Baseball, football and basketball, the three most popular American games, are uniquely reflective of the American character - American dreams, ambitions, achievements and defeats - and Americans often watch them as morality plays about their own conflicting natures, argues American writer and professor Roger Rosenblatt.
Of the three principal games, baseball is both the most elegantly designed and the easiest to account for in terms of its appeal. It is a game played within strict borders, and of strict dimensions - a distance so many feet from here to there, a pitcher's mound so many inches high, the weight of the ball, the weight of the bat, the poles that determine in or out, what counts and does not, and so forth. The rules are unbending; indeed, with a very few exceptions, the game's rules have not changed in a hundred years.
This is because, unlike basketball, baseball does not depend on the size of the players, but rather on a view of human evolution that says that people do not change that much - certainly not in a hundred years - and therefore they should do what they can within the limits they are given. As the poet Richard Wilbur wrote: "The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle."
And still, functioning within its limits, first and last, baseball is about the individual. In other sports, the ball does the scoring. In baseball, the person scores. The game was designed to center on Americans in our individual strivings. The runner on first base has a notion to steal second. The first baseman has a notion to slip behind him. The pitcher has a notion to pick him off, but he delivers to the plate where the batter swings to protect the runner who decides to go now, and the second baseman braces himself to make the tag if only the catcher can rise to the occasion and put a low, hard peg on the inside of the bag. One doesn't need to know what these things mean to recognize that they all test everyone's ability to do a specific job, to make a personal decision, and to improvise.
Fans cling to the glory moments of the game's history, especially the heroic names and heroic deeds (records and statistics). America holds dear all its sports heroes because the country does not have the long histories of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Lacking an Alexander the Great or a Charlemagne, it draws its heroic mythology from sports.
We also cherish the game's sublime moments because such memories preserve everybody's youth as part of America's continuing, if a bit strained, need to remain in a perpetual summer. The illusion of the game is that it will go on forever. (Baseball is the only sport in which a team, down by a huge deficit, with but one hitter left, can still win.)
In the 1950s, one of the game's greatest players, Willie Mays of the New York Giants, made a legendary catch of a ball hit to the deepest part of one of the largest stadiums, going away from home plate, over his shoulder. It was not only that Willie turned his back and took off, it was the green continent of grass on which he ran and the waiting to see if he would catch up with the ball and the reek of your sweat and of everyone else's who sat like Seurat's pointillist dots in the stadium, in the carved-out bowl of a planet that shines pale in daylight, bright purple and emerald at night.
Still, the youth and hope of the game constitute but one half of baseball, and thus one half of its meaning to us. It is the second summer of the baseball season that reveals the game's complete nature. The second summer does not have the blithe optimism of the first half of the season. Each year, from August to the World Series in October, a sense of mortality begins to lower over the game - a suspicion that will deepen by late September to a certain knowledge that something that was bright, lusty, and overflowing with possibility can come to an end.
The beauty of the game is that it traces the arc of American life, of American innocence eliding into experience. Until mid-August, baseball is a boy in shorts whooping it up on the fat grass, afterwards it becomes a leery veteran with a sun-baked neck, whose main concern is to protect the plate. In its second summer, baseball is about fouling off death. Sadaharu Oh, the Babe Ruth of Japanese baseball, wrote an ode to his sport in which he praised the warmth of the sun and foresaw the approaching change to "the light of winter coming."
Small wonder that baseball produces more fine literature than any other sport. American writers - novelists Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, Bernard Malamud, and poet Marianne Moore - have seen the nation of dreams in the game. The country's violation of its dreams lies here too. Like America itself, baseball fought against integration until Jackie Robinson, the first Major League African American, stood up for all that the country wanted to believe. America, too, resisted its own self-proclaimed destiny to be the country of all the people and then, when it did strive to become the country of all the people - black, Asian, Latino, everyone - the place improved. Baseball also improved.
On mute display in baseball is the design of the U.S. Constitution itself. The basic text of the Constitution is the main building, a symmetrical 18th-century structure grounded in the Enlightenment's principles of reason, optimism, order, and a wariness of emotion and passion. The Constitution's architects, all fundamentally British Enlightenment minds, sought to build a house that Americans could live in without toppling it by placing their impulses above their rationality.
But the trouble with that original body of laws was that it was too stable, too rigid. Thus, the Founders came up with the Bill of Rights, which in baseball's terms may be seen as the encouragement of individual freedom within hard and fast laws. Baseball is at once classic and romantic. So is America. And both the country and the sport survive by keeping the two impulses in balance.
Of the three principal games, baseball is both the most elegantly designed and the easiest to account for in terms of its appeal. It is a game played within strict borders, and of strict dimensions - a distance so many feet from here to there, a pitcher's mound so many inches high, the weight of the ball, the weight of the bat, the poles that determine in or out, what counts and does not, and so forth. The rules are unbending; indeed, with a very few exceptions, the game's rules have not changed in a hundred years.
This is because, unlike basketball, baseball does not depend on the size of the players, but rather on a view of human evolution that says that people do not change that much - certainly not in a hundred years - and therefore they should do what they can within the limits they are given. As the poet Richard Wilbur wrote: "The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle."
And still, functioning within its limits, first and last, baseball is about the individual. In other sports, the ball does the scoring. In baseball, the person scores. The game was designed to center on Americans in our individual strivings. The runner on first base has a notion to steal second. The first baseman has a notion to slip behind him. The pitcher has a notion to pick him off, but he delivers to the plate where the batter swings to protect the runner who decides to go now, and the second baseman braces himself to make the tag if only the catcher can rise to the occasion and put a low, hard peg on the inside of the bag. One doesn't need to know what these things mean to recognize that they all test everyone's ability to do a specific job, to make a personal decision, and to improvise.
Fans cling to the glory moments of the game's history, especially the heroic names and heroic deeds (records and statistics). America holds dear all its sports heroes because the country does not have the long histories of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Lacking an Alexander the Great or a Charlemagne, it draws its heroic mythology from sports.
We also cherish the game's sublime moments because such memories preserve everybody's youth as part of America's continuing, if a bit strained, need to remain in a perpetual summer. The illusion of the game is that it will go on forever. (Baseball is the only sport in which a team, down by a huge deficit, with but one hitter left, can still win.)
In the 1950s, one of the game's greatest players, Willie Mays of the New York Giants, made a legendary catch of a ball hit to the deepest part of one of the largest stadiums, going away from home plate, over his shoulder. It was not only that Willie turned his back and took off, it was the green continent of grass on which he ran and the waiting to see if he would catch up with the ball and the reek of your sweat and of everyone else's who sat like Seurat's pointillist dots in the stadium, in the carved-out bowl of a planet that shines pale in daylight, bright purple and emerald at night.
Still, the youth and hope of the game constitute but one half of baseball, and thus one half of its meaning to us. It is the second summer of the baseball season that reveals the game's complete nature. The second summer does not have the blithe optimism of the first half of the season. Each year, from August to the World Series in October, a sense of mortality begins to lower over the game - a suspicion that will deepen by late September to a certain knowledge that something that was bright, lusty, and overflowing with possibility can come to an end.
The beauty of the game is that it traces the arc of American life, of American innocence eliding into experience. Until mid-August, baseball is a boy in shorts whooping it up on the fat grass, afterwards it becomes a leery veteran with a sun-baked neck, whose main concern is to protect the plate. In its second summer, baseball is about fouling off death. Sadaharu Oh, the Babe Ruth of Japanese baseball, wrote an ode to his sport in which he praised the warmth of the sun and foresaw the approaching change to "the light of winter coming."
Small wonder that baseball produces more fine literature than any other sport. American writers - novelists Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, Bernard Malamud, and poet Marianne Moore - have seen the nation of dreams in the game. The country's violation of its dreams lies here too. Like America itself, baseball fought against integration until Jackie Robinson, the first Major League African American, stood up for all that the country wanted to believe. America, too, resisted its own self-proclaimed destiny to be the country of all the people and then, when it did strive to become the country of all the people - black, Asian, Latino, everyone - the place improved. Baseball also improved.
On mute display in baseball is the design of the U.S. Constitution itself. The basic text of the Constitution is the main building, a symmetrical 18th-century structure grounded in the Enlightenment's principles of reason, optimism, order, and a wariness of emotion and passion. The Constitution's architects, all fundamentally British Enlightenment minds, sought to build a house that Americans could live in without toppling it by placing their impulses above their rationality.
But the trouble with that original body of laws was that it was too stable, too rigid. Thus, the Founders came up with the Bill of Rights, which in baseball's terms may be seen as the encouragement of individual freedom within hard and fast laws. Baseball is at once classic and romantic. So is America. And both the country and the sport survive by keeping the two impulses in balance.
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