Baseball Is America

In many ways, baseball, much more so than basketball and football, is a sport whose character most closely resembles the American spirit and the Anglo-Saxon Protestant myth of our nation’s beginnings. It is a thinking man’s game, cerebral in every way imaginable. Moreover, out of the Enlightenment came our respect for reason and the idea that the proof of things rests in our ability to observe, measure, count and quantify them. In this regard, baseball satisfies this passion one-hundred times over—all sports pale in comparison to baseball when it comes to statistics. There are runs to count, hitting percentages to compute, steals to total and hits to tally. The game is exceedingly orderly and when combined with its cerebral undertones it satisfies the American appreciation for enlightened reason.

Baseball, like America, has a high regard for the individual and his achievements. Baseball puts each player in the spotlight at a single time. Standing alone in the chalked box, the batter has only himself and all of his instinct and experience in making the decision to swing or not. If he strikes out he is chastised. It he belts one over the fence he is revered. Indeed, the story is the same on defense. Tradition puts fielders where they play and each man has his distinct position or territory. When the ball is hit between second and third base it is the shortstop—not the second basemen or the outfielder—that must play the ball. Each player’s position has its traditional sovereignty. Just like countries, when defenders invade one another’s space trouble is bound to ensue.

Unlike baseball, football requires a supremely close interaction of players. The linemen need to block in order for the quarterback to throw or for the running-back to run. In this sense, basketball and football is corporate—it depends on the fluid and unitary movement of several athletes. Baseball is associational. As Michael Novak asserts, “baseball is a Lockean game, a kind of contract theory in ritual for a set of atomic individuals who assent to patterns of limited cooperation in their mutual interest.” Yes, there is a team baseball. But it is the amalgamation of distinctly individual efforts that achieve the team goal.

Nevertheless, while baseball elevates and accentuates individual achievement, there are elements of justness and equality that likewise show American values of the same elements. Though baseball teams have managers and captains and players are compensated at different levels, the importance of ‘team’ remains high.

The viability of communal strength rests in baseball’s intrinsic balances of power. Here too, we see the innate undercurrents of Americanism running and weaving through the sport of baseball. Baseball is to games what “the Federalist Papers are to books: reasoned, judiciously balanced, incorporating segments of violence and collision in a larger plan of rationality, absolutely dependent on an interiorization of public rules.” Like the balance between a judge and the accused, there is a similar balance of power between a pitcher and a hitter, and between a runner and an umpire. Even the field itself is balanced: the distance between the pitchers slab and home plate, the height of fences, the length and weight of the bat. Slight changes to any of these things could fundamentally shift the balance and outcome of events.

Finally, baseball can be said to resemble a form of checks and balances—much like the design of our federal government. It requires a bit of poetic license but, in a sense, batters step up to the plate one by one and are like unitary executive; the defense, acting together like the legislature, forms a check on the batters, their executive counterparts; the umpires lay down their judgments like the judiciary checking both the batters and the defense. The analogies are far from exact. But they do work to show that the principles of balance at work in our system of government, of which we are so fond, exist in baseball as well.