I see great things in baseball. It’s our game–the American game. It will take our people out of doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.
Conventional wisdom attributes that statement to Walt Whitman
In nine days we start it all over again. With a new season coming soon, let’s talk about baseball.
WARNING – CONTINUED READING MAY RAISE YOUR IRE.
Sport is important to many of our lives and the society. I watch baseball and have played many a game. Despite my involvement with baseball, I find it uninspiring. Maybe it’s just a marketing thing, but when I consider great athletic moments and great athletes, baseball and baseball players tend to come up short on my lists. I appreciate baseball for all its newsworthiness and drama, but I wonder if baseball should be called a sport. (That’s right I’m the dude who said it!) I’m trying to figure out why people, especially Americans, think baseball is “all that.”
Is a contest of groups of individuals really a team sport? If baseball is the American game, what does it say about America and Americans? Stuck in the past? Boring? Chokes? Cheaters? Individualistic to a fault? Obsessive? Money for nothing? Advanced? International? Smart? Poetic? Inspired?
If sport is about skillful physical activity, organization, and lots of rules, then baseball is all about it. If sport is about competitive activity between te
ams with great and inspiring individual and group champions, then baseball might, at best, be akin to a great novel. Why is baseball the great American game, sport, or pastime?
I’ll see you this afternoon in the Howard Thurman Center to talk about baseball. Do we really dig this game or is it time to go find a real sport? I’ll bring the coffee and cookies and I am sure you’ll bring the conversation (I might also need my umpire’s mask, too). See you at 3 p.m.
Peace.
