On Baseball

"Where home comes to life from out of the blue"

Here’s what’s great about baseball: It remains our most underrated sport.

Despite all the overwrought prose written about it. Despite the exploitation, depravity, and cheating that has always been part of the game. Despite the ambient sepia-toned weirdness that embalms and thereby stifles the game. Despite all of this, even the most skeptical non-sports person (hi!) understands that there is something strange and holy about baseball, some uncanny transcendent thing about it--more than in other sports. We sense there is something great in it, that it contains more than could ever be said. It is not merely a vehicle for superior athletic performance.

Baseball is not entirely of this world, and we know it.

Every attempt to get around that awkward fact—every attempt to clumsily speed up the game, or put it into a marketable box, or to make it more like the NBA or NFL—these misadventures fail to chop the game down to a tidy size. And meanwhile, some group of kids in a far corner of world are having a much better time than anybody else, because baseball will always be somebody's favorite game. Even if America's attention has moved on.

Let us now run through the two or three obvious reasons baseball endures. Perhaps you've read all of these before, or thought them, or even written them down yourself. If so, my apologies, but occasionally we have to revisit old truths to see if the same wine lives in today's bottles.

Briefly, and without fanfare: You have to have fortitude to make it through the game. Fortitude of every kind, not just physical. Baseball is fair in a way that's odd. It's unfair in the way a lot of sports are, but it also has the kind of justice that comes out of life, where karma is real but randomness plays such a chance.

Baseball rewards both individual achievement, and team effort. You can't just sit on the clock like in other sports. Everybody gets a turn at bat. You have to give the other person a hope. You have to strike the other guy out.

In baseball, somebody who is not in peak shape, somebody who isn't trained, or just some team of average players who hustle, can win against a great team. It is both obvious, and yet somehow unbelievable, that there would be professional baseball players. The sport feels designed to be executed by amateurs.

There's something inherently democratic about the sport. I don't know what it would feel like to do a slam dunk, or to be a defensive linebacker. But baseball rewards skill sets that basically anybody can do at some level: Hitting a thing with a stick, throwing, running, catching. Each motion of baseball is within the common human compass.

But beyond this remains the peculiar immortality of the game. Baseball only concerns this ball and this bat during this particular instance of weather. Yet because it concerns particular matters, it concerns all matters. It is for all seasons precisely because it is only for certain seasons. Baseball is only one thing, but because of that, it can be about all things.

And finally, it is not the speed, or strength, or the art of playing that moves us. Nor is it nostalgia, times gone by, or the pastoral nature of the sport. Those are incidental.

It is the mystery of the game that brings us back time and again. We wonder how an entertainment, a mere imitation of life, contains all of life. But there it is, the sport than contains an affirmative to its own question: Are we home?