The start of October marks the start of postseason, the part of the year when baseball, the gentleman’s sport, gets ruthless in its competition and elimination. But that doesn’t matter to most people. Most of the country will opt for football over baseball, if last year’s stats are any indication. Even a postseason game played by legendary rivals the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees failed to attract more viewers than an ordinary Monday Night Football game between the Washington Redskins and New Orleans Saints: 4.41 million tuned into the playoff baseball game, while 10.6 million watched football.
This is a shame, and not just because baseball is the better sport. There’s a lot America’s greatest pastime can teach us about ourselves and our potential.
As President Herbert Hoover said, “Next to religion, baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other American institution.”
Today we face a constant barrage of messages telling us to choose what is easy and shun what is hard. Youth are told they have a right to be included in every special activity, they’re a “winner” no matter what, and that they rarely need to be held accountable for their actions.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Fewer American institutions know this better than baseball.
As an antidote to what is sold in most schools today, we would do well to rediscover and embrace the things that make baseball the great, uniquely American pastime.
First, the fundamental challenge of baseball remains undisputed. No task in professional sports is as difficult as hitting a good fastball. As Hall of Famer Ted Williams once remarked, “baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.”
Over the last decade, the winners of MLB’s batting title have swatted an aggregate average of .340. To put it another way, the best hitter in the league only gets a hit 34% of the time.
Not necessarily a double or a home run. A mere hit.
To say that demonstrates baseball’s challenge is an understatement. As society lowers standards, baseball maintains a level of difficulty that makes even the smallest triumphs feel authentic and earned.
Baseball is unique in cutting against the rise of the “everyone gets trophy!” mentality which has sadly found its way into too many aspects of life. For example, over half the teams in the NBA and NHL receive playoff berths.
Baseball, however, is highly selective. Only 8 out of 30 teams make it into playoff action (excluding the one-game wildcard playoffs). Teams may go for long spells without seeing the postseason. But, like getting an elusive hit off an elite closer, when your team does finally make it, the feeling is special and memorable (just ask Cubs fans).
As longtime Detroit Tigers radio legend Ernie Harwell said, “Baseball is a spirited race of man against man, reflex against reflex. A game of inches. Every skill is measured. Every heroic, every failing is seen and cheered, or booed. And then becomes a statistic.”
Like the icons of the frontier west and cowboys, baseball extols the virtues of self-reliance combined with rugged, determined individualism. There are many players on the field at once, but baseball at its core is about the one-on-one battle between pitcher and batter.
Batters can’t escape popping up an easy fastball in the infield. They can’t blame their teammates on the bench for a strikeout. If something goes wrong for a team in soccer, hockey, basketball or football, it is often hard to pinpoint the blame. In baseball, every failure and every triumph is yours alone and cataloged for all history.
Outside baseball, accountability is increasingly rare. Today’s trend is to blame someone else, or a shadowy, unseen force, for bad results or poor choices. Politicians are hardly ever held responsible for broken promises or failed predictions. Millennials are told they must be victims of something or somebody or anything else whenever things don’t go their way.
Baseball holds individuals accountable with a level of detail bordering on ruthless.
The last 20 years have seen the rise of hundreds of new stats to track every metric of a player’s performance. Team offices are brimming with number crunchers and entire staffs of sabermetricians. Baseball is one of the last remaining institutions which highlights individual achievement and accountability.
New-school stats like WAR (wins above replacement) and OPS have furthered baseball’s ability to eliminate factors outside of a player’s control (such as a bad defense or home-run-friendly ballparks) in an unrelenting quest to judge individual athletes solely on their own merits.
As Walt Whitman said, “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game … the American game.”
In an age of lowering standards, baseball’s challenge should be applauded. In a time of participation trophies, its selectivity should be cherished. Baseball’s brutally detailed record-keeping reminds us to stop shifting blame away from ourselves. Against a rising tide of collectivism, baseball’s focus on the battle of heroic individuals represents one of the enduring aspects of the American spirit.
Joshua Lawson is a doctoral candidate in politics at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship in Michigan.
