One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Mastery of sports is the imposition of will over the drudgery of repetition. Baseball is not unique in this regard, but the solitary nature of the game enhances it: The slugger poised alone in the batter's box, the outfielder isolated in a sea of grass.

So too are the daily comings and goings of a baseball player, particularly a minor leaguer, a study in routine. The wakeup times on the road, the blurring of one small city into the next. And with it all, no promise of fulfillment at the end of the journey. The futility of the repetition is enough to drive a man to existential despair. Our only defense against the absurdity then is to refuse it, to insist that there is a point to our labors, or to laugh in spite of it, tossing the beach ball of life into the wind.

It's a lesson that center fielder D.J. Wilson of the South Bend Cubs, a minor league affiliate of the Chicago Cubs, learned during a game on Sunday, when a beach ball bounded onto his designated patch of earth. Wilson, who grew up a Red Sox fan in Canton Ohio, and was drafted in 2015, attempted ten times to return the ball to the stands, and ten times was denied. A video that has been shared throughout sports media details his efforts. On the speakers in the stadium the unmistakable strains of "Yakkity Sax" can be heard, the universal anthem of comic failure.

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"It's funny," Wilson explained by phone this morning. "South Bend had posted it on YouTube, and I sent it to my parents. They had a pretty good laugh about it. I was getting a bunch of Snapchats from my buddies having a good laugh about it. But, no, I'm taking it humorously, it's pretty funny."

Certainly, any baseball player would rather go viral for hitting a home run, he said, but "You've got to keep the fans involved," he said with a laugh. At first, Wilson wasn't aware what was going on. The umpire had called time, and was pointing out at him. He was confused, but eventually realized what he was enlisted to do.

"I didn't see what kind of ball it was. So I started jogging back, and the closer I got, I realized it was a beach ball. I looked up at the flags and I saw the flags blowing straight in from left, and I was like, ah, this is going to be funny."

And so it was. In each failed attempt, it's easy to see increasing frustration coloring his gait, as he tries, over and over to complete the absurd task. A group of fans gathered above seem to be cheering him on, but the cruel hand of the gods had one last indignity intended.

"I don't know what try it was, the fourth or fifth, I threw one I thought it was going to get over, and a little girl smacked it back down. I couldn't do anything but laugh."

There's a metaphor for the type of work ethic necessary to make it as a professional athlete here, although it hadn't occurred to Wilson until I mentioned it.

"If there was one lesson here, I would say persistence is key. You gotta keep going, keep driving. Rome wasn't built in a night. We're minor league ball players, and every day is a day you learn something new, something different about the game, and different about yourself. You just gotta keep going out there and hopefully one day you'll make the big leagues."

On the eleventh try he succeeded.

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