Opening Day for the American Game

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

I’ve reposted this baseball essay every Opening Day for the past several years, and I’ll keep at it as long as I’m breathing.

If you’re fed up with our postmodern mess—where purpose has been replaced with nihilism and everything seems flat because everyone assumes nothing is true or good—join me in celebrating the American game. If you like it, please share this little ditty with your friends.

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

Many modern sports have historic roots either in royal elitism or uncivilized savagery. Early golf, like fox hunting, required sprawling tracts of land that were typically owned by crowned sovereigns and managed by aristocratic “landlords.”

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

Soccer was obviously invented before homo sapiens evolved opposing thumbs. Why else prohibit the use of hands? The creators of soccer apparently didn’t know sporting competitions are 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 republican, American sport, where all spectators—even those in the cheap seats, and without need of a multimillion-dollar jumbotron—can see all the action on the field, all the time.

A Game for Everyone

Anyone—including those from the humblest backgrounds—can play baseball and be successful if he’s willing to work, practice, and improve. These were 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—who stood 5 feet 7 inches and weighed 180 lbs.—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.

Many Americans today seem obsessed with the idea of privilege, but in baseball there is no privilege; there is only effort, preparedness, and opportunity. 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 unique way.

Only a team playing harmoniously can turn an artfully 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.

Humbling

Baseball is an incredibly humbling game. In our postmodern age of cultural narcissism that would make Narcissus blush, that’s worth repeating: Baseball is humbling.

Two-thirds of the time, the best hitters strike out, ground out, or fly out. The best pitchers will 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 in all of baseball 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. That’s why there’s little gloating or showboating 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 (and officials) to see what actually happens on the playing field.

On a baseball field, players are spread apart from each other, making the action of the game easier to watch from any angle and any distance. 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 Perfect Circle

Many modern sports are modeled after ancient modes of war, in which opposing phalanxes would clash head on, each trying to push the other back.

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 unusual in that the defense—not the offense—initiates movement of the ball.

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 and strained, but the game does not require opposing players launching into each other like missiles.

Unlike other modern games, no one tries to make baseball violent and safe, simultaneously.

Time

Baseball has no game clock—no kneeling or stalling or delaying to kill time and prevent the other team from scoring. Nine innings, full stop; the home team bats last, always. Tied? Extra innings roll on—each side swings until someone wins.

In timed games, great deficits are impossible to overcome in the final moments. In baseball, nothing’s impossible.

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 in a best-of-seven series. And that is after a grueling regular season of 162 games and grinding playoff series. There are occasional fluke losers in baseball. There are no fluke winners. No one gets to the World Series because of favoritism from an umpire.

A Platonic Game?

These are but some of the reasons I love the game. There is much ugliness in our postmodern world, mainly because so many people have either forgotten or never learned what real beauty is, and the indissoluble union connecting the beautiful to the true and the good. We are in need of reminders about these noble subjects that encourage us to look up and admire that which is higher, bigger, and more important than ourselves.

Baseball might not be all that. But it’s also not nothing. Baseball is a wonderfully American reminder of something good within us. And it is Opening Day. Play ball!