A. Bartlett Giamatti
A Great and Glorious Game
Algonquin, 121 pp., $ 14.95
George F. Will
Bunts
Curt Flood, Camden Yards, Pete Rose and Other Reflections on Baseball
Scribner, 352 pp., $ 25
Even by the late 1960s, baseball had lost its preeminence in American sport. Football and basketball, especially as televised events, seemed better designed for the hurried pace the culture was assuming, while a great range of other games and interests lured children from the national pastime. By the late 1990s, not even baseball's most ardent followers believe the sport will recover any time soon -- particularly given Major League Baseball's current financial, labor, and public-relations problems.
And yet, whatever the immediate future of baseball, the sport's long-term survival is secure. As with classic works of literature, which may or may not be the most popular reading during any particular era, baseball is sustained by a fiercely devoted core of fans. Nothing in the history of sports approaches the devotion of these fans, and, as a pair of new books show, baseball is the only major sport that can still be considered, in a certain strict and old-fashioned sense of the word, a pastime.
A Great and Glorious Game is a posthumous collection of essays by A. Bartlett Giamatti, the scholar of Renaissance literature and president of Yale University who became president of the National league and then, briefly, commissioner of Major League Baseball. His principal claim to fame as commissioner was the 1989 Pete Rose affair. Rose had been one of baseball's greatest players, but during the 1980s, while managing the Cincinnati Reds, he bet on games involving his own team -- the greatest offense anyone in baseball can commit, aside from actually throwing a game. Giamatti banished Rose from baseball for life; a few days later, at age fifty-one, the commissioner was dead from a heart attack, his already poor health perhaps aggravated by the enormous stress of dealing with Rose.
As one might surmise from the title, A Great and Glorious Game belongs to the mythopoetic school of baseball writing, a genre known for its lapses into bathos and cliche, its cornball and kitsch about emerald-green fields and golden memories -- about baseball as a metaphor for life, expressing all our primal and subliminal urges. The adjective "homeric" comes up a lot in this school of writing -- more often, perhaps, than it does in writing about Homer. Such mythopoetry is not necessarily false, of course -- but in large doses, even the dewiest-eyed baseball fans quickly grow tired of it.
In Bartlett Giamatti's hands, however, this mythopoetic genre seems to work, most of the time. Maybe that's because Giamatti avoids its worst excesses -- or because somehow, through the purple prose, he gets things right, states clearly and convincingly what others say obscurely and preposterously. (Even the rough, unlettered Pete Rose recognized that Giamatti was no ordinary egghead: "He's an intellectual from Yale," Rose observed, "but very intelligent.") Thus, according to A Great and Glorious Game, the journey around the bases, "by theft and strength, guile and speed," acquires, so to speak, a homeric symbolism. Giamatti once dismissed basketball as all " thumpety, thumpety, thumpety, swish," and in basketball -- as in football and hockey -- the contestants charge up and down to place the ball or puck at a destination of no intrinsic value. But baseball
is about going home, and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need. It tells us how good home is. Its wisdom says you can go home again but that you cannot stay. The journey must always start once more, the bat an oar over the shoulder, until there is an end to all journeying. Nostos; the going home; the game of nostalgia, so apt an image for our hunger that it hurts.
The end of all human striving, according to Samuel Johnson (serious baseball analysis requires literary allusions), is "to be happy at home." It's hardly surprising, then, that the sport about going home should attract and inspire so many writers and thinkers, sustain endless debates and conversations about the past, and prompt the compulsive hoarding of "sacred" memorabilia.
But perhaps this is to intellectualize and psychologize too much. On somehwat firmer empirical ground is Giamatti's description of baseball's addictive, mesmerizing effect over the course of a long spring and summer: " You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive." One ends up "investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy . . . counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day."
Recalling a game in which his beloved Boston Red Sox were eliminated from the playoffs by their old nemesis, the New York Yankees, Giamatti insists that, win or lose, the end of a baseball season "breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised." In a world where " nothing lasts," he concludes, "I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; and it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun."
The political commentator George F. Will, when not diverted by national and international affairs, tends to write about baseball in a different style. Will's 1990 bestseller, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, was a nuts- and-bolts account of the game's techniques and tactics. Will concentrated on how players and managers dedicate themselves to excellence at their craft. It was an ingenious demonstration of the subtle interplay among intelligence, physical ability, and trained reflex, and it showed how little things done well or poorly have an enormous cumulative effect over the course of a 162- game season.
Will's latest baseball book, Bunts, is a splendid collection of essays written over the last two decades. It rehearses many of his earlier themes, but it takes a broader, lighter view. Like Giamatti, Will insists that one of the great pleasures of baseball is remembering, savoring, and discussing the past. And Will is a fount of memories about baseball's past. He repeatedly returns, for instance, to his lifelong disappointment with the Chicago Cubs, a team whose "mediocrity under pressure" has for Will come to symbolize Man's Fate. The Cubs have not won a pennant since 1945 (when, as the author points out, most able-bodied males were in the Army) or a World Series since 1908; thus, in Will's mock optimism, the Cubs are in the ninetieth year of a rebuilding program. Will recalls that when he was a boy in the 1950s, his birthday celebration always included watching a doubleheader at the Cubs' Wrigley Field -- so he could enjoy "two defeats for the price of one."
Though Will appreciates both earnestness and humor, he roundly disparages some varieties of baseball romanticism -- particularly "a certain kind of person" who tries to freight the game with heavy poetic and philosophical meaning. "I would call that person a intellectual," Will says, "but let there be no name-calling." (The object of his attack is not Bartlett Giamatti but Professor Donald Kagan -- another intellectual from Yale, but very intelligent -- who had criticized Men at Work for its emphasis on craft and calculation over drama and glory.)
But though he may be shy about saying how it all fits together, Will clearly does think baseball is more than the sum of its parts. It could hardly be otherwise: Almost any sport, taken seriously, provides a vehicle for the cultivation and display of virtue. Will might not admit that he agrees with Giamatti that the trip around the bases is an allegory for life, but he does acknowledge that "Baseball, properly practiced and appreciated, is a form and object of love, and thus touches, at least tangentially, all of life's great themes." And he seconds journalist Thomas Boswell's claim that the game's preculiar "blend of intensity and underlying serenity" is something that "in daily life, we might call mental health." Will even thinks that baseball -- with its long season of "peaks and valleys" in which even the best teams lose a third of their games -- is "a study in culmination" that "illustrates regeneration, resurrection, and life's second chances."
All of which helps explain why, as Will puts it, "the involvement of baseball fans with their sport is different, in kind and intensity, from the involvement of people with professional football and basketball." It is in the everydayness of baseball -- this season, last season, and all the seasons past -- that George Will the sober realist meets Bartlett Giamatti the mythopoetic hymnist. Where Giamatti speaks of "something abiding, some pattern and some impulse" to "resist the corrosion," Will speaks simply of " baseball as oxygen" -- for the fans, "part of the rhythm of their lives and the fabric of the nation's history." It is the only sport that truly constitutes a pastime -- our national pastime, whether we know it or not.
Matthew Berke is managing editor of First Things.