conclusion: the reims baseball club: why baseball matters

Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, you’ll straighten out the rest of the world.

BILL “SPACEMAN” LEE

The year was 1987, and I had overdosed on European culture on a Sunday afternoon in Reims, in the heart of France’s champagne-producing region. Late in the afternoon, Luke and I had taken a tour of the city’s famed thirteenth-century cathedral, in an effort to work off a spectacular four-course midday meal, consumed at an equally famous restaurant and accompanied, of course, by fine champagne. The cathedral cure didn’t work; we were both suffering from a bad case of Stendhal syndrome, a combination of nausea and sensory overload brought on, in our case, by too much fine food and drink as well as too much beauty. We needed to sit down. We needed coffee—the stronger the better.

A five-minute walk from the cathedral, we came across a scruffy café with an intriguing small sign proclaiming that this was the headquarters of “The Reims Baseball Club.” Surely this must be a mistake. We had no idea that anyone, anywhere in France was even remotely aware of American baseball. When we opened the door, we saw walls covered with posters of the New York Mets—Dwight Gooden, Keith Hernandez, and Darryl Strawberry most prominent among them. Strawberry’s lanky image loomed over the espresso machine. Most of the café’s customers were young men of roughly the same age as Gooden and Strawberry, and we immediately asked them to explain what the Reims Baseball Club was and how it came to be. There were a few English-speakers in the group, and Luke spoke fluent French, so communication was easy. These young Frenchmen had become fans of American baseball because two of their relatives—cousins or brothers, I don’t remember which—had attended graduate school in New York and fallen in love with “our” national pastime. They became Mets fans, because the Mets at that point in New York’s baseball history were a more exciting team than the Yankees. They learned to play with college friends in pickup games. When the Reims baseball fans came home on vacation, they brought VCR tapes of Mets games and explained baseball to their friends. This was, of course, just before personal computers conquered the world and the Internet provided universal access to baseball statistics and images. But the VCR tapes were enough to hook these particular young men of Reims on American baseball. When they learned that we had actually seen the Mets play, they would not let us leave and the owner would not accept our money for the espressos we downed. “Baseball is the most beautiful game I have ever seen,” said one man. “And it ought to be perfect for France, because it’s très logique (very logical). It will be popular in France someday. Absolument.” Having followed Gooden in 1985 and 1986, the baseball club members were filled with sorrow at news, which surfaced publicly in 1987, of his problems with cocaine. How was he doing, they asked us—as if we knew him personally. What sort of désintox (rehab) was he undergoing? When we said their guess was as good as ours, they sighed. “Yes, it’s always a mistake to think that sports heroes are gods,” said one of the youngest men, who was learning to pitch from an American exchange student. Then he added, “If I were an American, I would be proud to be of the country that invented this game.”

When Luke and I left the café, completely cured of artshock and our hangovers, we looked at each other with amazement and mild embarrassment. Since the Vietnam War, which had ended twelve years earlier, neither of us had felt especially proud to be an American when we were abroad. Viewed by our new Reims friends as exporters of the double jeu (double play) rather than napalm, we felt more American, in the best patriotic sense, than we had in years—as if, somehow, we were personally responsible for showing (even showing off) our country’s better side. How good it felt to be seen as representatives of an America that had produced something logique rather then illogique! That young man, who was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, had grasped something essential about baseball—that its appeal is grounded in logic and proportionality as well as beauty.

The Reims Baseball Club still exists. Its Web site informs readers, as our café informants had told us, that the club was founded in 1986 by “a few enthusiasts.” (There is no mention of the Mets-mania of some of the early members.) Today, the club has participants from ages nine to fifteen at the junior level and sixteen to seventy-seven in the senior division. Women of all ages are also welcome. The senior team plays matches against other small French clubs from towns such as Nancy, Strasbourg, and Metz. It is pleasing to me to know that in corners of some small cities in France, on fine summer days, games are being played that will be forever America. Or, in any event, that will reflect the better angels of America’s nature.

Leaving aside the question of whether baseball still merits the label of “national pastime,” the game’s historical identification with American patriotism has always incorporated some of the worst as well as the best elements of American exceptionalism. But that, too, is a part of what gives baseball its special place in both American iconography and American reality.

I could not agree more strongly with Bill Lee, whose natural sinkerball is dwarfed in baseball memory by his natural inability to utter a dull sentence.* Calling baseball America’s belly-button—that primal remnant of everyone’s first medium of nourishment and entry into the world—is exactly right, just as reverential descriptions of the game as a metaphor for and evidence of American exceptionalism and goodness are exactly wrong (unless, for a moment, one succumbs to national pride after being congratulated on the game in a far-off land). Baseball matters because it provides genuine nourishment rather than junk food (a good hot dog is not junk food). I have concentrated on baseball’s vulnerabilities in today’s culture precisely because we cannot afford to lose a game that demands our attention to provide its nourishment. Many have argued that baseball has outlived its time, as the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus had when it gave its final performance in 2017 after years of declining ticket sales. This analogy is misplaced. The circus folded for a specific cultural reason: there has been a sea change during the past two decades in public attitudes about the confinement and exhibition of animals for entertainment. For increasing numbers of parents in their thirties and forties, taking children to see performing elephants and tigers ran counter to important ethical values.

*Bill Lee, nicknamed “spaceman,” pitched for the Boston Red Sox from 1969 through 1978 and for the Montreal Expos from 1979 until his retirement in 1982. The left-handed pitcher was a source of many startling and original quotes over the years. (The one used as the epigraph of this chapter appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Feb. 3, 1977.) An extremely effective pitcher, with a lifetime record of 119–90, Lee had one bad moment on the mound that will be remembered forever in Boston. In the seventh game of the 1975 World Series, with Boston up 3–0 in the sixth inning, he throw an eephus pitch to Cincinnati slugger Tony Pérez, who hit a two-run homer to begin the Reds’ comeback. An eephus pitch is an extremely slow pitch, almost a lob, and if used judiciously, it usually fools hitters completely. Pérez, the future Hall of Famer, was not fooled.

Baseball, as we have seen, is also vulnerable to outside cultural changes, but the changes have little to do with ethics and everything to do with technology and the altered nature of childhood in a culture gorging on entertainment. But I do not think that baseball will go the way of the circus, because the game has played a role in American history that goes far beyond amusement or entertainment.

The role of the Civil War in spreading baseball across the nation, far beyond the northeastern states where the game began, is the first example of baseball’s complicated relationship with America’s iconic image of itself. Union soldiers from the Middle West, many of whom had never been exposed to baseball before serving in the army, learned the game from their contact, during the prolonged waiting times in encampments between battles, with soldiers from the Northeast who already played and understood the prematurely named national pastime. Some Union officers actually sent reports to their superiors recommending that baseball be promoted in encampments in order to keep the minds of soldiers off the war. Baseball equipment was a problem. The standard “ball” was a walnut wrapped with yarn until a piece of horsehide would fit around it tightly. Branches of oak trees were cut down and carved into bats. Special baseball gloves did not yet exist.1 After the war, surviving Union soldiers brought baseball back to their communities and taught it to their children, laying the basis for the national game as an ordinary person’s recreation as well as a professional sport. In the decade after the Civil War, baseball in the North spread from “the region of the Manhattanese” to the northern plains states, where the summer playing season was short and the first snowflakes might appear as early as September.

The Civil War also spread the game to the South, but southerners learned how to play in prison camps—not only if they were imprisoned in the North, but from Union soldiers imprisoned within the Confederacy. Our image of Civil War prisons (insofar as it survives) is formed mainly by the most notorious institutions, such as Andersonville in Georgia and Elmira in New York. Treatment of prisoners in camps became more brutal after 1863, when all prisoner exchanges were suspended by the Union because the Confederate Army treated captured black soldiers not as prisoners of war but as the property of their former masters—even if the master was unknown or nonexistent. After President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the Union Army stepped up recruitment of black soldiers. From the Confederacy’s viewpoint, all black soldiers were former slaves—whether or not they had actually lived in the South or been slaves under pre–Civil War laws. A black soldier captured by the Confederate Army had almost no chance of coming home alive. In the days when exchanges were still possible, however, baseball games were played in both northern and southern prison camps.

One of the earliest known visual depictions of such prison games—indeed, of baseball itself—belongs to the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. It is a lithograph by the artist Otto Botticher (sometimes spelled Boetticher), who was himself a prisoner of war. Botticher, a Prussian immigrant and a successful portrait painter in New York before the war, was captured near Manassas, Virginia. In North Carolina’s Salisbury Confederate Prison, he produced a watercolor of an 1862 ballgame, and the watercolor served as the basis for the lithograph after Botticher was released in a prisoner exchange. The Salisbury facility was specifically designed to hold Union officers waiting to be exchanged for Confederate officers, and because the prisoners were considered to be officers and gentlemen, they enjoyed a great many privileges that would disappear after 1863. Soldiers documented their daily pastimes in diaries. “Prisoners from the first half of 1862 noted that baseball games were played nearly every day, weather permitting,” notes Debbie Schaefer-Jacobs, a curator at the National Museum of American History. “For the first couple of years, prisoners were also permitted to whittle, read, write letters, attend lectures, perform ‘theatrics,’ play cards such as poker, and go fishing.”2 The lithograph of Union prisoners playing ball depicts an audience that included townspeople as well as guards. The picture definitely presents a pro-southern view of the treatment of captives in Confederate prisons and was promoted that way in Europe. However, the lithograph was also marketed in northern American states and, according to Schaefer-Jacobs, was popular there for “the images of Union officers and of course for the depiction of a baseball game in progress.”3 With the baseball diamond as its focal point, the lithograph has a slightly pastoral as well as propagandistic quality; were it not for two guards holding guns, it could be assumed that this ballgame was taking place on some sort of village green. This impression is reinforced not only by the lithograph’s focus on the ballgame but by the presence of small cottages, a meatpacking plant, a blacksmith shop, and even a small hospital in what was, in fact, a prison compound. Needless to say, there are no black people—soldiers or civilians—in this picture.

It is one of the ironies of baseball history that the game truly became America’s “national pastime” only after a war in which more than 620,000 soldiers died. The unfinished business of that war—America’s resistance to racial equality in the North and South—meant that baseball would develop, on both a semiprofessional and a professional basis—as a largely segregated national pastime. This development was not inevitable—not, at least, until the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. There were a few nineteenth-century blacks—their names unknown to almost everyone today except scholars of baseball—who played for professional teams in the first two decades after the Civil War. Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker caught for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the then–major league American Association in the early 1880s, and his brother Welday also played a few games in the outfield for the team. Fleet Walker attracted the racial animus—actually, “hatred” is the correct word—of Adrian “Cap” Anson, an enormously influential figure in the history of baseball who played twenty-seven seasons at first base, mainly for the Chicago White Stockings (who eventually became the Cubs, not the White Sox). Born in Marshalltown, Iowa, Anson became the first player to reach 3,000 hits—and he was also an ardent segregationist. Anson, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1939, refused to play against a team with a black man on the field. In 1884, according to various scholars, the Chicago team asked for assurances that Fleet Walker would not be on the field at an exhibition game with Toledo.

This evolved into the infamous “gentlemen’s agreement” that prevented blacks from playing in the major leagues until 1947. Some gentlemen. In the official exhibition on Anson in Cooperstown, former Hall of Fame historian Lee Allen described Anson thus: “Sturdy, blunt, and honest… the captain who was always kicking at decisions, the symbol of all that was strong and good in baseball.”4 This is indeed a description worthy of inclusion in the Baseball Hall of Shame. Anson wasn’t the only villain in the so-called gentlemen’s agreement. Many of Walker’s own teammates shunned him. According to one baseball historian, Toledo pitcher Tony Mullane would “intentionally throw the ball in the dirt, trying to injure his own battery mate.”5

In the decades after the institutionalization of segregation in professional baseball, blacks could and did watch white baseball—usually from separate blocs of seats—and whites could and did watch black baseball. But the playing field itself never offered the possibility of equality, any more than a great many trains, hotels, and restaurants did. Whatever patriotic associations were fostered by and embedded in baseball, turning a blind eye to segregation was part of the deal. In his essay “My Baseball Years,” Philip Roth writes about his own feelings of patriotism when he attended minor league games in Newark during the Second World War.

It would have seemed to me an emotional thrill forsaken if, before the Newark Bears took on the hated enemy from across the marshes, the Jersey City Giants, we hadn’t first to rise to our feet (my father, my brother, and I—along with our inimical countrymen, the city’s Germans, Irish, Poles, and, out in the Africa of the bleachers, Newark’s Negroes) to celebrate the America that had given to this unharmonious mob a game so grand and beautiful.6

The Africa of the bleachers. Much has been written about the importance of baseball in the Americanization of immigrants and their children from the early 1900s through the Second World War. Not least among the factors contributing to Americanization was the fact that by the time Roth was a young fan, the sons of first-generation immigrants had established themselves as stars of the game. Among the most prominent were Lou Gehrig, whose background as the son of German immigrants helped make an enthusiastic fan out of my grandmother; Hank Greenberg, born on the Lower East Side to Romanian Jewish immigrants; and Joe DiMaggio, the eighth of nine children born to Sicilian immigrant parents. But black Americans, whose families had been in the United States for hundreds of years, were relegated not only to the Africa of the bleachers in professional parks but to the Africa of the Negro Leagues. It is not an exaggeration to say that the desegregation of baseball in 1947 was as much a part of the unfinished business of the Civil War as the desegregation of the military was in 1948. But it had taken another war and another eighty-plus years to move both baseball and the military toward some semblance of justice—another demonstration of why baseball’s identification with American values matters and why those values continue to demand close scrutiny. Yet who could have imagined in 1941 that an unknown Jack Roosevelt Robinson, who would be drafted, be assigned to a segregated unit (there were no others, of course), and narrowly survive an attempt to court-martial him for refusing to move to the back of an army bus, would break the color barrier in baseball only two years after the war’s end. Baseball desegregated, with difficulty and dissension, not because it was the right thing to do (although some exceptional men, like Bill Veeck and Branch Rickey, recognized that it was) but because M.L.B. needed the talent of great black players. Desegregation was based on baseball’s pragmatic needs, not idealism. But that is not an indictment of the game. One can only wish that the nation’s finest educational institutions and most successful businesses had come to the same realization as early as 1947.

At the beginning of the 2017 season, baseball fans were reminded that their country’s racial divide is still a part of being taken out to the ballgame. Calvin Hennick, a white fan of the Boston Red Sox, had taken his biracial son, Nile, to see a game at Fenway Park as an early sixth birthday present. He was attending the game not only with his son but with his African-American father-in-law. As it happened, this game took place May 3—one night after Adam Jones, an African-American center fielder for the Baltimore Orioles, had been the target of a racial slur by a Boston fan. At the game attended by Hennick’s family, the national anthem was sung by a Kenyan woman. Then, according to the Boston Globe, a middle-aged white man, wearing a Red Sox cap and T-shirt, leaned over Hennick and used a racial epithet to characterize the Kenyan woman’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Hennick notified Red Sox security, and the fan was ejected from the park and barred for life. Before calling security, Hennick had actually asked the man to repeat his words. He thought he might have misheard and “wanted to be 100 percent sure I heard him right.”7

After the two incidents in Fenway, M.L.B. announced that it was reviewing its security procedure in all ballparks to determine how racial and ethnic slurs were being handled. This story was especially stinging to me because I remember, so clearly, how shocked I was to hear Robinson called a “nigger” at Wrigley Field in the early 1950s. Back then, however, no one was ejected at Wrigley for spewing forth the same racist words that fans shouted at Fenway in 2017. It is tragic that young Nile Hennick, excited about his forthcoming birthday and seeing his Red Sox, could not be protected from hearing the same filth that I heard in Chicago more than sixty years ago. The difference is that this young boy also saw a man thrown out of the ballpark for using racist language. Furthermore, I can imagine what the adult Cubs fans in the early 1950s would have had to say to a white man attending a ballgame with his biracial child and black father-in-law. A baseball park in any era is, after all, only one venue for the display of the best and the worst of American values. For racial slurs to disappear from ballparks altogether, Americans would have to construct the postracial society that is still so far beyond us.

In no historical period was baseball’s connection with American identity more complicated than during the Second World War. More than five hundred major league players served in the military. They included many stars of the game—DiMaggio, Greenberg, Ralph Kiner, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, and Bob Feller, to name only a few. All returned home, resumed their careers, and eventually wound up in the Hall of Fame, but devotees of statistics still love to figure out how much better the lifetime records would have been had the athletes not lost several prime playing years to war. Five weeks after Pearl Harbor, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, then the commissioner of baseball, wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt and asked whether baseball should continue during the war. The following day, in what came to be known as the “green light letter,” Roosevelt wrote Landis, “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.” He noted that Americans would be working longer hours than before the war and argued, “That means they ought to have the chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work more than ever before.”8 The quality of ball played in the United States undoubtedly suffered during the war, since players who were declared unfit for combat by military doctors tended to be older than the stars who were in the prime of their careers. There certainly would have been serious questions about draft evasion had the greatest stars of the game, obviously in first-rate physical condition, somehow been declared unfit to serve. In an article prepared for a symposium on baseball and culture at the Hall of Fame, two scholars note that in spite of the military service of many top players, there was some criticism from within the Roosevelt administration itself. James Byrnes, director of war mobilization and reconstruction, wondered how players could be declared physically unfit for service if they were still physically fit to play baseball. M.L.B. gave the not entirely convincing answer that players had training room support not available in the military, and “after all, they were found to be 4-F by army and navy doctors, not baseball’s doctors.”9

There is little doubt that most Americans approved of the decision to continue baseball during the war, and baseball was played by the troops wherever fields could be carved out adjacent to military encampments. There is even an iconic photograph—reminiscent of the Civil War prison lithograph—showing marines in the Solomon Islands studying their position on the map while also poring over baseball scores. The photo was published in the Marine Corps’ Guadalcanal Gazette.10 Roosevelt was right. I like to think of these young men, not knowing whether they would ever return from what, at that time, seemed like an uphill battle against Japan, feeling a link to home that had nothing to do with bombs, shells, shrapnel, and death. I like to imagine those scared kids hoping that they might one day see or play a game in which no one had to die.

Japan as an enemy, however, posed something of a problem for the baseball establishment, which included the sporting press. The nation that attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor had embraced baseball since the 1870s. The game was imported by the American missionary Horace Wilson, who taught at an institution of higher education that is now Tokyo University. Baseball became so popular, and so respected, in Japan that the game received a Japanese name—yakyu. All other sports that trace their origins to foreign countries—such as football, soccer, tennis, basketball, and golf—are known only by their foreign names in Japan.

In 1934, a team of American all-stars, headed by Babe Ruth, toured Japan to enormous popular acclaim and competed with the Nippon all-stars. Jimmie Foxx, the second American player to hit more than 500 home runs (after Ruth), was also on the tour, and he captured the camaraderie and excitement in eight-millimeter, black-and-white film, now digitized and stored in the Hall of Fame. Japan—the only nation in Asia or Europe to fall in love with the American national pastime, was now our mortal enemy. What did this mean about the sanctified American values supposedly embodied by baseball? As one historian of the military and baseball puts it, “If baseball embodied those values that made America great, such as fair play, hustle, and teamwork, did Japan’s love of the game mean that the Japanese exhibited these qualities as well?”11

Just eleven days after Pearl Harbor, J. G. Taylor Spink, editor of the Sporting News, addressed the issue in an editorial. Baseball, he explained (in a burst of venom that did not do justice to Horace Wilson or his nineteenth-century Japanese students) was not a recent phenomenon in Japan.

It dates back some 70 years, not so long after our American Civil War. It was introduced by American missionaries, who wanted to wean their boy pupils away from such native sports as the stupid Japanese wrestling, fencing with crude broadswords, and jiu-jitsu. Having a natural catlike agility, the Japanese took naturally to the diamond pastime. They became first-class fielders and made some, progress in pitching, but because of their smallness of stature, they remained feeble hitters. In their games with visiting American teams, it was always a sore spot with this cocky race that their batsmen were so outclasssed by the stronger, more powerful American sluggers. For, despite the brusqueness and braggadocio of the militarists, Japanese cockiness hid a natural inferiority complex.

Spink concluded that Japan was never truly “converted” to baseball, despite its enormous popularity before the war. “They may have acquired a little skill at the game,” he told his readers, “but the soul of our National Game never touched them. No nation which has had as intimate contact with baseball as the Japanese, could have committed the vicious, infamous deed of the early morning of December 7, 1941, if the spirit of the game had ever penetrated their yellow hides.”12

Take that, you slant-eyes! Yes, the Japanese, with their feline agility, might have learned how to turn a nifty double play, but they could never really comprehend or partake of the goodness and purity of America’s game. Spink’s rationale certainly did embody the American values that led to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during the war. This is not the belly-button of our society but an anatomical opening located somewhat lower in our body politic. It is to be hoped that when Ichiro Suzuki becomes the first Japanese-born and Japanese-bred player elevated to the baseball Hall of Fame, a copy of this editorial will be prominently displayed in the exhibit dedicated to him. I have no doubt that the Hall of Fame will meet its historical responsibility in this regard. During the past forty years, the Hall in Cooperstown has transformed itself from a curio institution that pretty much ignored baseball’s sins into a serious historical museum and scholarly research center. Many scholars trace the beginning of that transformation to 1971, when Satchel Paige became the first veteran of the Negro Leagues inducted into the Hall. Public protest had forced the Hall to abandon its insulting original plan to hang Paige’s plaque in a separate section from the other members of the Hall and to place his image where it belonged—with the other baseball immortals. “This notion of Jim Crow in Baseball’s Heaven is appalling,” wrote Jim Murray, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, in 1971. “What is this—1840? Either let him in the front of the Hall—or move the damn thing to Mississippi.”13 Today, a life-size bronze statue of Paige in his characteristic windup stands on the south lawn of the Hall.

If there were any doubt that baseball still occupies a special place in America’s iconic image of its best self, and a conflicted place whenever America’s worst impulses bare their teeth, it should have been erased by the mixture of horror and sanctimony expressed in the aftermath of the shooting of four people on June 14, 2017, at a Republican practice for the annual congressional baseball game. The majority whip of the House of Representatives, Steve Scalise; two congressional staff aides; and a Capitol police officer were wounded during a practice session in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital. The shooter, killed by a Capitol policeman who was part of the detail guarding Scalise, was James T. Hodgkinson, a sixty-six-year-old from Belleville, Illinois, who turned out to be a familiar figure in the annals of American killings—an unstable man with a history of domestic violence, a powerful rifle (which he was perfectly free to buy despite his record), and a political grievance. A volunteer in Bernie Sanders’s primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, he had expressed strong animus toward Donald Trump and had come to Washington with what looked like a hit list of Republican members of the House and Senate.

In short, Hodgkinson was the usual made-in-America, gun-toting crazy, this time on the left side of the political spectrum. Hodgkinson got lucky; the practice ball field was one of the few largely unguarded places where a group of congressional representatives might go. Had Scalise not been a member of the House leadership, and therefore guarded by a police detail, the body count would have been much higher.

This attack had no more to do with baseball than the terrorist mass murder at an Orlando nightclub a year and two days earlier in 2016 had to do with nightclubs per se. Yet much of the commentary for the first twenty-four hours after the shootings focused on baseball itself. A column in the New York Times by Steve Israel, a former New York Democratic congressman, was headlined “An Attack on Congress and Baseball.” The publicity was so intense that the killings of three workers at a United Parcel Service facility in San Francisco, by another deranged gunman who killed himself, were all but ignored. Nor were there any headlines suggesting that the San Francisco murders had been “an attack on package delivery services.”

Representative Roger Williams, a Republican from Texas, declared, in an interview with CNN, “America doesn’t give out; America doesn’t give in and we must play this baseball game. If we don’t play this baseball game and we go home, then they win.… This is America, the greatest country in the world. If you punch us, we punch back. And we’re going to play baseball tomorrow.”14 The use of pronouns in this interview deserves special attention. “If we don’t play this baseball game, then they win.” “If you punch us, we punch back.” To whom do they and you refer? It sounds almost as if Williams thought the shooter was a non-American terrorist who hated baseball. The undertone here is that that shooting men in the process of playing baseball was a form of sacrilege as well as a crime. More than twenty-five thousand people who bought tickets for the game seemed to agree; the amount of money raised for charity was more than a million dollars—more than twice the amount raised the previous year. The enthusiasm even spilled over to another, less publicized annual event, a charity softball game between female members of Congress and members of the Capitol Hill press corps. The congressional game was played at the Washington Nationals’ stadium, but the women’s softball game took place on Capitol Hill, on a scruffy artificial turf football field that had been appropriated and repurposed for the night. In 2017, the bleachers were jammed as the correspondents, named the Bad News Babes, beat the lawmakers 2–1. A female Capitol police officer injured in the shootings threw out the first pitch.

Why does this episode bother me so much? Surely there is nothing wrong with thousands of extra people forking over money for charity or with women getting a small, unaccustomed piece of the action. The problem here is that baseball, our beautiful game of largely native origins, was being used as a metaphor for a kind of mindless “punch-me-I’ll-punch-you-harder” ethos. This martial attitude is even more ridiculous because the enemy of America and baseball who committed the crime was indisputably One of Us.

There is no question that baseball, even though it is no longer the most popular American sport, still lends itself to a unique conflation of the game itself with American virtue. The response to the shootings in Washington, despite being attached to a less cosmic event, inevitably reminded me, as a New Yorker, of the role baseball played in my city after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The first thing I did on September 13, when the city was open for business again, was buy tickets for a game scheduled for September 21 between the Mets and the Atlanta Braves. It wasn’t an important game, but I had planned to see it anyway because the regular baseball season was almost over. I was certain that this game would be played and that New Yorkers would turn out in droves—not to “punch back” at the terrorists but to demonstrate that we were going to continue with our normal lives. The game was a sellout—at a time when many New Yorkers were still too fearful to take the subway. And I cannot deny that I felt something, while singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” as a citizen in the company of my fellow citizens, that I could never have felt at a theatrical performance or, for that matter, a football game. The emotions baseball is capable of evoking are part of its special currency, but it is a currency that can easily be devalued if used in an exclusionary, aggressive fashion.

There was nothing unduly bombastic about President George W. Bush’s appearance in Yankee Stadium on October 30, 2001, to throw out the first pitch of the third game of the World Series between the Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks. Bush, as is well known, has deep and authentic ties to baseball as a former owner of the Texas Rangers. Furthermore, his speech to rescue workers, delivered through a bullhorn amid the ruins of Ground Zero, had endeared him to the many New Yorkers who voted against him. It might have been something of an insult had he not shown up in the Bronx to throw the first pitch.

But a video of Bush’s two appearances, shown at the Republican National Convention in 2004, is another matter altogether.* Linking Bush’s “bullhorn moment” with his moment on the mound, the video was introduced by then-Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee (who chose not to run for reelection in order to play a tough district attorney on NBC’s long-running Law and Order series). In his narration, Thompson said of Bush, “He was wearing a heavy secret service bulletproof vest, and he could hardly move his arms. But he knew. So George Bush took the mound. What he did that night—the man in the arena—he helped us come back. That’s the story of this presidency. With the heart of a president, he told us, ‘You keep pitching. No matter what, you keep pitching. No matter what, you go to the mound, you find the plate, and you throw. And you become who you are.’” Thompson then asked, in grave tones reminiscent of 1950s television shows exalting the FBI, “What do a bullhorn and a baseball have in common? What truths can they tell? Which is another way of saying, What did George W. Bush do? What did he become? And how did that help us?”15 In Rhetorics of Purity, Michael Butterworth deconstructs this mystifying analogy between throwing a pitch and defending one’s country. “On the one hand,” he writes, “baseball appears as a metaphor in the conventional sense—that is, the game serves as a model of national character and unity in a time of crisis.… Yet, on the other hand, the convention video also depends on a… logic that hails baseball as a means for shaping attitudes and behaviors. In other words, Bush did not throw the first pitch at the World Series merely to exploit baseball as a clever persuasive strategy. Instead, the video tells us that the very act of throwing from the Yankee Stadium mound that evening transformed the man himself.16

*I am indebted to Michael L. Butterworth, author of Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity, for reminding me about the video, which I slept through on the night it was broadcast at the 2004 convention.

What do a bullhorn and a baseball have in common? Absolutely nothing.

Baseball’s relationship to American values—however one defines them—has never been “pure” and has always been as complicated as the physical and mental game unfolding on the field. The capacity of baseball to reinvent itself at certain crucial points in American history—even when the reinvention has proceeded too slowly—is the essence of the game’s importance as the belly-button of our society. When one reads Spink’s wartime denunciation of “feline” Japanese as beings too lowly to enter into the soul of baseball, the international sport we take for granted today—in terms of foreign-born players on American teams and the popularity of the game throughout much of Asia and Latin America—seems almost miraculous. At the same time, baseball has never gotten too far ahead of other American institutions in reinventions of a cultural nature. Robinson and his black baseball contemporaries differed only in their athletic skills from the tens of thousands of black Americans who had served their country in wartime and who returned home with the strong sense that America owed them more opportunity than they had ever received in the past (or in segregated military units).

What baseball has never had to do in nearly a century, since the transition from the dead ball to the lively ball era, is reinvent the way the game is actually played in order to attract a new generation of fans. Much as I dislike the designated hitter, I do not consider it a major reinvention. Baseball is played in essentially the same way as it was when my grandfather watched it as a teenager a century ago and when he passed it on to me as a child in the 1950s. That seamless transition is no longer occurring, as I have emphasized throughout this book—and that is why baseball, at all levels, must make more of an effort than it has been making to attract new younger fans of all ethnic and racial groups and to bring more of its traditional fan base—especially African Americans—back to the ballpark, as well as to the interior stadium.

In the past, new technology (even if many owners failed to understand this at the time) was always baseball’s friend. Every change was perfectly suited to the expansion of the long game in the American imagination. After the Civil War, the greater reach of railroads was a perfect enabler for the nationwide extension of the baseball knowledge that soldiers had acquired in encampments and prisons, in both the North and the South. The first transcontinental railroad—its construction having begun in 1863, during one of the darkest periods of the war—was completed in 1869, thereby ensuring that baseball (among other enterprises) would reach the American West. In the interval between the First and Second World Wars, radio would make fans out of people who had never seen a professional game at the minor or major league level. The same would be true of television in the 1950s, despite the laments of those who, by then, were insisting that listening to radio was the only right way to experience a game outside the ballpark.

The online world is different, in that its devices are designed not to focus anyone’s attention on a long game, in either the literal or metaphoric senses, but to enable split focus. While it would be foolish for baseball not to make use of every available form of technology to reach young fans, it would be even more foolish for stewards of the game to deform the essence of their unique product—to twist the belly-button further, as Bill Lee might put it, instead of to straighten it out. Baseball should not run away from its strongest selling points—the tension of untimed confrontations between hitter and pitcher; the intricacy of a team sport in which one never loses sight of individuals; the contrast between the solitude of the interior stadium and friendships born out of (and borne along by) endless talk about the game, and, above all, a sense of history that can be felt even before its particulars are known.

Finally, the future of baseball depends not only on its institutions but on individual adult fans making an effort to show the young why we love the game and why they might love it too if they surrendered themselves, as an experiment, to time uninterrupted by clocks and clicks. Such experiments can work—if the grown-ups invest their hearts and their own time in teaching. A few years ago, I used Lawrence Ritter’s 1966 classic The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It in a volunteer tutoring program for children considered smart but unmotivated. My eleven-year-old-student became enthralled by the voices of men from a time he had initially dismissed as “boring.” His general interest in both history and baseball increased dramatically; he would phone me to ask what a crackerjack or an agnostic or an atheist was (all terms used by players born in the nineteenth century). My young student picked up the words “agnostic” and “atheist” from Ritter’s interview with Sam Crawford, known as “Wahoo Sam,” who played from 1899 to 1917 and was the dominant power hitter of the dead-ball era. Wahoo Sam was a fan of Robert Green Ingersoll, who was known as the “Great Agnostic” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He certainly might have heard Ingersoll’s speeches in the early 1890s, and he agreed with the Great Agnostic’s favorite admonition, “Let the dead past bury its dead.” Although Crawford did go on to reference George Santayana’s well-known line about those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it. “So maybe there are two sides to this matter,” Crawford told Ritter.17

I was initially surprised that my young student perused these interviews so closely, and followed digressions like Wahoo Sam’s musings on just about everything, because I had been told that this boy was an extremely poor reader. He especially loved the biblical quote used by Ritter as an epigraph: “All these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their times.”

This is why baseball matters and why it matters even more today than it did in the past. The game stands up and out in the lowest-common-denominator American culture of distraction, disruption, and interruption. For me, this distinction makes baseball the most intellectual stimulating, emotionally satisfying, and downright glorious pastime ever devised. I see it as the duty—yes, a genuine patriotic duty in the best sense—of all of us who love the game to do everything we can to see that baseball continues to matter. One kid at a time, one adult at a time.