One of my favorite memories of my college years occurred when I was a freshman. My honors professor Dr. James Hardy was giving a lecture on the history of baseball from its inception to modern times. Now Hardy knows a bit more about baseball than I do, having written a book on the early years of the New York Giants and following the sport from the end of the Depression years to the present day. Thinking about it now, this lecture did much to bring back my interest in the sport that had dominated my childhood.
Living in the Deep South, I can understand why baseball is less popular here than it is in my home state of Pennsylvania. I grew up, as most everyone in my family did, a Phillies fan – though my late grandmother was old enough to remember the old Philadelphia Athletics, a precursor to today’s Oakland team. For my first 14 years living about 45 minutes away from Philadelphia, I managed to attend about three Phillies games a season, though I cannot remember them winning once. Then again given the team and times, this was not all too uncommon, and I see, checking the scores, that they have lost on opening day as well.
Baseball, at least it used to be, is the national pastime for a good reason. For one, its season lasts for 162 games, from early April to late October, over half a year. The sport itself grew with the country, arriving in California during the baby boom of the late ’50s. Its desegregation preceded that of the nation’s armed forces and schools. Indeed, even its current drug problems mirror this country’s obsession with controlled substances.
In some ways if the War Between the States is America’s “Iliad,” then baseball is this country’s other great epic. We’ve all reveled in the malapropisms of Yogi Berra, the stories of the viciousness of Ty Cobb and the outrageous characters that have populated the sport from Babe Ruth to my youthful hero John Kruk. Its players are larger-than-life figures; their deeds the stuff of school yard imitation and talk. Hell, even Joe DiMaggio, not exactly a looker, married Marilyn Monroe.
Personally, I am rather unfit and ill-formed for sports. I did my best with baseball but found myself unable to get more than a base hit while playing T-ball, let alone anything on a faster pace. Still, my admiration of those who perform well in the field as well as those who write well about the subject remains to this very day. The sport, unlike all the others as interesting as they are, has done more to enrich our common culture and literature, from books such as “The Natural” to films like “The Sandlot” and “Bull Durham.” Even Supreme Court decisions about the sport seem to attain a poetry they might otherwise lack – Harry Blackmun’s opinion in the 1972 case of Flood v. Kuhn is a chief example of this.
So baseball, from the sandlots to the major leagues, is perhaps one of the things that makes our country truly great. The sport is democratic, yet it respects the individual. Everyone is out to better both themselves and their teams as a whole. Now, granted, the system isn’t perfect nor are the actors themselves, but there the league lacks the showboating of the NFL and the NBA, as well as the sheer incomprehensibility for most folks that hockey brings.
For me, I know how I’ll be spending my summer, as I have done most of my life. Sitting back in my chair, filling up an ashtray and watching the action on a diamond made of dirt. Who knows, maybe the good folks from Philadelphia will win it all this year.Well, that or it ends, as it did almost 13 years ago, with Mitch Williams and Joe Carter in the bottom of the 9th of game six of the 1993 World Series.
Not, unfortunately, my favorite ending but enduring proof of the old Brooklyn Dodgers cry of “wait ’til next year!”
 
Ryan is a history senior. Contact him
at [email protected]