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Sports and War, Baseball and Innocence: An Opening Day Meditation
by Don Malcolm

As you may already know, this column (entitled "Swinging From The Heels") is more about the verb in that title than the prepositional phrase. Though I dearly love ballplayers who will take a pitch, my job in this space is not to draw a walk. As valuable as that may be on the baseball field, it's not a workable concept in writing. Following an odd connection between things—as I'm about to do now—might well be seen as "bad-ball hitting," to be sure.

But possibly I'll wind up with a hit anyway. Let's see what happens.

Linking the two phrases in the title evolved from a chance encounter with two books that compete with thousands of others for my fleeting attention in my vertiginous library/office. The first—sports and war—came from my dipping into The Paths of History (Cambridge, 1999), by noted Russian historian Igor Diakonoff.

In his book, which is a sweeping overview of the evolution of world civilization, Diakonoff makes one very interesting reference to sports and its function in the more recent stages of culture:

Putting an end to wars, which satisfied the social need for aggression, must lead to the growth of aggressiveness in everyday life, as terrorism and crime, and of the popularity of such sports as football, hockey, field athletics, karate, etc.

Diakonoff, of course, touches upon themes here that are at least as old as Plato. We might ask ourselves how organized sport in modern times differs in its structural relationship to society than its analogue in ancient Greece.

More relevant to us at this point, possibly, is to consider why sports came to be invented in the first place, and how their professionalization has affected our view of them, especially in the last 150 years. The incessant use of the term "warrior" in conjunction with professional athletes (even occasionally in reference to women athletes) is but one superficial reminder of the connection between these two forms of aggression.

Diakonoff refers to (post-)modern society's need for controlled, "safe" violence when he makes his commentary on the decline of war that he envisions as a consequence of mankind's development of nuclear weapons. It's interesting to note that he omits several sports from his (admittedly cursory) list.

One of those, of course, is baseball.

Less violent than any other major sport, baseball was also the first to be professionalized in the modern sense. Possibly in 1870 the game was violent enough for a country that had just endured a bloody, culture-wrenching civil war. In 1970, the game was considered passe by many of America's most influential sports pundits. Too boring, they said. Not enough action.

Thirty years later, war and our views and memories of it have changed. (Diakonoff writes that while we are not guaranteed of an end to warfare, he describes an emerging phase of thought that operates as a strong deterrent to future prospects for global warfare.) Baseball's most violent wars of the past forty years have been fought in the press and at the negotiating table. Despite all this, the game is close to its all-time level of popularity.

Why has this happened? There are some partial explanations to be found in Richard Skolnik's Baseball and the Pursuit of Innocence (Texas A&M Press, 1993). Baseball has always appealed to that segment of the fan population with an intellectual bent—the sabermetric movement that blossomed in the 1980s has a long, subterranean pre-history. On a more primal level, though, baseball manages to combine two elemental principles of life into a uniquely aesthetic quality. (There are a proliferation of poets who have been attracted to baseball as a subject; prior to the invention of rap, few if any rhyme-makers focused their attention on football or basketball.)

Those principles, as Skolnik explains, are "innocence" and "order." Baseball's relationship with innocence is more consciously manipulative today than it was in past times, as it uses its rich and unique lore to blur the distinction between innocence and nostalgia; despite this, however, "innocence" is still resonant.

And this is true in spite of the off-field wars that escalated to the point of seeming self-destruction in the 1990s. Baseball's unique connection to "innocence" may yet prevail as a means of avoiding its equivalent of a "nuclear winter."

Skolnik captures this best in the following passage:

Baseball, a game respectful of traditions, has managed somehow to retain at least the flavor and fervor of an era now long gone, one with fewer shadings, more stringent requirements, exacting standards and greater commitment to matters of individual responsibility.

What's interesting here is the strong undercurrent of "order" that creeps into any discussion of innocence. To be free of society's rules and regulations is to be considered "innocent" in a Edenic sense; baseball's appropriation of "innocence" is much more secularized than that. There is the lingering sense that baseball is a game played by boys who grow into men, while all other sports are played by adults. One of the dissonances in the game today is that this notion, which always involved some amount of suspension of disbelief, is increasingly harder to achieve in the context of labor strife and increasing salaries.

Yet somehow, most of us find a way to do that. There is comfort in the interplay of these elements, and this curious conflation of "innocence" and "order" gives us some respite from darker matters, and from the increasing din of life itself. Baseball appears to have survived the encroaching shadow of more aggressive sports, and with any luck it will survive its own internicine struggles. While we may wonder how the game will "play" in the century to come, we are best advised to immerse ourselves in the "play" of the game on-field.

Whatever draws you to the game, feel free to examine it, and feel free to append your own thoughts on this subject as we celebrate the beginning of another baseball season—an event that affirms, as both Diakanoff and Skolnik suggest in their quite different contexts, our celebration of the human need to seek transformation and renewal.

Play ball!

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April 5, 2001 - Sam Hutcheson

Damn, Don. That's possibly the best thing I've read on the philosophy of baseball since Giammatti's "Take Time for Paradise." Honestly, I didn't know you had it in you. Great work.