On Baseball and America

As we celebrate the birth of our nation, America, our Independence, we pause to think about baseball.

Baseball, that sport so deep soaked in tradition, so part of our cultural fabric, so important a part of the coming of age of the vast majority of American males (and ever more so females as well.)

Baseball, which can stir in us passions and nostalgia that maybe we didn’t even know we had in us. Which can inspire and transfix and cast a spell that only works best when the days are long and hot and well suited for a game that moves in its own rhythm, out of our usual conceptions of time.

I recently went to a game at Wrigley Field, a game between the Cubs and the Florida Marlins that was of no particular importance. It had been a while, maybe a year, maybe two, since I had gone to see a game in person.

The thought that struck me instantly was that I had simply forgotten how much I love watching baseball. Love, a word I use not lightly. Memories of playing as a youth flooded back, the successes, the failures, the triumphs, the humiliations. Memories of other professional games I attended, too. Of learning to keep score, of taking in the atmosphere, of feeling oddly compelled to eat peanuts.

I’m reminded that in the book I’m currently reading, “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville” by Bernard Henri-Levy, he talks about visiting Cooperstown, to examine, as he describes it, “this sport that establishes people's identities, becomes part of their imaginative world — almost the American civic and patriotic religion, this baseball.”

As for the baseball Hall of Fame, and excuse the long excerpt, but I find it too perfect to paraphrase:

This is not a museum, it's a church. These are not rooms, they're chapels. The visitors themselves aren't really visitors but devotees, meditative and fervent. I hear one of them asking, in a low voice, if it's true that the greatest champions are buried here—beneath our feet, as if we were at Westminster Abbey, or in the Imperial Crypt beneath the Kapuziner Church in Vienna. And every effort is made to sanctify Cooperstown itself, this cradle of the national religion, this new Nazareth, this simple little town that nothing prepared for its election and yet which was present at the birth of the thing. An edifying history, told in the exhibition rooms and the brochures, of the scientific commission created at the beginning of the twentieth century by a former baseball player who became a millionaire and launched a nationwide contest on the theme "Send us your oldest baseball memory." He collected the testimony of an old engineer from Denver who in 1839, in Cooperstown, in front of the tailor's shop, saw Abner Doubleday, later a Northern general and a Civil War hero, the man who would fire the first shot against the Southerners, explain the game to passersby, set down the rules, and, in fact, baptize it.

The only problem, Tim Wiles, the museum's director of research, tells me, is that Abner Doubleday, in that famous year of 1839, wasn't in Cooperstown but at West Point; that the old engineer, who was supposed to have played that first game with him, had been just five years old; that the word "baseball" had already appeared in 1815, in a novel by Jane Austen, and in 1748, in a private letter found in England; that a baseball scholar, an eminent member of the Society for American Baseball Research, had just discovered, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, an even older trace; that the Egyptians had, it seems, their own form of the game. The only problem, he says, is that we have always known — since 1939, in fact, since the museum's opening — that baseball is a sport of the people, and even if, like all sports of the people, it suffers from a lack of written archives, its origin is age-old. The only problem is that this history is a myth, and every year millions of men and women come, like me, to visit a town devoted entirely to its celebration.

So as we celebrate this week, as we eat and drink and make much merriment and ogle the fireworks, we can think a little about baseball and our country. How they are intertwined, both sharing a devotion to myths and to legends, and how each are perpetually fueled by cherished memories and a sometimes naïve optimism about what brought us where we are.

Happy Fourth!