Opening Day for the American Game: Baseball

Now more than ever, we need a reminder of what is good and beautiful. Baseball is that reminder.

Few things are more American than baseball, and this is Opening Day.

Many modern sports have historic roots either in royalty, aristocracy, and political privilege, or uncivilized savagery. Early golf, like fox hunting, required sprawling tracts of land that was typically owned by a crowned sovereign and managed by royal “landlords.”

American football owes much to rugby, which in medieval Europe was a kind of rule-less, tribal, mob warfare between neighboring villages that featured bare-knuckled brawls and sometimes even murder.

Soccer was invented before homo sapiens evolved opposing thumbs. Why else prohibit the use of hands? The inventors of soccer apparently didn’t know a sporting competition is supposed to have a winner. Nil-nil is not a score. It’s a summary of Nietzsche and the abyss staring at each other.

Baseball has no aristocratic past. It’s an eminently democratic, American sport, where all spectators—even those in cheap seats, and without need of a multimillion-dollar jumbotron—can see all the action on the field, all the time.

Anyone, including those from the humblest backgrounds, can play and be successful in baseball if he’s willing to work, practice, and improve, habits that used to distinguish Americans from spoiled or submissive Europeans, as the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the early 19th century — right around the time baseball was being invented.

In no other game could Yogi Berra become one of the all-time greats and set records that still stand. Even today, some of the best players come from impoverished, third-world regimes. For kids growing up in places like Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, baseball is a way to get out of there and get to the land of liberty, the United States.

Baseball combines teamwork with individual excellence in a way that’s beautiful.

Only a team playing harmoniously can turn an artful, choreographed 6-4-3 double play. Yet, in the batter’s box, each individual player stands alone, without any assistance from his teammates. With all eyes upon him, the batter faces daunting challenges, including fastballs, curveballs, changeups, sinkers, and cutters.

Baseball is an incredibly humbling game. The best hitters fail to get a hit two-thirds of the time. The best pitchers sometimes throw twenty pitches, or thirty, or more, just to get three outs, and every pitcher gives up home runs. In this coming regular season, the best team is going to lose at least 50 games, maybe more.

Let that sink in.

No team in baseball goes undefeated. No team comes close to being undefeated. Every team knows that however sweet a win feels in the moment, a loss is just around the corner. There’s little reason to gloat in baseball.

Among the more striking features of baseball is the design of the field and the play that happens upon it. Baseball doesn’t feature the “fog of war”—a term introduced by the great theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz—as collision sports like football do. There are no gangs of men piling on top of each other, making it impossible for observers to see what actually happened.

That’s why, throughout most of baseball’s history, there was no need for video replay. The game made perfect sense long before TV was invented.

The game of baseball is circular, not linear. Rather than going back and forth like so many sports require, a baseball player scores by returning to the same spot where he stepped up to bat: home plate. Round and round, without end. Like the seasons. Like the planets. Like the cycle of life.

Baseball is civilized in that there’s nothing about the design of the game that requires the sacrifice of body or limbs. Accidents happen, sure, and muscles get pulled, but the game does not require opposing players launching into each other like missiles. No one tries to make baseball violent and safe, simultaneously.

To boot (or to cleat), every championship is a series rather than a single game, recognizing the American way that while a man might have a bad day, he can dust himself off, learn from his mistakes, and try again tomorrow.

For one team to be named World Series champion, they must best their opponent four times out of seven. And that is after a grueling regular season of 162 games and multiple playoff series. There are occasional fluke losers in baseball. There are no fluke winners.

These are but some of the reasons I love the game. There is much ugliness in our modern world. I doubt anyone denies that. Something simple that reminds us what is true, good, and beautiful seems especially precious right now. For me, that’s baseball.