A key difference between baseball and democracy is that in baseball the winners don’t get to rewrite the rules. And it never occurs to the losers to blame the rules for their losses. Our deepest norms of order can still be seen in operation on the diamond when they’ve been adulterated everywhere else. Baseball is [...]
“Ryan is the only guy who puts fear in me. Not because he can get you out but because he can kill you.” —Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson It was the last day of our spring training odyssey: Sunday, March 28, 1993. For the past week, I, along with my friends Mark and John, [...]
"I like your interest in sports ball, chiefest of all base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a [...]
The Yankee franchise represents the worst side of modern baseball and is thus the fittest of villains in the cosmic drama embodied by the game... "They are the 'Dark Side.' They represent all that is evil about baseball, and about our society in general." —Bill Lee, former major league pitcher It was the late winter of 2002, [...]
When the fielder loves his record More than victory for his team Doubtful chances miss his glances For his caution is extreme. Going after every grounder Means a slip-up here and there, And in terror of an error He will choose the chances fair. Spotless records are enticing In a ball game as in life, [...]
Field of Dreams beautifully portrays in a contemporary idiom the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but even more so, the grand cosmic drama to which that Parable points: that of Paradise lost and Paradise regained… In view of the beginning of baseball season, and as the father of two Little Leaguers, I thought it [...]
Idolatry is a dimension of the value that is now placed on sports in America, and is expressed in unbridled adoration of physical feats, and in bowing down to the things of the world… “A technologically supported secularism would make men as gods whose mere desires transform material reality to suit their needs.” So [...]
“April is the cruellest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the first lines of The Waste Land, but for baseball fans it is the month of September that marks the time of bitterest disappointment. Whereas April, the opening month of the baseball season, is filled with hope and promise, September is the final full month of the [...]
Recently I went to see a baseball game. The New York Yankees were playing the Baltimore Orioles at Yankee Stadium. Usually I am perfectly content to watch sports on TV in the comforts of home and avoid the contingencies of weather and traffic, and the costs of parking, tickets and concessions. I am also sensitive [...]
On April 25, 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial celebrations, Chicago Cubs outfielder Rick Monday saved an American flag from being burned by two protestors who had trespassed onto the field during a game at Dodger Stadium. As the bottom of the fourth inning got underway, the protesters placed the flag in left-center field [...]
The Game Like any sports culture, American football arrives at its season with its own mythos. The difference is, here in the States, no other sporting event captures and communicates so well the id of the American psyche: good guys vs. bad guys, victory or defeat, and violence, violence, violence. But I am more [...]
Tensions tighten and raucous roars of excitement permeate America as football fans eagerly await this year’s Super Bowl. Fans have watched the playoffs intrigued as games unfold, awaiting the final score to see which team will advance to the final game. Some scorn the passion and obsession people have with a “trivial” game. And [...]
President Obama has been taking a good deal of flak, lately, for all the time he is spending on the golf course. He famously “took a break” from his latest vacation to address the horrors of the beheading of an American journalist by an Islamic extremist group, and to say a few words about [...]
The beginning of the baseball season is a natural time to reflect on the singular mystique of the game known as “America’s pastime.” Budweiser Beer recently garnered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition asking the White House to make Major League Baseball’s Opening Day a national holiday. The Obama Administration, however, in a [...]