Why Baseball
An American Eden of the Mind
I wrote this essay 25 years ago, and it was published in conjunction with the release over nine evenings (“innings,” of course) of Baseball, Ken Burns’s now celebrated documentary for PBS in which I played a role. The film is still available — with the addition of a “Tenth Inning” in 2010 — as is the companion book in which this essay appeared. Although I have learned a great deal more about baseball since 1993, I have made no changes to what I wrote then.
Fundamentally, baseball is what America is not, but has longed or imagined itself to be. It is the missing piece of the puzzle, the part that makes us whole … a fit for a fractured society. Baseball is about connecting; America is about breaking apart. America, independent and separate, is a lonely nation in which culture, class, ideology, and creed fail to unite us; baseball is the tie that binds. While the imperative for Americans has always been to forge ahead, in search of the new, baseball has always been about the past. In this land of opportunity, a man must venture forth to make his own way. Baseball is about coming home.
Yet more than anything else, America is about hope and renewal. And gloriously, so is baseball, pulsing with the mystery of the seasons and of life itself.
This great game opens a portal onto our past, both real and imagined, comforting us with intimations of immortality and primordial bliss. But it also holds up a mirror, showing us as we are. And sometimes baseball even serves as a beacon, revealing a path through the wilderness.
It is true enough that baseball is a sort of Rosetta Stone for deciphering our still revolutionary experiment in nationhood. It is no less true that baseball has realized — through individual brilliance or teamwork or racial harmony — the highest of our country’s ideals. But the game’s greatest gift to America has been to provide a haven from it — a Providential antidote to our raging, tearing, relentless progress, an evergreen field that provides rest and recreation, myths and memories, heroes and history.
”It’s our game,” wrote Walt Whitman, “America’s game … it belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our Constitution’s laws; is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.” Baseball fits us today, and will tomorrow, in the same ways it always has, for the place of baseball in our nation’s life is not different from its role in our own lives. It is a hard thing to be resolutely independent, despite all the fierce pride it permits. Baseball meets our occasional need for dependency. It is what Mother England was to us once, what our own mothers were to us before we found it necessary to fly from their embrace: the repository of sustaining legend and the wellspring of our beliefs about ourselves. Baseball is our home base, replenishing our spirits, restoring our hopes, repairing our losses and blessing us to journey anew.
Our continuing failure to form a more perfect union, to live up to our forefathers’ plan, is a key to this game’s enduring appeal. Healing deep rifts, or in the course of a contest papering them over, baseball has shaped and been shaped by the national character since the 1840s. It was then that advancing industry and urban migration first imbued rural life with a utopian, and by definition false, nostalgia. Idyllic America had not disappeared, for in fact it had never existed. Young bachelors who now streamed into the cities forgot the endless monotony and grinding physical labor of backwoods and farm; in their hearts they ached for their Paradise Lost, and regained it on the Elysian Fields. In the park within the city, they could go home again.
Bat-and-ball games are not unique to America; they are depicted in Egyptian hieroglyphs and find their origins in fertility rituals, blood renewals of the earth. It may be argued that baseball itself is not uniquely American, because some English forerunners — rounders, cricket, feeder, cat ball, trap ball, prisoners’ base, town ball — had been played in New England since the latter half of the seventeenth century. A game called baseball, though differing markedly from any we would recognize by that name, had been played in America as early as the Battle of Valley Forge. But the game that these United States embraced as their national pastime was none of the ones mentioned above. What rendered unique the version of baseball pioneered by the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York was the state of the nation at the time of its origin.
Sport indulged in by grown men in the 1820s and 1830s — indeed, any physical exercise taken for its own sake — brought scorn from puritanical souls and derision from men of business, who had long ago given over boyish things. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote despairingly of the “invalid habits of this country.”
Americans were blind to the virtues of play, much to the contempt of visiting Englishmen like W. E. Baxter, who wrote in America and the Americans that “to roll balls in a ten pin alley by gas-light or to drive a fast trotting horse in a light wagon along a very bad and dusty road, seems the Alpha and Omega of sport in the United States.”
But as the lure of employment and relative leisure herded country boys into crowded cities, an outdoor movement was born. “Who in this community really takes exercise?” wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson. “Even the mechanic confines himself to one set of muscles, the blacksmith acquires strength in his right arm, and the dancing teacher in his left leg. But the professional or business man, what muscles has he at all?” (Higginson’s crusade for exercise lifted ice skating into such prominence that in the 1850s it became known as Higginson’s Revival. Grassy fields were enclosed and flooded, to become skating rinks; subsequently, shrewd promoters took advantage of the spring thaw to create baseball fields for paid admission.)
The Knickerbockers were comprised of flaccid professional and business men when they began to gather for exercise at New York City’s Madison Square Park in 1842. They were exhilarated by the crack of the bat and the sting of the ball and, to use Whitman’s description, the “snap, go, fling” of their new American game, no less manly than its English counterpart but lightning-fast compared to cricket’s languor. By 1845 the Knickerbockers had shifted their play ground across the Hudson River to the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, a landscaped retreat of picnic grounds and scenic vistas that was designed by its proprietors to relieve New Yorkers of city air and city care, and to give the urban populace a place reminiscent of the idealized farms that presumably had sent all these lads to the metropolis.
The Knickerbockers adopted fourteen playing rules in response to their new constraints of space (such as the concept of foul territory) and their quest for dignity (runners to be thrown out at base, not at on their way to base). On September 23, 1845, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club was formally organized and its rules were recorded. The statistics of their games were noted in a scorebook that survives to this day. Baseball was not a game for boys anymore.
So, if one had been asked the question, “Why Baseball?” in the 1840s and 1850s, the answer would have been this: first, the novelty and excitement of play, a rebellion against Puritanism; second, the opportunity for sallow city clerks to expend surplus energy — the sort that impedes hard work at a desk — in a sylvan setting, communing with an American Eden of the mind; and third, the assertion of a binding national identity, independent of John Bull.
The era of Anglo-American amity had not yet dawned; our country’s spiritual separation from the Mother Country, begun in 1776, was still in process. And nominating baseball to rival and replace cricket — for cricket was, after horse racing, the most popular sport in America — became an important step in that process. Moreover when England, seeking to maintain its supply of cotton from the American South during the Civil War, appeared overly cordial to the Confederate cause, anti-British feeling swept the North. By 1865 cricket in this country had been reduced to a diversion for a shrinking band of Anglophiles, while the New York Game of Baseball was spreading across the landscape like dandelions, courtesy of returning veterans whose first exposure to the game might have come in a prisoner-of-war camp.
Actually, cricket was doomed in this country regardless of England’s actions in the Civil War. The pace was too slow and, more importantly, the requirements for field maintenance were too fastidious for it to be played by soldiers forever on the move. What America did to cricket was what it does to all exogenous innovation — repackage it to suit its own tastes. Baseball borrowed much of cricket’s nomenclature, its copious recordkeeping, its style of play and, most significantly, its emblematic relation to its nation of origin.
Many other clubs had sprung up after the Knickerbockers in 1845 — the Gothams, Eagles, Mutuals, Excelsiors, Atlantics, Eckfords, and scores more. The class struggle of white collar and blue collar was played out on the field, and not surprisingly the working man won out; after the Knickerbockers’ initial attempts at limiting baseball competition to men of genteel stock, it was playing ability, not social standing, that counted in baseball. The gentlemanly players of baseball’s first team retreated from the field, shaking their heads in dismay at how common riffraff had perverted the “grand old game” — not even a generation old — and probably ruined it forever.
For patriotic Americans, bred to honor individualism and democracy, this was yet another reason to embrace baseball as the national game. Industrialism had already begun to create vast inequities of personal wealth and political influence unrelated to voting power. Yet Americans were slow to turn cynical; most still believed in the promise of the new world, and were gratified to find that in baseball it didn’t matter whom you knew — victory went to the team that scored more runs. Just as the game had drawn a new urban America back to its pseudo-Edenic past, it now helped to carry forward, into a new and increasingly corrupt body politic, the hypothetical democratic values of a bygone age.
One of the ways in which baseball and America manifest hope for the future is to lie about the reality of the present, or at the least to engage in self-delusion. There is nothing terribly evil in this, for the lie is sometimes all that sustains the dream. Undelivered promise is, when viewed one way, the tragedy of both the nation and its pastime; viewed another, it is the measure of their souls — an uncaring nation or game would feel no compulsion to rationalize its failures.
The great exception to any equivocal view of baseball’s hypocrisy must be in the matter of race, where clubs (which by their very nature include some and exclude others) systematically barred African-Americans for no reason besides plain prejudice. Black baseball teams had been formed in the early 1860s and had played against white teams just a few years later. Integrated teams were fairly common in the North in the late 1870s, and by the middle of the next decade, blacks were playing with whites at the highest levels of Organized Baseball — the minor leagues and the majors. And then there were none, for sixty years. It is baseball’s shame, and the nation’s.
The Knickerbockers’ vaunted purity was not long for this world. Again following the trail blazed in cricket, gambling led inevitably in baseball to paid admissions, which led with equal inevitability to covert professionalism; enclosed ball fields led in turn to percentage-of-gate arrangements with leading clubs, and hence open professionalism. Game-fixing (“hippodroming”) became known in the 1860s and commonplace by the ’70s. Where had it all begun? With that primal organization of amateurs, the Knickerbockers. Bowing to the reality that baseball could no longer be reserved for the upper crust, and that they would slide from the top rank of competition, the Knicks recruited Harry Wright to join them in 1858. This signaled their abandonment of gentlemanly pretense and their dedication to winning, for young Harry was a professional cricket bowler and a budding baseball genius. This was baseball’s first hint of the professionalism soon to come.
The age of baseball heroes dawned in 1860 with the Brooklyn Excelsiors’ peerless pitcher, Jim Creighton, a remarkable embodiment of baseball’s transecting trends just prior to the Civil War. A declared amateur, he nonetheless accepted money to switch teams and thus became the game’s first true professional; henceforth skilled players would never again be satisfied to contemplate a game of ball as merely a jolly field exercise to be followed by noble toasts and cornucopian banquets.
Creighton was a high-principled, unassuming youth whose gentlemanly manner and temperate habits were exemplary attributes for the promotion of baseball as a “hygienic” pastime. (“Baseball Fever — Catch It!” would never have done in the 1860s.) All the same, he changed the game forevermore not by his prowess but by cheating and getting away with it: pitching a spinning, rising ball with a then illegal snap of the wrist, masked so skillfully that no umpire could detect it. By playing within the strictures of the intricate game of baseball, Creighton gratified those Americans who revered the rule of law, and by evading those strictures he gained the esteem of that even greater number of Americans who despise lawmakers.
How did this simple game come to resonate so deeply all of America’s ideals and idealized visions of itself? How did it come to be our game? Like other American institutions, baseball proceeded from the spark of individual genius to the dynamism of group effort and, in a paradoxical flourish, was simultaneously corrupted and enriched by the entrance of capital. Money came into the game first in the form of gambling; next, as payments to “revolvers,” players who would switch clubs; and finally, as entrepreneurial investment. Money was not the snake in the Garden, spoiling a pastoral, amateur idyll, but instead the stimulus to creativity and excellence.
Indeed, the same could be said for corruption. If gamblers had not found amateur baseball of interest — as professional footraces and prizefighting had been before it — there would have been no ascendancy within a score of years to a level of skill that would command the interest of an adult spectatorship. In the years before the Civil War, the very term “professional” was for baseball players an epithet; by the end of the decade it had become synonymous, as it is today, with precise execution and peak achievement.
The National Association, baseball’s first professional league, was brought down by crooked play, on-field drunkenness and, most of all, by the birth of a bigger idea. That great notion was the National League, a capitalist consortium of stock companies dreamed up by William Hulbert, the game’s least celebrated hero. If baseball players go to bed at night with prayers of thanks for John Ward and Curt Flood (they don’t but they ought to), the owners should hit their pillows with hosannas to Hulbert. Among his accomplishments — besides the reserve clause, which in the Owners’ Secret Hall of Fame is enough to earn him the gaudiest plaque — was to clean up the league after the Louisville Four, particularly pathetic Jim Devlin, conspired to toss away the 1877 pennant.
Gambling did not return to the game in a big way until the twentieth century: attempts were made to “fix” both the 1903 and 1905 World Series, and in the 1914 Series the Philadelphia Athletics, according to losing owner Connie Mack, played to the gamblers’ tune. Hal Chase was tossing away ball games throughout his big-league career, which lasted from 1905 through 1919. The Black Sox Scandal of 1919 did not arise ex nihilo. Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, and Hap Felsch were guilty, sure, but they were dimwitted victims, too, just as Jim Devlin had been.
In our beginnings are our ends. How can you tell where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been? Why baseball? Whence baseball? To ask the latter is to answer the former. And in that answer lies yet another question, the one that now weighs on the minds of all who love the game: Whither baseball?
In the 1980s baseball was touched by the drug problem endemic in our society. Baseball’s victims were highly publicized and their fall from grace was judged more reprehensible for all the advantages that players enjoy. But the game is an American institution reflecting what is wrong with our people as well as what is right. Baseball punished those players who used illegal drugs but ultimately welcomed them back into the fold, even the most incorrigible recidivists. In this most difficult area, baseball was humane and wise and, in recognizing that drug addiction was not a matter of personal election, led America — as it did with integration — rather than follow it.
Even if our current understanding of addiction ultimately proves to be more charitable than scientific, baseball has done right to acknowledge human frailty and help those who have fallen. Why not now, when baseball’s own house is in such transparent disarray, proclaim an amnesty for all its blacklisted players? America, a nation of immigrants, is about second chances. America is about hope and renewal. We love comeback stories and prodigal sons; we extend rehabilitation and parole and pardons to the most dubious prospects for reform. Isn’t it time for baseball to be as generous as America? Come home, Joe Jackson. Come home, Jim Devlin. You’ve been out in the cold long enough. Come home, Denny McLain. Come home, Pete Rose.
As Monte Irvin said in the context of integration, “Baseball has done more to move America in the right direction than all the professional patriots with their billions of cheap words.” Baseball can do it again.
The gyrations of the past few years seem positively frenetic for fans accustomed to the game’s unhurried rhythms and resistance to change. Yet for all its shifts and reversals, baseball has not strayed far from its origins. What sustains baseball in the hearts of Americans, finally, is not its responsiveness to trends in society nor its propensity for novelty, but the promise that it will be the same as it ever was. And oddly, despite the scheduling carousel of three divisions and wild-card entrants into the playoffs, baseball is still our game.
“This is the age of contrivance,” wrote Daniel Boorstin. “The artificial has become so commonplace that the natural begins to seem contrived.” In baseball, domed stadiums with artificial turf had been the norm for new construction for two decades. When the Baltimore Orioles opened their new stadium at Camden Yards the effect was dazzling. Open air? Real grass? Ornamental ironwork? It was the shock of the old. And fans loved it, instantly. They sensed that here was, in Boorstin’s phrase, “an oasis of the uncontrived.”
That same phrase applies to baseball itself. It is a game that reminds us of an America that was — and, even more distantly, of a land of wonders to which we can never return. It is the game of our past, our nation’s and our own; it is the game of our future, in which our sons and daughters take their places alongside us, and replace us. It reflects who we have been, who we are, and whom we might, with the grace of God, become.
