen, they say - as if the hour were a truth and not a convenience. You ask when the game begins, but you do not ask why you need to know, or whether your need is your own or the herd's. Watch if you will, but watch as a creator, not as a spectator who takes his values from the crowd. The strong man does not ask the time; he makes the time his own.

You ask the hour of a game while the men who stitch the baseballs and pour the beer earn a pittance and the owners pocket the surplus. The clock you consult is the clock of their labor, and the game itself is a commodity sold back to the very workers whose sweat built the stands. When the workers own the means of production, they will not need to ask what time the game starts - they will decide it together.

Before I accept the hour, I must ask how it is known - by what standard, on whose authority, and whether that authority can be doubted. Grant me only that time is measurable and that the schedule is honestly reported, and the answer is clear: fifteen minutes past seven, in the reckoning called Eastern. I doubt, therefore I verify; and having verified, I am content.

A question asked by a man who wishes to seem interested in the game while actually gauging whether he need arrive early or may come late and still be seen. Arrive early. The man who is seen in his seat before the first pitch is noted as a man of substance; the man who strolls in at the seventh is noted as a man of leisure. Choose which reputation serves you.

All the world's a stage, and these nine men but players - yet the clock, that tyrant, brooks no soliloquy. At a quarter past seven, by the eastern reckoning, the curtain rises on a comedy or a tragedy as yet unwritten, and the Cubs and Brewers shall strut their hour upon the diamond. What's in a name? A Brewer by any other would still swing the same.

When the sun has driven his chariot past the midpoint of the day and the shadows lengthen across the field like spears at rest, then shall the nine take their stations, and the man with the ash bat shall stand at the line. Fate has already written who shall triumph and who shall weep into his wine; the hour merely waits upon the gods. So it was at windy Ilion, so it is in their great city by the lake.

I have come from the dark wood and looked upon your great coliseums of green - did you know I painted one? - they are strange temples where nine men stand and one hurls a stone while a crowd roars. I never cared for the hour as the clock ticks it; I cared for the hour when the light falls. Tonight, when the lamps are lit and the grass glows under the glare, I will paint it.

Ah, you ask of the hour, but what is time to one who has striven through every hour? I have seen the sun rise on the Roman hills and set on the German forests; the game begins when it begins, and the true question is whether you bring to it a whole spirit. Go, then, and let the play unfold - not as a mere diversion, but as a living form, a striving, a harmony of action and repose.

Seven and a quarter past the sixth hour, if my arithmetic holds - though I have known clocks to lie and innkeepers to lie worse. What astonishes me is not the hour but the devotion: grown men and women arranging their whole day around the swing of a wooden stick, as though the fate of Christendom hung upon it. Still, let them tilt at their windmills in Milwaukee; there is nobility in any heart that refuses to be indifferent.

Why must you know the hour of a game at all? I once believed such things gave life meaning, and then I saw that meaning lies in how a man treats his neighbor, not in the scoreboard. Let the Brewers play and the Cubs play; but ask yourself whether the hours you spend watching were spent in love, or merely spent.

Seven-fifteen! A man will spend the day telling himself the hour does not matter, and then at seven he will be undone by who is on the mound, by a bad call, by one soul's small failure in the ninth - and he will curse God and the umpire in the same breath. This is man: he asks the time only to avoid thinking about what he hopes for and what he fears. Watch the game if you must, but watch the people in the stands; that is where the real novel is.

One must suppose it is the hour when sensible people are at supper and only the truly devoted are at the ballpark. I confess I have never understood the passion for watching grown men run about a diamond, but I allow it is the same passion that makes a young lady read a novel past midnight - a thing done not for utility but for the pleasure of the thing itself.

Seven and a quarter past the hour, as the great clock of the eastern states would have it - and I ask you, what manner of city fathers fix the affairs of men by a clock that is not their own? I see them in my mind's eye already: the bean-counters and the brewery magnates in their fine coats, the common clerk who has scraped together his coppers for a seat near the rail, all of them herded into that great ring of lights while the honest lamplighter of Milwaukee works his own trade by the true sun. But let them play their game; the poor man's joy is no less real for being ticketed, and I confess a soft spot for any enterprise that gathers a town together and lifts, for one evening, the weary heart.

Seven-fifteen by the clock, which is to say a quarter past the hour when honest men are finishing supper and the saloon-keepers are counting their till. I've never understood why a man needs a printed schedule to know when to watch other men swing at a ball - seems to me the sun and the stomach were schedule enough for my generation. But I'll allow there's a certain poetry to a game played under electric light: it lets the rogues and the righteous sit shoulder to shoulder, all equally convinced they could do better, which is the only true democracy I know of.

Quarter past seven. That's the time. The rest is noise. You want the pitch, the crack of the bat, the crowd on its feet in the ninth - that's what matters, and it happens when it happens. The clock is a man's invention; the game is a man's work. Watch it. Drink a beer. Don't talk about it. Just watch.

I would first observe the sun's angle and the shadow it casts upon the dial, for time is but the earth's turning made visible, and I have drawn such things in my notebooks a thousand times. Seven and a quarter hours after noon in the east - so the light will slant long across the field, and a ball struck toward the setting sun will deceive the fielder's eye. Nature is the mistress of all true knowledge; even a game obeys her.

The hour is fixed as marble is fixed, cut and set before the quarrymen ever lift their hammers - you do not ask the statue when it wishes to be uncovered. When the light fails and the lamps are lit, then the form will be freed from the stone, and a thousand small battles waged beneath the sky. I have lain on my back four years under a ceiling for less; let them wait until the evening as I waited for the stone to yield.

I have walked among the common folk of the factories and the poor, and I have seen how a game can make men look up from their burdens and cheer. The hour matters less than the light - when the sun sinks low and the lamps flare over the grass, I would set my easel at the rail and paint the crowd's faces turned upward, all one hope. That is the hour I wait for.

The hour? The clock is a lie - I have painted it into fragments. But if you must know, the game begins when the light shifts and the crowd's noise becomes a colour. Seven-fifteen by your machine, yes, but what matters is not the time; it is the angle from which you see the pitcher's arm, the violence of the curve, the way the bat breaks the white sphere into a new geometry. Watch, and paint it yourself.

The hour matters less than the light. At such a time the sun drops low and the dust on the infield turns to gold, and the uniforms lose their edges in the haze - that is the moment worth painting, not the first pitch. I would set my easel past the outfield wall and wait for the sky to change its mind, for the game will keep its schedule and the light will not.

Seven and a quarter by the clock of the English - I have no head for such reckonings, and no matter. What interests me is the light. The men on the field are lit like figures in a night watch, each face catching the flare of the lamps, one man's jaw clenched, another's shoulders slumped, each carrying his own small drama, and none of them seated long enough for me to catch it truly. Paint them at dusk, not at noon; the shadow tells more than the sun.

At a quarter past seven the men will run out onto the green, and the grass will be that impossible kind of green, and the sky over the city will be the color of the last light - and I would rather paint that moment than the score. Every game is a small resurrection: the body that failed yesterday is asked to try again, in front of everyone watching. Go, take your heart with you, and wear something red.

Seven and a quarter! A fine hour for a lively allegro - the crowd's murmur like a string section tuning before the downbeat, the crack of the bat a timpani stroke. I should set it to music: a little overture in the key of the Brewers, with a mock-heroic theme for the Cubs. If only they'd let me write the score, I'd have the whole stadium humming by the seventh-inning rest.

What matters the hour? The hour is a prison-bar, and I have shattered prison-bars before. Whether at seven or at midnight, when the first ball is thrown and the crowd draws breath as one, there is the moment - and it will strike like the opening chord of the Fifth, sudden and terrible and glorious. Let them play when the sun goes down; darkness was never an obstacle to me. I wrote my greatest music deaf.

Were it a fugue, I would give you the subject now and the answer in due order - but you ask after a game, and the hour is the seventh past nine in the morning here, which is evening where the players stand. You are welcome; the answer is given. All things begin and end in Him; the hour of a ballgame is no exception.

Well, honey, I'll tell you - it don't matter what time the clock says, it matters when the crowd starts feelin' it. But if you're askin' so you don't miss the first pitch, you best be sittin' down by a quarter past seven, Eastern time. That's when the boys in blue and the boys in pinstripes start stirrin' up a little rock and roll on the diamond. Thank you, thank you very much.

They'll take the field when the evening comes, brother - and oh, the way a crowd lights up when the whole stadium moves as one, that's the same feeling I chased my whole life. Love and rhythm, that's all it is, whether it's a glove or a moonwalk. Heal the world, make a better place - and tonight, let them play.

A quarter past seven, wherever you happen to be standing, and I'd wager the whole of Milwaukee is humming by then, the way a good crowd hums before the first note. It's only a ballgame, but so was Shea, and so was Candlestick, and something always happened there worth remembering. Come together, right now - over nine innings.

Seven and a quarter past, they say, but the clock in the tower don't run for you and it don't run for me. The umpire's whistle is a train that left the station before the question got asked. You want the hour - go stand on the corner with the vendors and the lost dogs and wait for the crack of the bat; that's the only time that ever told the truth.

Seven-fifteen, and honestly? That's a perfect time - the sun's going down, the lights are coming up, and everybody's got that one song they're waiting to hear. I've played stadiums at that hour and I can tell you the crowd's different then - looser, braver, like they know the night belongs to them. So be there. You'll want to remember it.

By my reckoning, the seventh hour and a quarter past noon in the eastern Indies - though I have been wrong before about the longitude, as the learned men of Salamanca reminded me. I would set sail for such a game as I set sail for Cathay: with confidence in my own charts, and a prayer that the wind holds. But mark you, the lands one reaches are not always the lands one sought.

Ha! In Cathay they reckon the day by gongs and water-clocks, and never twice the same hour in two cities - a merchant learns to ask not 'when?' but 'when by whose bell?' Still, the men of this western town will gather when the day's work is done and the lamps are lit, some while past the setting of the sun, and there will be much shouting and spiced drink and wagers. I have seen stranger games in Kublai's court, and richer wagers too.

The strait is narrow, the winds contrary, and the men mutinous; yet we hold our westward course until the hour the islands rise from the sea. That hour is the same for games and for spice - the hour God grants the steadfast. The Brewers' harbor is no different from any other: you sail until you sight the flag, and you do not turn back for fear of the dark.

The scheduled start is 7:15 pm Eastern. But I'd remind you that a game, like a mission, depends on more than the clock - it depends on preparation and the team's discipline. I'd rather know the wind and the pitcher's arm than the hour. Still, if you want to see the first pitch, be in your seat before seven.

I never once asked what time the flight left - I asked whether the fuel was enough and the wings were true, and then I went. If you're waiting on the clock, you'll spend your life on the ground. Find your seat, feel the engine catch, and let the Cubs wonder what hit them.

In Baikonur we counted the hours until the window opened, and here they simply say seven-fifteen and expect you to trust it. I watched the Earth turn beneath me and could not have told you what time it was in any city - but I knew the moment the sunlight caught the rivers and made them shine like silver. Put your mind there instead of on the little hand, and you will find the whole world is at the game.

Seven fifteen Eastern. But here's the thing - you didn't need to ask. You should have a device in your pocket that knows the time, the score, and the pitcher's ERA before the umpire finishes the call. That's the whole point: technology should disappear, and the answer should just be there. Now go watch the game, and stop wasting the moment asking about it.

Seven fifteen Eastern - that's the schedule, and schedules slip, so the real answer is whenever the first pitch actually leaves the hand. But here's the first-principles version: we could stream this to a phone on Mars with about a twenty-minute light-lag, which is wild when you think about it. So the honest time is: right now, if you're watching the recording that already exists in some frame of reference. Show up at 7:15 local-to-them and you're fine.

I remember sitting in my father's barbershop in Kosciusko, the radio crackling, and the whole shop going quiet when the game came on - that's what a start time really is; it's when people gather. Tonight that gathering is at 7:15, and I want you to think about who you're watching it with. Are you watching it with someone you love? You tell me.

The Brewers and the Cubs? I'll tell you the time, but I'll tell you this too: a man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee don't need a watch to know when the action's gonna be. Seven-fifteen, Eastern, and I'd be there with my hands up, ready to rumble - but I'd rather be in the ring than in the stands, 'cause I'm the greatest, and the greatest don't watch; the greatest perform.

Ha! You ask me the hour of a baseball game - I only ever counted the minutes of a match by the roar of the crowd and the ache in my legs. But a ball is a ball, and a boy chasing one under the floodlights is the same boy I was in Bauru, barefoot in the dirt. Go early, take a child, and stay until the last out - that is the only timekeeping that matters.

Seven-fifteen - and that's when the magic starts, not before. A boy sitting with his father, a scorecard, a bag of peanuts, a game that could turn on one swing in the ninth; that's a story worth telling, and it begins at a quarter past seven whether the teams deserve it or not. Dream a little, stay curious, and don't start the picture before the lights go down.