A Facebook friend posted the following passage. The source is here, but that's not important, as the quote is typical of a genre seeing baseball as embodying American exceptionalism:
This game is so profoundly in tune with our national character and temperament that it confirms my opinion as per which it is purely of American origin, that no other game or no other country has any right to claim any sort of kinship with it. (Spalding 1911)
Huge piles of bullshit have been written about baseball. It's a great game, one that I dearly love, and has produced real literature: John Updike's meditation on fame and character, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," on Ted Williams's last at bat, or Robert Coover's wonderfully mythic The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., but also lots of crap linking the alleged values of the game to the political vision of the author. I'm all in favor of analyses of the political economy of actually operating baseball (e.g., Field of Schemes or exposés of exploitation of Latin American players, and so on), but spare me the "values" nonsense.
The Spalding thing is probably just nostalgic agrarian anxiety in the face of 20th C urban industrialism. Lots of this genre goes on and on about the timeless nature of baseball -- both its seasonal cycles (rebirth in the spring, the long maturation of the season in the summer, the finality of the autumnal climax, hibernation in the winter, rebirth in the spring ...) and the individual game ("never say die," "it's not over until it's over," etc.).
Then there's George Will on how baseball reflects neoliberal values (w/o the name, of course). I never read his book, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball (gah -- with a title like that, can you blame me?), but I remember a terrible newspaper column on the stolen base as entrepreneurial risk / reward gamble.
Anyway, comments are solicited on good and bad literature and / or cultural commentary related to baseball. [UPDATE: while I don't like "values" talk, I'm very happy with materialist (though not necessarily reductionist) analyses of how fans become attuned to baseball's rhythms, along with associations of pleasant memories of shared joy at games and in discussions, the power of symbols and group belonging, etc. Not liking "values" talk doesn't mean we can't think about how the love of baseball develops!]
Recent Comments