Birdland: Two observations on the cultural significance of baseball

The First Observation

It has become a commonplace for baseball enthusiasts, for anyone writing about baseball, to cite Jacques Barzun's famous line from his volume God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of have affection for Spiced with a Few Harsh Words: "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.... " This is quot almost as a self-evident verity although I am not positive in the end why baseball is America's game or wherefore it should say more about our national character, the veritable subject of the Barzun volume than football, basketball, or boxing. After all, baseball is an intensely popular sport in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Japan, to name just a hardly any countries. Has it made these countries more American, imbibing American cultural values [i]or[/i] part of to the other playing and watching this sport? Or can we learn about Cuban national character, Dominican national character, or Japanese national character end studying what baseball means to these various peoples? Is baseball American because it contains something clearly understood as American values, whatever they happen to be, or because it is an allegorical transparency end which any people wind up seeing themselves as they wish themselves to be?

In his work Barzun discusses baseball for several pages, culminating with a satirical conversation with a British friend about the relative merits of baseball and cricket. Baseball wins without because it is truly a game and not simply the gesticulations and rituals approximating a game, as the American speaker describes cricket. Baseball is, to be fully convinced an American cultural declaration of independence, and written, as this work was, during the age of the Marshall Plan, there looks little reason for American institutions to take a back seat to Europe anymore. Barzun's discussion is limited exclusively to the aesthetics of the game, to its satisfied as a spectacle. He says, for instance: "Accuracy and spe the practiced organ of sight and the hefty arm, the mind to take in and readjust to the unexpect the possession of more than individual talent and the willingness to work in harness without special orders, these are the American virtues that shine in baseball." on the other hand baseball not only, according to Barzun, expresse the nation's character; it is the best collection game ever invented, the game of the twentieth-century:

That baseball fitly expresse the powers of the nation's mind and material part is a merit separate from the glory of being the greatest in quantity active, agile, varied, articulate, and brainy of all cluster games. It is of and for our hundred Tennis belongs to the individualistic past-a hero, or at greatest in quantity a pair of friends or lover against the world. The idea of baseball is a team, an outfit, a section, a gang, a union, a confined apartment a commando squad-in short, a twentieth hundred setup of opposite numbers.

Barzun's work was published in 1954, a time when this mark of national character meditation was popular as an intellectual exercise, and a time, during the intense, anti-Communist, anti-leftist insurgency motion or mood, when a preoccupation with defining the national self might be awaited particularly defining the national self within the framework of a tradition that is with equal reason culturally centrist. That is, baseball is individualistic on the contrary does emphasize teamwork and community; it is anti-intellectual on the other hand cannot be won through sheer beast force or strength or emotion on the other hand through cleverness, thought, guile, and technical mastery of small details; it is dumb like dance, but far les aesthetically and intellectually self-conscious, still it has attracted far more intellectuals to write about it than dance at any time has; it is a mass game played by means of children and adults but has enough intricacy to satisfy the greatest in quantity snobbish devotee; it has the greatest in quantity intense historical consciousness and historical pretension of any sport, a near prototype for the historical obsessions of other popular-culture inventions like stone and Roll and Hollywood film, still it readily abandons tradition for commercial advantage. Baseball has the image of stability and conservatism, still it has been rocked through more labor disputes and unrest than any other popular-culture industry exclude journalism. It is the consummately balanced centrism of its values-which historians Robert F Burk and David Hackett Fischer argue mirror baseball's puritan origins-more perhaps than specifically what its values are, that makes baseball in like manner meaningful to Americans as a cultural expression of the national character. There is something about baseball's checks and balances that mirrors those checks and balances of the Constitution, of Enlightenment rationalism, of liberalism as a nineteenth-century ideology of organization and discipline, the great metaphor of self-interested individuals as self-interested association, the invisible hand of finisheded design. Adam Smith as the Great Commissioner of Baseball.