201. What Baseball Does for Americans

What's the main thing baseball teaches us?  To be ready for a test at any time.  You never know when, dreaming, you get picked off second base, that the run you represented will be the one needed for the ballgame that will be needed to keep from losing the pennant.  As, on a warship, a lookout doesn't know that the sighting he missed (because maybe he was dreaming) will lead to the loss of four cruisers — as, the story went, happened at the battle of Savo Island.  Baseball teaches us war.

But baseball teaches us far more than this.  Insofar as life, or great achievement in it, is war, baseball teaches us life.  I realize, though, that I can't convey that now as well as I once did.  So here's what I wrote in the late seventies to explain what baseball does for us.

Baseball's Appeal to America

To appreciate baseball think first of what the other sports have to offer.  The solo sports, like golf, offer beauty of form and cause-effect clarity.  But they lack reciprocal action, the forced replies of offense and defense.  Duel sports, like tennis, offer clear reciprocal action as well as beauty of form, but they lack complication and brotherhood.  Team sports like football offer complication and brotherhood but the reciprocal action is often muddled and beauty of form is often interrupted.

Ah, but baseball.  Baseball, by some miracle of design, offers all the advantages of the team sport without losing any of the advantages of the solo or duel sport.  And that, I want to argue, is why it will be eternally appealing to a civilized audience, and to America, if America remains civilized.

Consider baseball's design.  First, notice how the offense and the defense are kept so cleanly separate.  After bat meets ball, in perfect reciprocity, the defensive players move in unhampered flow, handling the ball, each fully observable, each performing alone, in sequence.  What clarity, and beauty, and individual responsibility.

Think, though, what we'd have if the designers of soccer or hockey, those messy gestalts, had inserted their kind of play into baseball.  Think what it would be like to have three players from the at-bat team roaming the field, throwing blocks on the fielders.  Picture Dave Concepcion fielding a ground ball while some Met is kicking him in the shins.

I don't mean to say, now, that there is no beauty of form in those mixed offense-defense games.  It's just that those games are designed so that somebody is always breaking up the form, sticking his own form in somebody else's eye.

And in baseball the form is, of course, all the more beautiful because the bodies are normal, graceful, human bodies.  The game gives no advantage to height-freaks or weight-freaks, as it does in basketball and football.  Nor does it reduce the human body, taking away its arms, as soccer does.  The full creature, with all his God-given parts, is in play.  Think what a soccer game would look like to the designer of baseball.  Some kind of exercise in a hospital therapy-yard.  Armless trunks showing their exasperation.

But clarity, rather than beauty, is what really makes a game civilized.  The civilized man, I take it, is one in whom the reason and the passions are fully employed, mutually supporting, and fruitfully balanced.  A civilized game will nourish both the reason and the passions.  It will, that is, lead to knowledge and love, which promote each other.  The greater the knowledge the more intense the love, and vice versa.

Here is where baseball's clarity raises it above all other team sports.  At the end of a baseball game we know what happened, what produced the outcome, what blew the game, what saved it.  Everything significant has passed before us, and before the other players, in sequence, and at a pace that lets us take it all in.  The action is a string of pearls, offered to the undistracted eyepiece.  And oh, the blessing of that pace!  What tensions it lets build up in us, what slow-swelling anxieties.  That is the way to savor human complication, and understand it.  That is civilized pleasure.

(Please do not identify my civilized pleasure here with wholesome pleasure.  The sight of seven acres of Russians doing calisthenics may be more wholesome than the sight of Will McEnaney throwing at Greg Luzinsky's head, but it is not necessarily more civilized.)

So clarity brings knowledge, and knowledge explains why we can love baseball players, and baseball players can love each other, more than is possible in any other sport.  We know just what Luis Tiant did, what he went through, in that second World Series start.  We can identify with him and feel all the pressures on him and be grateful.

Can we be as grateful to the football lineman who must have been doing a good job while our eyes were on the end downfield?  Can the other players be as grateful?  I think not.  Only after the play is over will the running back notice that the guard's face is, off on the other side of the field, perhaps significantly in the mud.

Here is where America comes in.  Consider how this team sport which is a succession a glaringly exposed individual performances puts a man on the spot.  It is terrifying.  But we in America are drawn to this kind of terror.  We were gripped by the man on the spot in the TV isolation-booth, sweating out those terribly hard $64,000 questions.  Well, in baseball each player takes his turn in an isolation booth.  And that touches our nightmare, which is also our glory-dream.

Does this focus on the individual diminish love and brotherhood, the thing we look for in a team sport?  No.  What it substitutes for shoulder-to-shoulder teamwork is sympathy, a brotherhood of the spirit that acknowledges essential human isolation.  We see this in the way baseball players call to each other across the spaces.  No sport's terms of encouragement are more tender.  "You're the one, Ron, you're the one.  Go get it, babee!"  It's an expression, I think, of what Stephen Spender called "all love's aidlessness."  They can't help each other so they make it up in rooting for each other.  When Gionfriddo goes back into the shadows of left-center field for DiMaggio's impossible drive there's nothing the eight other Dodgers can do but root for him.  But for a team, or a city, or a nation full of essential individualists, that is a great thing to do.