Legends of the game

Somewhere between the loud arrival of John Madden and the coronation of Michael Jordan and Dale Earnhardt, baseball ceased to be the American pastime. If you measure a sport’s influence by the revenue it produces or the number of TV viewers it attracts, baseball falls to second or third place, well behind NFL football and buried when college and professional football are considered together. A recent Harris poll confirms baseball’s downward trend, which in long-term consistency resembles that of the mainline church.

The exact date of baseball’s demotion is as hard to pinpoint as the birth of postmodernism or the death of American innocence. But tune into the MLB Network for a late game between the Mariners and the Astros in a near-empty stadium in which the few remaining fans are snacking on sushi rather than hot dogs, and you know something bad has happened.

How to explain, then, the continuous flow of elegiac tributes to baseball that appear every summer? Are the authors self-deceived when it comes to baseball’s flaws, perhaps writing more about themselves and their own childhood experience of the game than about the game itself? After all, there is nothing like the memory of holding your father’s hand as he walks with you up the winding ramp of Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, Wrigley Field in Chicago or Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and of emerging from the shadows to your first view of the field—green, brilliant in the afternoon sun and ready for play.