With the Major League Baseball season now well underway, I feel it a great opportunity to take a reflective look back on my own love for America’s pastime. Relatedly, I hope to shed light on the ways in which a staple of American popular culture has been — and may be again in the future — utilized for artistic and intellectual pursuits, as the beginning of the end of my undergraduate career has appeared all too soon.
The story I often tell of my love for the New York Mets begins with the 2015 postseason, where they reached the World Series for the first time since 2000. And although that team and those of the late 2010’s occupy a special place in my memory, I think I misplaced the genesis of my fandom.
I trace my early appreciation for the sport I love to moments spent in my grandparents’ home. Littered throughout are countless Mets tchotchkes, and with them lie the images and emotional material I wish to forever hold close: scents of basil and sawdust, iconographies of bicycles and The Beatles, plenty of Yiddish words I understand only partially. Though I’m not sure I realized it explicitly until very recently, the Mets are a team I have tied closely with my family and my childhood, having acquired a sense of nostalgia beyond that which sports franchises already evoke via past championships or players long retired.
Be it through its extended history as a centuries-old sport that establishes a community across history, or through the balance of extraordinary moments with the intense structure of the rule book and time itself through the ticking of innings rather than the hour, baseball constitutes much more than a game; it is a far more manifold and perplexing social activity.
This association of baseball with the forging of bonds is well-documented in literary scholarship, particularly noted for the notion of baseball existing as a religion in the U.S. Professor of comparative religion at the University of Cape Town David Chidester takes note of this idea in a 1996 article on different frameworks of studying religion in American society. Evidencing it through various aspects of the sport, Chidester describes baseball as “a religious institution that maintains the continuity, uniformity, sacred space, and sacred time of American life” such that “baseball does everything we conventionally understand to be done by the institution of the church.”
Be it through its extended history as a centuries-old sport that establishes a community across history, or through the balance of extraordinary moments with the intense structure of the rule book and time itself through the ticking of innings rather than the hour, baseball constitutes much more than a game; it is a far more manifold and perplexing social activity.
Speaking on the intersection between baseball and religion more directly, Paul Christopher Johnson, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia, notes the ways in which certain of the sport’s objects become conduits of memory in his essay “The Fetish and McGwire’s Balls.” Referencing the record-setting home run baseballs of then-St. Louis-Cardinals first baseman Mark McGwire, Johnson aims to “explore the use of set-apart-objects, objects heavy with significance, as they become anchors of memory and history-making.”
He begins his analysis through noting the complexities of memory itself. Rather than locating the faculty directly within the mind, Johnson presents numerous examples of otherwise banal social activities taking on an added dimension of meaning-making based on their congruence with the act of remembering.
Among the most beautiful inclusions in this list is a quotation attributed to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who notes of his affinity for wine that “people may think I am drinking: I am remembering.” To Johnson’s list I would add American author John McPhee’s love of cherries, as he says “one of my daughters left a bag of wild cherries here in June, 2023, and set the clock back eighty-five years.”
On the obsession with McGwire’s home run baseballs themselves, Johnson compares this practice with that of religious devotees approaching a saint’s relic. One approaches the baseball as “to evoke memories of the past, to ‘return’ and thereby recharge our sense of the real in the present.”
The spatial and temporal transformations the world undergoes on the baseball field are among the many stable contradictions examined by psychoanalysis Stephen Seligman in his essay “Baseball Time.” Seligman beautifully articulates the simultaneous chaos and order that characterize the sport, a quality that I find so often invigorates my own passion for it.
“Baseball juxtaposes the quotidian and the beautiful; its gift is to contain apparently contradictory elements without resolving their opposition,” Seligman said. “It blends harmony and stress, time and timelessness, spaciousness and containment.”
The notion of ordinary beauty particularly strikes me as important, on account of the potential to sanctify other aspects of popular culture — especially in a 21st-century world that so often leaves one derelict, stupefied and at a loss for words or direction — to an ameliorated position of meaning-making. What other insights into our current world may we glean from a sport that predates the American Civil War? More particular to my own intellectual interests, how has baseball been utilized as a hermeneutic tool already?
American studies scholar Richard Alan Schwartz tracks the emergence of baseball as a literary motif in the works of postmodern writers like Philip Roth and Robert Coover in his aptly titled 1987 essay “Postmodern Baseball.” Schwartz hypothesizes the attractive richness of baseball as a symbol derives from much the same skepticism of traditional narratives and ideologies which gave rise to modernism — and, for that matter, postmodernism and nearly all movements that have cropped up in time’s march to the present day — as an intellectual tradition.
“In our increasingly secular era, where religious belief also largely fails to provide the stability and community that myth once offered, baseball emerges as at least a partial alternative,” Schwartz wrote.
Schwartz describes Roth’s “The Great American Novel” as “an admonition to remember and learn from history, as well as to be attentive to who is left in charge of history and to who is excluded from it.” Moreover, the literary techniques used in this challenge to remember instruct us to do so in a particular way — with smiles on our faces.
“(The Great American Novel) is an admonishment made through parody, a parody that does not undermine the warning but allows us also to be joyous in the face of it,” Schwartz said.
I present these somewhat scattered ideas with the hopes of fostering in others a passion for this sport to which I reflexively return so often.
In presenting a fictional creation with borderline-journalistic sincerity, Roth’s work calls into question how it is we determine whether or not the information that is “left out of history” truly took place.
As Schwartz shows, Coover’s novel “The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.” uses baseball as a narrative device in an even more overt manner. The book follows J. Henry Waugh, in his nightly tabletop creation of a fictional baseball league not dissimilar to the beloved statistics-based board game Strat-O-Matic. Thinking thematically, the work examines our relationship to history in parable-like fashion.
“Like Roth, he questions the knowability of history; moreover, he uses the baseball vehicle to ask the big essential questions: why are we here? What does it all mean? Is there a God; if so, is He crazy?” Schwartz says.
I present these somewhat scattered ideas with the hopes of fostering in others a passion for this sport to which I reflexively return so often. Baseball is an escape, yes, but it also has much to tell us about all that from which it offers us reprieve. It is, like many other culturally defined objects in American society, an instance of secular religion. It is also an exploration of how we approach resolving the ordering worldviews we conceive with the untrumpable disorder and randomness of the living universe.
Baseball is also still a topic of limitless potential as a literary device. Or perhaps it’s just full of good stories that stay with me. I am here thinking of a pair of documentaries published on YouTube that have, to my mind, invigorated my love not only for baseball but the possibilities of (re)telling our stories of the otherwise ordinary events and entities that populate our lives.
The first — “The History of the Seattle Mariners” — recounts a massive tale through the moments and figures that brought me an affect of wonder that few other works have impressed upon me. Moments like longtime Mariners broadcaster Dave Niehaus’ breathtaking call of Edgar Martinez’s go-ahead grand slam in the 1995 American League Division Series will forever travel with me thanks to this piece.
The second, however, left me even more touched by the narrative power of baseball. Produced by the same creators of the Mariners documentary, “Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb” keeps the former’s captivating visual style but plays out with an even more personal tone on account of its focus on a single player rather than an entire franchise. For fear of embarking on an odyssey of description and butchered retellings of that which a phenomenal piece of artful documentary recounts beyond compare, I’ll choose to limit myself to a single sentence of description.
The tale of Stieb explores, more brilliantly and more fully than any other work I’ve encountered, the ineffable struggles of chasing perfection in any endeavor, and through its eponymous seafaring ballplayer of fortune, reminds me that the stuff worth striving for is that which we craft for ourselves while we wait for others to take notice of what we’ve already got.
I recognize now that I have spent very little time talking about baseball in isolation, instead having chosen to dive through various readings and instances that arise when I think of them. I think I’ll conclude by again choosing not to talk about baseball directly.
I have chosen to present baseball in a rather academic — and thereby, I hope, a rather unathletic, un-jock-like — way as a reminder that kernels of truth lie in facets of popular culture just as much as they do in entities one more readily associates with academia. Baseball, like nearly every other entity in the universe, is a kaleidoscopic, prismatic object; it begs for us to behold it from every angle, dragging out new meanings with every refraction.
