Making Sense of the National Pastime

Abstract

If baseball is no longer the most popular sport in the United States—and na- tional preference polls and television ratings strongly suggest it is not—the game still possesses great cultural cachet. Football and basketball may indeed fit twenty-first-century American life better, but neither sport has generated the volume of writing that baseball has. For nearly two centuries, the self- proclaimed national pastime has served as a handy symbol of national vigor and national innocence. It is noteworthy that, while use of performance enhancers is arguably greater in football, it is use in baseball that has drawn the most attention and has been an emblem of modern-day disregard for fair play. Of no other sport has it thus far been said, as historian Jacques Barzun did in 1954, that whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the 1 That baseball embodies something essential and timeless about America is a sentiment of longstanding and one that a good many sports historians have set about to debunk. In the last twenty years, they have challenged the notion that baseball was first and foremost a rural game. Noting how the game was engineered in the late nineteenth century to exemplify the emerging values of industrial America, they have argued that the link between the seasons and the professional game that commentators often extol was not so much a mat- ter of tradition as a consequence of the rise of professional organizations that set the season for money-making purposes. In the same vein, they challenge those who rhapsodize about baseball's freedom from the clock by pointing