The Greatest Game

By Stefan Kanfer

SLOW? Players have been known to sleep during a game. Unfocused? It begins when the hockey rinks are frozen and ends when footballs are tossed in snow flurries.

Archaic? Its greatest heroes are locked in the mythic past, an epoch located roughly between the Jurassic era and World War II.

Unfashionable? Of all major team sports, it is the only one that is not played against a clock.

By all rational standards, baseball should have gone the way of the bison and the convertible by now. But there are no rational standards in love. Besieged by Masters tournaments, Olympics, track meets and Super Bowls, the fans have kept baseball incredibly popular. In a recent Harris poll, they were asked which championship event they would prefer to attend. Results:

1. World Series: 23%

2. Super Bowl: 20%

3. Kentucky Derby: 10%

4. Indianapolis 500: 10%

5. College bowl game: 8%

Why should baseball, with its sluggish metabolism and lack of crunch, retain its hold on the national imagination? The answer lies partly in its seasonal associations. No one is immune to the vernal equinox. The same jump of the blood occurs on ghetto streets and Little League diamonds, in bleachers and in front of the TV screen. Baseball implies an earthly benignity: clear skies, vacations and, above all, no school.

Secondly, there is the peculiarly intellectual quality of the game, with its geometric layout and its deep well of tradition. Philip Roth, whose new book The Great American Novel concerns the fortunes of a homeless baseball team, recalls: "Not until I got to college and was introduced to literature did I find anything with a comparable emotional atmosphere and as strong an esthetic appeal baseball, with its longeurs and thrills, its spaciousness . . . its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its heroics, its nuances, its 'characters,' its language, and its mythic sense of itself, was the literature of my boyhood."

Almost from the beginning, novelists have gone to bat for the game. Ring Lardner saw baseball as the great American comedy--look through the knothole and you found uniformed counterparts of Huck Finn and Charlie Chaplin.

The magic works for spectators as well as novelists. In The Summer Game, Roger Angell celebrates a field that never was: the Interior Stadium. "Baseball in the mind . . . is a game of recollections, recapturing and visions . . . anyone can play this private game, extending it to extraordinary varieties and possibilities in his mind. Ruth bats against Sandy Koufax or Sam McDowell . . . Hubbell pitches to Ted Williams. Baseball, I must conclude, is intensely remembered because only baseball is so intensely watched."

No other sport can be so intensely watched. There is no jumbled scrimmage that must be clarified with instant replay. The ball may approach home plate at 100 m.p.h. or crawl down the third-base line like a crab. A 400-ft. fly ball may fall foul by two inches. As in chess, power radiates from stationary figures. Yet on a given pitch, ten men may be moving. Clearly, this is a game to be scrutinized.

With all the intensity, there is something more. Baseball's deepest fascination lies in twin aspects of the game: records and time. In other sports, the past is a laugh. Teen-age girls are breaking Johnny Weismuller's old Olympic marks. The four-minute mile has been shattered beyond repair. Pole vaulters, broad jumpers, skiers, quarterbacks, golfers, chess players--they have all rewritten the record books until yesterday's hero is exposed as a man with feat of clay. Only baseball has retained so many of its idols. No one has come close to Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak of 1941. The Ted Williams of 1941 was the game's last .400 hitter. Pitcher Cy Young's record of 511 victories has held for two generations. This permanence extends to the game's oddballs, men like Casey Stengel, who once tipped his hat to the crowd and released a bird that was nesting in his hair; Bobo Holloman, who pitched only one complete game in the majors--and that one a no-hitter. There are players whose names alone could render them immortal: Eli Grba, Fenton Mole, Eppa Rixey, Wally Pipp, Napoleon Lajoie. All these men, the immortals and the "flakes," exist like the game beyond the erosions of style and time.

Down on the playing field, another version of time exists, Einsteinian in its complexity. Other sportsmen keep an eye on the minute hand, hoping to "kill" the clock. In baseball, time is subservient to circumstance. An inning may last six pitches or 80 minutes. Official games have gone 4 1/2 innings, and 26. That timelessness is at once the game's curse and its glory. At the conclusion of his disastrous World Series with the Mets, Baltimore Manager Earl Weaver philosophized, "You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the goddam plate and give the other man his chance." Then he paused and concluded: "That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all." ' Or is it? Surely football is closer to the Zeitgeist, with its chatter of "long bombs" and marches downfield. Surely basketball with its constant scoring, or hockey with its eruptions of violence, is America's ideal spectator sport. The conservative, hidebound sport of baseball can offer no such qualities; scoring is rare, violence a matter of tempers, not policy. The game is an echo of a vanished pre-TV, prewar America, a bygone place of leisure and tranquillity.

Baseball was doomed when the Black Sox scandal revealed that the World Series of 1919 was fixed by gamblers. It was finished when it refused to admit black players--gifted men who were forced to play in brilliant, threadbare leagues where only the ball was white. It was dead when attendance wavered and franchises fled hysterically to Seattle, Kansas City, Atlanta, Oakland.

The game survived it all. How? Is it because of the inexhaustible promotional gimmicks, the bat and ball and senior citizens days; the all-weather artificial turf; the dazzling uniforms? Is it the metaphysics and momentum that still continue from the zenith of the '30s and '40s? Or is it that this supposedly stolid, permanent game has imperceptibly accommodated change--that in each era it has accepted physical, textual and social alterations that a decade before had seemed impossibly revolutionary? Is it that, in the end, no other sport is so accurate a reflection of the supposedly stolid, permanent--and ultimately changeable--country that surrounds the interior and exterior stadiums?

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