Baseball Fever... CATCH IT!

Thomas Boswell (the longtime Washington Post scribe) has a list of reasons why baseball is better than football, although they're not as funny as Carlin's.

Two of America's favorite team sports favor huge people (football and basketball). I think this appeals to our egalitarian instincts. I used to play a lot of pick-up basketball, and legion were the numbers of good (but not THAT good) basketball players who thought they'd be pros, "If only I were 6'7". It's a sort of built in excuse. In the case of baseball, because the statistics are so telling and clear-cut, there can be little doubt about the talents of the players. It's a meritocracy, in the black and white of the box score. In a sport like soccer (or hockey, which I played in college) talent is less measurable. Football players are equated with their size ("he's a 6'6", 300 pound left tackle), basketball players by their height, and baseball players by their stats. Paul Bunyan, after all, is one of our culture heroes. How many times do we hear some broadcaster say that NBA players are "the greatest athletes in the world", as if no mere 6' tall mortal could be a great athlete?

Football is a strange game because no fans understand it. All we see is the skill positions -- hence the endless palaver about quarterbacks. "This game will be won in the trenches," intone the announcers, but nobody watches what goes on there.

Our American individualism would seem to favor baseball, which is a game of individual match-ups and not really a team sport in the sense that other sports are, because it doesn't involve much teamwork.

It's amazing to me how most people who talk about sports for a living don't understand them. "Golf is 80% mental," say the broadcasters, despite the fact that it is clearly the case that golf is the least mental and most physical of sports. If you have a perfect swing and a decent caddy, you barely need to think at all. In all the team sports like basketball, hockey or soccer, the endless permutations of where your teammates are and where the opponents are must be constantly computed in your mind. Same with football, except you get to huddle up and think about it between every play (or let your coaches do the thinking for you).

ive got a bunch of allen guttman (a cultural/sport historian at umass Amherst) texts and in one of those, I remember there being a mark twain quote concerning baseball and urban/rural---hopefully i'll remember to hunt that up.

I think heaven is a baseball park. Until I wrecked my arm irrevocably forever my great ambition and hope and dream was to become a major league pitcher. More than being a rock-star or a movie-star or anything else that was my grandiose unrealistic childhood vision of perfect happiness. My arm got destroyed from practicing pitching with my dad in the back-yard endless hours a day and afterwards I began my quest to become a writer. But even if that quest proves real and I become a writer professionally I bet it will be nothing in terms of happiness next to the joy I would have had as a baseball player. Like I said - heaven is a ball park.

Anyway. I am a Seattle Mariner's fan and have been since I can remember. They have two solid sluggers and an out of this world pitcher but I have low expectations nonetheless. And as a Canadian I like the Blue-Jays, and I've actually come to really adore the team lately though I once hated them beyond all rational measure since the Toronto channels would shove them down our throats even though we are endless hundreds of miles away from that particular city. But I like the Jays now, probably because I'm a shameless band-wagon jumper ever since they've gotten good. They don't air Mariner's games anymore on my local cable for some insane unknown reason like they once did, despite the fact that I live practically next-door to Seattle, up here in the Pacific North-West.

Anyway. I think the Royals could repeat, or else the Giants. Everyone is saying the Cubs will do it but its hard for me to accept that given that they haven't won in over a century. That seems to me a genuine curse, in the realm of the super-natural. A century-plus of championship failure is truly hard to imagine in fact.

I might sound ignorant but the only team I'm really confident in is the Kansas City Royals. I saw them destroy the Jays last year, every game of that series tragedy, and with their base-running and stealing and all the rest I can't put any team above them. Maybe the Giants, maybe the Cardinals, but the Royals is who I'd put my money on if I had any money to speak of.

here's the account of allen guttman's mark twain quote. its from his book, "from ritual to record: the nature of modern sports."

"one way to understand is to see it against the background of what it is not. when mark twain was informed that albert spalding's touring baseball teams had played an exhibition game in the Hawaiian islands, he marveled at the cultural contrast: 'I have visited the sandwich islands...where life is one long slumberless Sabbath, the climate one long, delicious summer day...and these boys have played baseball there!--baseball, which is the very symbol the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century! one cannot realize it; the place and the fact are so incongruous; its like interrupting a funeral with a circus.'"

its been years since ive read the book but there's a chapter in it called "why baseball was our national game" and an immediately following one called "the fascination with football."

if any realllly wants to know what guttman thinks about those things, id be happy to re-read and share some of his gems.

Interesting quote, bounty. I'd like to read some of guttman's gems.

Darcy, looks like the M's are picking up a little steam. Sorry your local station is not baseball-fan friendly. I can't watch the game on TV until the playoffs, but baseball is one of those games I like to listen to on the radio while I'm working on stuff in the barn - if the announcer is any good.

hang in there with me Sancho---im reading the da vinci code and loving it!

okay I did a quick perusal, with some dedicated reading in Guttmann.

the really short answer as to why baseball was our national pastime, is found in two prominent qualities relatively unique to baseball. its pastoral nature (which hearkens to pre-modern, "primitive" times) and its high degree of quantification (which speaks to modern times), the merging of which have created a dynamic that appeals to us and was appropriate to the times.

a telling quote ends the chapter:

"baseball may have been a vehicle for transition, a peculiar game whose combination of modern and primitive-pastoral elements helped to bring the united states emotionally into a decisively secular modern world. to speak this way is not to suggest that baseball will now decline and disappear, but it is hard not to believe that the primitive-pastoral aspects of the game are not mostly anachronistic. it seems all too likely that baseball has had its day in the sun."

the next chapter is "the fascination of football."

Thanks for the quotes, Bounty. It's an interesting theory, and who am I to say? Probably he's right. And at any rate, I like his style.

But is it really a pastoral sport? Despite it being played more or less on a pasture, I've never thought of baseball that way. Granted outfielders in the Little League are living the bucolic, pastoral life. I know this first-hand: I stood out in center field many an hour, hemming, hawing, scratching, chewing, spitting, daydreaming; but that was Little League. The outfield in the big leagues is intense.

A few years ago I went to a Giants game at AT&T Field in San Francisco. They've got a free area behind Right Field, under the "Levis" sign. You can just walk under the bleachers and there you are, field level, nothing between you and the Right Fielder but a chain-link fence. It gave me a real appreciation for the athleticism of a Major League Baseball player. I mean those guys look like normal guys on TV, but they're not - they're professional athletes - freaks of nature. Anyway, Hunter Pence was playing RF and I've gotta tell ya, the dude was wired, spring-loaded, and freaking fast. Yes, well, so anyway, they call him Intense-Pence for a reason.

lemme head back to the book Sancho and i'll see how Guttmann elaborates on "pastoral"

here's a good quote to start: "in a new and relatively open country, baseball and cricket---once popular in America---rivaled each other as fulfillers of a psychosocial need, much as plants and animals struggle to occupy ecological niches....Two quite dissimilar factors are at work---the place of baseball in the cycle of the seasons...[this latter part being a part of Guttmann's pastoral sense].

he goes on to talk about how historians and most especially novelists, have explored and written on that subject.

another quote: "the ceaseless effort to discover rural traits in an essentially urban sport indicates the importance of the pastoral impulse in baseball."

he talks about the pilgrimage to cooperstown and the commemorative postage stamp from 1939 that symbolically showed a sandlot, a barn, a church and a country school.

he goes on to say that pastoralism is "more than an emphasis on the rural. the gestalt is a complex one which includes open space, grass, warm weather, the bright sun" and that those factors have been "woven into the rhetoric of baseball."

a good quote to finish from someone Guttmann quoted (gerard McCauley): "as soon as the American earth softens mackinaws are shed for sweaters and American boys are feeling the sting of balls snapping into gloves, anticipating that in a very short time the trees will bud, the sun will linger, telling them baseball is here."

I see his point. Who knows, there may something deep in our dna that yearns to be on a lush green field as the buds are popping, particularly for city kids living in a concrete jungle.