The MLB All-Star Game, hosted by the Washington Nationals, is Tuesday night. Baseball has been gathering its best and brightest for an annual game like this for nearly 100 years. If you’re one of the lucky few to have tickets, it will surely be a fun time. If you’re like most of the rest of us, and you have to watch it on FOX, there are still plenty of good reasons to try to make it out to a Major or Minor League Baseball game (particularly with the kids).
Baseball is America’s greatest game
Baseball is as American as apple pie and goes back a couple centuries. Reports say it’s a combination of two English games – rounders and crickets – yet not surprisingly, Americans tweaked the sports to something more to our liking. (Kind of like our democracy, yes?)
In 1845, according to The History Channel, a group of New York City men founded the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club. “One of them—volunteer firefighter and bank clerk Alexander Joy Cartwright—would codify a new set of rules that would form the basis for modern baseball, calling for a diamond-shaped infield, foul lines and the three-strike rule.” The rest is history. Baseball is America’s greatest game because we thought of it—just like our democratic republic.
Baseball offers a lot of life lessons
Even though I grew up going to baseball games with my parents, I avoided taking my kids as an adult because, frankly, the games are long. It’s not like young children are rapt with attention at every single at-bat, like most adults are. Still, it struck me last year: Why shouldn’t they have the experience, even if they are squirrely? A lot of things that happen in baseball can have real-life applications, not the least of which is learning to watch a game that takes several hours. (I’ll admit we still leave around the 7th-inning stretch.) Here are a few I’ve been known to point out to my son, who started playing baseball two years ago:
- Three strikes and you’re out. (Third time’s a charm.)
- Like pitchers, life throws curve balls.
- Swing a bat like you want to actually hit the ball. (I’m talking to you, millennials.)
- Always run out the bases—you never know if you’re going to be out until you know.
- It’s better to hustle than to have talent.
Sure these sound cheesy, but are they wrong? Of course not. Baseball is never wrong, except when the MLB commissioner banned Joe Jackson from the sport in 1920 and refused to put him in the Hall of Fame.
It’s more American than football
Like no other sport, baseball has captivated the imaginations of Americans of all ages, races, ethnicities, and sexes—and hasn’t let go. As a kid I watched Ken Burns’ “Baseball” and fell in love with how he portrayed the game I loved to watch.
At the game’s heart lies mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that sometimes manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to father and grandfathers. And it reflects a host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.
Baseball demands what football and soccer do not: Finesse coupled with talent and solidified with hard work. Likewise, it combines both the need for agility and speed with strategy and patience. Risk-taking is rewarded but also punished. As Ken Burns says, it’s the only American sport where “the defense has the ball” and conjures up a feeling of refreshing Americana just when the flowers bloom–and ends when America goes back to work as autumn strikes.
It’s a unique sport and fan experience
Unlike other sports, watching baseball at a stadium is an altogether unique experience, one you can’t get on television. Everything from the smell of the stadium—which is a combination of sweat, peanuts, and beer—feels magical if you’re not too hoity-toity about it. From the start of the game and the singing of the national anthem to dusk when those huge stadium lights finally turn on, the game transports you back to a simpler time.
If there’s anything better than eating a hot dog and drinking a cold beer while watching a group of men try to hit a ball nine inches in circumference and listening to my kids cheer for their home team, I haven’t found it. It’s gritty and yet refreshing, magical and yet very much down to earth.
It’s a great bonding experience
Baseball is a game meant to be shared with family and friends. There’s a reason the song with the lyrics “Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd,” is played at every game in America. For the first eight years of my life, I was an only child and one of my favorite memories is sitting between my parents watching our home team, the Minnesota Twins. It felt safe and exciting; memorable and yet we did it so often it became a tradition.
Sure there are scandals in baseball and way too much money in advertising and salaries is spent on the sport, there’s still a purity in the game that beckons us to forget about social media or worries at work, and just enjoy time with family and friends watching a game only America loves more than any other country.
As Walt Whitman, that wonderful American poet, said: “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.”
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
