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Two Thoughts About Baseball

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Yes, I know the season hasn't begun yet. Still ... Two thoughts.

(1) One of the enduring and endearing facts about baseball is that it doesn't have a clock to run down to zero.

The duration of a game is defined by the rules, independent of any clock. When the last out has been recorded, the game ends.

Much appeal of the game has long been that if one gives one's self to the game, one puts clocks aside.

Another thought -- (2) sports might in general be placed on a spectrum from individualist to collectivist. Skiers in the winter Olympics are individualists. They perform on their own, they win the medals on their own, although their achievements are also chalked up to lists of which nation got how many medals, and they wear the colors of that national "team." Football players (American football) are collectivists. The front lines literally line up shoulder to shoulder. The structure is hierarchical, with one central figure calling out the plays and the other players expected to 'execute.' Baseball? it occupies a unique position in the center.

In baseball we have the outer trappings of individualism. One pitcher is credited as having Won or Lost the game, on running counts of Ws and Ls next to his name. The players are physically quite far apart from each other, especially those outfielders. There is no regular "huddle."

And yet it is beneath the individualist trappings a game of cooperation and coordination. The individualism is for show, the collective effort is for the dough.

That was Jacques Barzun's key point about the sport, in the notorious essay in which he wrote, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and reality of the game."


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