What Baseball Means to Us
by NIH sports correspondent Duff "Twilley" Wilmott
Not really reviewed in this article:Curt Smith (ed.), What Baseball Means to Me, Warner Books
You can imagine how surprised I was to discover that a collection of pieces about the meaning of baseball had been published without anyone asking me to contribute! Of course, once I got over my surprise I discovered that, as would be expected, this incomprehensible omission was fatal to the entire enterprise.
The collection is What Baseball Means to Me, a product of Warner Books. In it we read the opinions, among many others, that baseball means an attempt to control time, it means memory, it means "the mystic texture of childhood" (that quotation is from Doris Kearns Goodwin, though of course where she got it from is an open question).
In fact, according to the book baseball means pretty well anything anyone wants it to mean. So you see why I was upset, and why I'm sure you are, too – if I'd been asked to contribute I could have explained exactly what baseball means and spared the baseball public all that pretentious and platitudinous piffle.
For baseball means exactly nothing. It's a bunch of grown men hitting balls with sticks! What in the name of all that's holy could that possibly mean? Right, it could only mean exactly nothing.
E. M. Cioran once noted – see, they omitted the one guy in the sportswriting world who can quote E. M. Cioran! what was on their tiny little minds? – anyway, as I was saying, E. M. Cioran once noted that le réel me donne de l'asthme. Pretty acute, eh? Quite the pithy little encapsulation of a complicated theory of knowledge, don't you think? Anyway, let's conduct an experiment. What happens if we substitute le baseball for le réel? Well, we end up with le baseball me donne de, de – hé, qu'est-ce que le baseball me donne exactement?.
And what does baseball give us, exactly? It gives us exactly nothing. It seems to me that the relationship is entirely the other way round – it is we who mean something to baseball. We're the ones who pay inflated ticket prices so that the average ballplayer can "earn" approximately twice as much a year as all the elected leaders of the G8 nations combined. We're the ones who buy the absurdly expensive team memorabilia. We're the ones who refer to the more proficient hitters of balls with sticks as – here I must pause, because the thought of this always makes me fair want to puke – as great men! Look, there is nothing great about hitting a ball with a stick. Churchill was a great war leader, Einstein was a great physicist, Russell was a great philosopher, and Lou Gehrig hit balls with a stick. Duh. The height of this impudence was the recent designation, immediately repudiated by the estimable Mr. Ripken himself, of Cal Ripken as a great American. Mr. Ripken understood, even if we don't, that his metier does not provide scope for greatness.
Looking at this problem another way, I have already noted that according to What Baseball Means to Me baseball can mean anything. As a truly great philosopher taught us during the last century, if something means everything then in fact it means nothing. Which is what I would have said. If they'd asked me.
Looking at the problem yet another way, what effects would the disappearance of baseball from the face of the earth have on the quality of our lives? Would our life expectancy be reduced? Would the formerly baseball-playing nations be riven by class warfare? Would legions of former baseball fans roam the streets wailing and gnashing their teeth?
Well, no. None of that would happen. As we found out during the last baseball strike, many people found out they didn't miss baseball one bit and have never returned to the major league parks. If, as expected, there is another strike this year, even more people will conclude this. Books like What Baseball Means to Me do a disservice to baseball itself by suggesting to the purveyors of professional baseball that they are somehow significant or important in the greater scheme of things.
The history of the Selig Dynasty has been the history of a sport which has developed a grossly inflated sense of its own importance. The only things this can lead to are decadence, decay, and the destruction of an agreeable pastime. All this because people like the contributors to What Baseball Means to Me insist on telling these guys that their sport has meaning, no less. Of course, there would have been one way for the book not to leave that impression. That would have been to ask me.
Curt Smith, editor of What Baseball Means to Me, be it on your own head. Not only for your sake but for the sake of things which are bigger than you, I hope that next time you will do what the reasonable editor would do – ask me.
August 2002
What Baseball Means to Us © Coolth, 2002
Click the banner or click here for Coolth
More sports articles | Home