Baseball takes the stage

Hoboken brags it’s the birthplace of baseball and Frank Sinatra. I’m a fan of both, and will one day attend this annual event featuring 7 10-minute plays with a baseball theme.

The lede, in which I casually drop the word leitmotif:

America’s national pastime is always the common thread loosely linking the seven 10-minute plays that make up Mile Square Theatre’s annual “7th Inning Stretch.” But somehow, Artistic Director Chris O’Connor said, at least one other leitmotif — religion, fathers and sons, you name it — emerges.

This year, that’s inclusion.

“I think that speaks to our time,” O’Connor said. “Three of the plays really align.”

In one short, male baseball players prepare to welcome a female left-handed reliever. In another, a woman of Southeast Asian descent and an Irish-American man share their family stories on a first date at a baseball game.

In a third, a father and son argue about the father’s trip to Puerto Rico to help hurricane victims and their talk turns to baseball great Roberto Clemente, who was killed in a 1972 plane crash while on a humanitarian mission to the island.