I’ve always been fascinated by the myriad faces and types of humanity that populate the human zoo. And in America, there is no better place to study our particular version of the human animal than at a baseball game. Unlike other sports, all manner of Americans can, and do, love baseball. To me, the term National Pastime has never meant the most popular sport in the nation, although for a long time it was, and, truth be told, may still well be. Instead, I always felt it meant that the best way to candidly observe an American in his and her most natural habitat is when passing time at a baseball game.
The photographs of the fans in the stands go all the way back to Civil War America. The pictures open a window to another universe, a lost world to which it may seem a personal connection simply isn’t possible. It is possible, however, and those old photos provide the formula for making that connection real. We are all—them, us, then, now—watching the game.
As I scan the crowds, the men wearing hats, coats, and ties, the women in hats, too, and dresses covering them up to the neck, it is not difficult to effect a Ted Turner-style colorization in my mind, to insert the sound of hubbub and spontaneous roar. I know the grass was green, the sky was blue. I hear the crack of the bat, the slap and pop of leather. I see the attitude of the times in their faces—defiance, cockiness, worry; a studied personal posture on public display. They were fighting the Great Depression, or worrying about loved ones at war, or basking in peacetime pleasures, all of this held in a momentary stasis, suspended, as they turned their attention to another kind of problem solving, but always with one consistent theme: doing a job. That’s how we talk about a baseball player’s responsibility. He does his job. This isn’t romance. It’s a way of looking at the world. Three strikes and you’re out. He got there first. He gets to walk. He hit it out of the park. Keep it in front of you. Hit the cut-off man. Keep your eye on the ball. Don’t make an error. You’re either safe, or you’re out. At games they are all there, the elements to be successful. The way to do a job.
So did others, from the very first, by the tens of thousands. A century and a half, or about two-thirds of our country’s history up to now, is wrapped up in this shared experience. Before there were bleachers, people climbed fences, sat on hillsides, stood just beyond the field of play, forming a human perimeter where future outfield fences would one day stand. They climbed trees and sat in the branches like flocks of fedora-wearing birds. At one time, the game must have seemed as new as the country itself. Grandstands had to be constructed. Entrance fees needed to be charged to make the events sustainable. Why did they come? To see local boys make good, to pit one neighborhood or town against another, for civic pride. The game is the curiosity-seeker’s perfect thrill; spectacle conjured from the available elements of open air, open field, wit, and brawn. Wait one more pitch, and just see what happens.
Over time, fans made social and political statements, first with their posture, then, later on, with their appearance. From cocky to colorful. Wealthy or working class. Anti-war or conservative. Socially flamboyant. Posturing or unself-conscious. Patriotic. Contemporary. And, at long last, casual. Fan behavior has run the gamut, from stoic observance to complete rapture, to pandemonium, flooding the streets after Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard 'Round the World,” or following the home run king around the bases. Even when away from the game, it is somehow comforting to realize that the game is always being played, as long as the weather is warm and the evenings are long.
Other sports claim to make history. Baseball actually does make history. Whether breaking the color barrier or canceling the World Series to solve a labor dispute, or shamefully allowing an All-Star game to end without a victor at a time when the country itself was enforcing only the laws a privileged elite deemed necessary, baseball runs its parallel course with the struggles of America.
Better sportswriters than I—Red Smith, David Halberstam, Thomas Boswell, Bill James—have chronicled the sport’s inner connection with the American temperament. Like them, at some games I feel the eerie attendance of many generations. At other times, I sense a strange missing element—those fans who have moved on.
Like fans, certain players look as if they could only have existed in the time in which they played. Take Jacob “Old Eagle Eye” Beckley, for instance, who, to this day, holds the record for first basemen, with 25,000 chances. Most putouts, 23,696, most games played, 2,368. He played for Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. He made 2,930 hits and batted .309 for his career. After twenty years in the big leagues, he retired in 1907. Even his nickname seems antique.
But look at John “Happy Jack” Chesbro. Where Beckley looks as though he could only have lived at the turn of the last century, “Happy Jack” looks as though he might be the guy sitting beside you, or stepping through security next to you, at a game today. He won forty-one games in 1904.
Many of the platitudes you hear about the game of baseball are true. For Americans, it is a timeless game. This is more than a play on words because the game is not governed by a clock counting down the minutes until the end. Its timelessness rests in the fact that the game and its history can connect generations and maybe even epochs of culture with its long, woven rope of happenstance. It is true, as well, that power and greed can corrupt and ruin the game. But isn’t it ever thus? In 1911, Walter Johnson, baseball’s greatest pitcher, wrote in Baseball Magazine of what he called “The Great American Principle of Dog Eat Dog,” and he wasn’t talking about ballpark franks.
My point is that baseball has always been popular. Consequently, it has always attracted large crowds. Large crowds attract money, gamblers, wheeler dealers, and confidence men. It’s astonishing how similar today’s baseball issues are to those that have arisen over the last 150 years.
On Opening Day 2003, the New York Times pointed out that from 1901 to 1994, ten men hit fifty or more homers in a season eighteen times. From 1995 to 2002, the Times went on to remind us, ten men also hit fifty or more home runs in a season eighteen times. What once took ninety-three years to accomplish now takes seven. Clearly, something has changed. Is there a Watergate waiting to happen over juiced balls and TV money? Power and greed can corrupt and ruin anything, maybe everything. But they don’t have to.
Our culture and its custodians should take care to not despoil such a well-made thing as baseball.
The game, whether played by anonymous souls whose names we’ll never know, or the big-money-making star athletes we’ve become so suspicious of, maybe such a part of who we are that even the clown princes of America can’t screw it up for very long. Just teach your kids to play, and the tradition will survive. And if it survives, perhaps those things that could heal baseball’s problems—doing your job, making a sacrifice—might just heal some of America’s problems, too.
Meanwhile, look at the pictures of the crowds. I’m that little speck of color in the upper deck, and happy to have a seat there, right where I belong.