This season, let us cherish anew the goods that baseball offers us.
Let us cherish anew the goods that baseball offers us.
F or baseball fans, hope renews every spring. Another year might bring a winning season, a playoff run, or even a world championship. Opening day arrives later than usual this year, following bargaining disputes between owners and players. Still, in all its hope and all its glory, the season has come.
It’s probably outdated to call baseball “America’s game.” Certainly we cannot say that with respect to popularity. Football can claim higher shares of the public’s attention when judged by the typical number of television viewers per game. Basketball holds comparable numbers to baseball in viewership, too.
We Americans must recognize that the games citizens play and watch matter for the political health of the country.
Games habituate. Preparing well for them requires countless hours of repetition. Our repetitions — our practice — ingrains in us certain motions, such as how to throw a ball or swing a bat. Watching the games week after week, if not day after day, also establishes repetitive cycles. They bestow on viewers certain knowledge of the game.
Our practice habituates in other, deeper ways as well. Both playing on and rooting for teams habituate us to citizenship.
We must know the game’s object — its core principles. To misunderstand the basics of team play, of scoring runs, and of the innings framework would doom a team or a hapless fan to frustrated wanderings instead of fulfilling competition. The same goes for our political life. We must understand the object of our Constitution, as stated in the Declaration of Independence and its preamble, to rightly involve ourselves in the political community.
Moreover, we must learn and obey the game’s rules — its laws — to meaningfully participate. We must so learn and so obey because the rules display how to play the game. They fill out the skeleton of principle into a full-fledged picture of play. Of course, law is essential to politics. Truly just and healthy regimes act in accordance with the rule of law. As cheating (when it’s discovered) removes a person from the game, so lawbreaking can remove a person from participation in the body politic through imprisonment, disenfranchisement, even capital punishment.
To win, we need even more than playing by the rules. We must play the game well, better than our opponents. In other words, excellence matters. Excellence matters, or at least should, for citizens as well. We choose our political leaders for the political arts they supposedly possess. Do they show excellence in their capacity to write, enforce, or interpret the law?
Games also breed tradition. Our games have histories. They have heroes, villains, and the moments that made them so. These traditions, formed from these histories, create intergenerational links and build on the rules, establishing additional expectations for conduct, among players and fans alike. So, too, does tradition matter in politics. Through our traditions, we give greater form to our laws and therefore to our first principles, establishing who will be our George Washingtons and who our Benedict Arnolds.
Finally, games forge and sustain community. Fans and players share the experience of the game. But they do so in relation to a commitment to a particular team. Built around common triumphs and tribulations, around years in the wilderness and exhilarating moments of conquest, this community links to history. The relationship of a fan to his team can form part of other relationships as well. So much of my own family’s bond finds expression through watching, playing, and discussing the teams we commonly love. I know that I am at least a fourth-generation Cincinnati Reds fan, with videotape evidence, taken on my first birthday, of my great-grandfather’s love for the team. Similarly, citizenship is a community built around common loves and common experiences. We love our country in common, both because she is ours and because she is good. As Americans, we share the experience both of tragedies like 9/11 and of triumphs like landing on the moon.
While all sports help forge habits of good citizenship, I would argue that baseball does it best. Baseball best teaches patience, for instance. Granted, the game in its current iteration needs to be sped up. At its perfect pace, however, baseball remains slower, more methodical than its counterparts. It thereby instructs on the political need for self-control — for the liberty that comes with discipline.
Moreover, baseball best realizes the concept of the individual and the team. As Diana Schaub has pointed out, a batter gets individual glory for triumphing over a pitcher in an at-bat. But the order in which a batter comes up to hit is established before the game begins. One cannot isolate or target the best player, as in basketball and football. So, too, our own political principles seek a united common good, based on protecting the individual and his inalienable rights.
Finally, baseball’s traditions, better than those of any other sport, track with American history. The sports’ struggles — and triumphs — regarding gambling, labor, drugs, and race form a miniature picture of our nation’s struggles, and triumphs; a past in which we both acknowledge our imperfections and celebrate the inherent beauty of the game and our country.
This season, let us cherish anew the goods baseball offers us. Let us remember that these goods come to us not just as fans, but as citizens. In our turbulent, partisan times, those goods are a source of recurring hope, too.