Feature
Take me out to the ball game
by Tim Wilson
A Kiwi in New York struggles to understand the appeal of America’s national game.
“In the rules of baseball,” says author and New Yorker writer Roger Kahn, “there are no boundaries. The baseball field extends forever. And though there are nine innings, the game can have no time limit.”
The implication is at once clear: boundless America!
I am, along with a collection of eight international ink-stained wretches, seated near Kahn at a table in New York’s Foreign Press Centre. The author of one of the greatest books written on baseball, The Boys of Summer, Kahn also has the best set of eye-bags I have seen since my bedroom mirror reported the toll of a long and particularly Rabelaisian week in New Delhi.
Kahn’s – and my – business is serious. Jacques Barzun wrote that anyone who wants to understand the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball. Get the game, in other words, and you get the country. So the writer has brought with him a ball, a glove, a bat and a fund of stories. His task in the next two hours, as mandated by the US State Department, is to summarise baseball for the foreign press.
America is funny like this. Demonstrating both generosity of spirit and naivety, the US believes that if it explains itself in sufficiency, it will be understood. The world reacts, often, as writer Gertrude Stein responded, in cataloguing the poet and pedant Ezra Pound as “a great village explainer, excellent if you were a village, and if you were not, not”.
But Kahn’s first anecdote, which features himself, and a president whose first political ambition was to be the Commissioner of Baseball (a position overseeing the game), reinforces the supposition of the sport and politics being interwoven. That president is George W Bush, and Kahn met him recently to discuss a legislative matter involving libraries and publishers. “I’m on top of that,” Bush told Kahn, patting his knee (Dubya is famously tactile). The president then said, “Let’s talk baseball.” They did so for half an hour, whereupon Kahn’s presence in the Oval Office was replaced by the President of Argentina.
The writer recalls similar experiences with Ronald Reagan, then asserts that baseball is a language that all America, whether president or author, may speak. Why does the game have such pre-eminence, and what is it saying? Kahn’s answers seem vague. Old sportswriters tend to use mysticism to clarify events that have prosaic, tangible explanations. Baseball, he says, has a long history in the US – during the siege of Vicksburg during the Civil War, soldiers were seen playing it. Furthermore, in the 1920s there was a golden age of writing about the game, which included such greats as Ring Lardner. Kahn mentions the crisis of confidence that followed a group of gamblers bribing players to throw the 1919 World Series, and the epically named first Commissioner of Baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who cleaned up the filthy mess.
What he doesn't mention is that baseball emerged as the national sport as the 19th century ended, during the nationalism of the Progressive Era in the US. Internationally, Teddy Roosevelt talked quietly and carried a big stick. Locally, baseball-club owners agreed that to foster local loyalties, their clubs would remain in cities. They also established a buyer’s monopoly over the players. Drunkenness and gambling were cleansed from the sport.
Considering these factors, one understands why Reagan and Bush are so keen on the game – it evinces the peculiar mixture of freedom (from organised labour, for example) and constraint (on unacceptable passions) that characterises contemporary conservatism. Thus, isn’t baseball a medium in which the advantaged classes display their values?
No, says Kahn. Part of his defence is the racism of the game in the early 20th century, a feature of its blue-collar origins. However, the writer asserts that the arrival of the first coloured player in 1947 established a climate in which Martin Luther King might flourish. “If you want to see who plays,” Kahn advises me, his eyes bulging with what I trust is amusement, “go to a game and write down the players’ names.”
Which I do shortly afterward, dodging the lakes that have formed on Manhattan’s streets during a summer downpour. The Staten Island Yankees are playing at home. This is what is known as the farm league. In rugby, perhaps the closest equivalent would be the NPC. Salaries are lower (around $US40-50,000 a year), the players are either headed for or on the slide from the big league.
The game seems reasonably simple to understand: it’s about disinhibited kids, tolerant parents and long periods of tedium, relieved by hot dogs and beer. Each time a batter assumes the plate, his image appears on the big screen, and a theme tune is played. The faces are young, about the age of the two or three Americans who die each day in Iraq at present. And, like those soldiers, the surnames do not suggest inherited privilege. Listen to these: Melky Cabrera, Hector Zamorra, Tyson Hanish. My question, I suppose, was ludicrous, but I do believe that the racism Kahn was so clear about documenting is and was an elitism of sorts, one practised as enthusiastically by the oligarch as the peon. Sports writers participated also, by the way, classifying white players as “thoughtful” and blacks as “natural”.
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