Another Enthusiasm

This week I've been revisiting Ken Burns's 1994 documentary on baseball.

I've always had a bit of an antipathy for major American sports (my apologies to Joshua). It begins, I suppose, with the elitist idea that anything that has broad appeal to American society must by definition be mundane and insipid. My wife hates and rejects the snobbery of this sentiment, but I can't help myself: I find it confirmed (or I think I do) daily, everywhere.

Football provides the perfect exempli gratia, providing a never-ending fool's parade of beer-soaked emotional cripples whose deepest commitment is reserved for this ritualized homoerotic warplay. It's an entertainment, people, like lions ripping people apart in the colosseum. Hailing from a Northern climate, I admire the skating involved in hockey and its speed. But the fights, the tolerance of them, puts the whole sport right out of the running. The honest--or naive--devotee doesn't even try to disguise that the fights are their whole reason for liking hockey. And there's a real sense that the audience would fall off alarmingly if the fighting were *gasp* outlawed. And basketball. I don't even know what the fuck to say about that. I can't even get myself to a place where I dislike it; I just don't get it altogether. Not even close. It looks like an exercise in wrist-slicing futility. A sweaty modern dance called (like a Calvin Klein perfume) "frustration." To me it's like watching the 24-hour drowning channel.



Baseball always felt different, though I devoted very little time and attention to the game growing up. I was living in Minneapolis when the Minnesota Twins were working their way up to their two World Series in '87 and '91, and you couldn't help getting caught up in the stream. The Twin Cities were electrified during those post-seasons, and the nights when World Series games were played in the Metrodome were unbelievable. I drove a bus through several of those nights, and I'll never forget sitting in a gridlocked downtown surrounded by a hundred thousand good-natured, frenzied Twins fans. The Ken Burns documentary came out a couple years later, though I didn't watch it until its DVD release.



But even prior to all this I loved the idea of baseball, the whimsical collection of rules and characteristics that mark the game. I love the game's abstraction, the complete arbitrariness of its very concept. It's beautiful to watch, both its setting with vibrant greens and contrasting earth tones and white lines and bags, and the game itself, which is graceful and surprising. It's leisurely, but thrilling when things happen. And it's especially magical on the radio (everything's better on the radio). The actions of a baseball game are quiet and repetitive, and the difference between success and failure in this repetition is often very subtle. I love that.



There's nothing new in these observations, I know. But as a bona fide nostalgia whore I cannot watch the history of baseball without noting--and pining a little for--all that has been lost. This is rather ironic when baseball itself has not changed fundamentally for a century. We recognize and react to the old footage as though we were watching a current game, which is why the statistics which so many baseball fans love remain meaningful. Baseball is a phenomenon of culture--the most impermanent of realms--which holds steady while the rest of the culture changes around it. This seems an inversion of most history where some major change occurs suddenly in front of the backdrop of the day's culture. But baseball's history is still marked by a succession of interesting characters, talented athletes and canny entrepreneurs. And these men were products of the changing world. We see them burst onto the scene, age and depart, their lives and accomplishments condensed like a movie trailer.



There is a good photographic record of Babe Ruth's whole career, and the end of his baseball career and the latter half of his life are represented on newsreel footage. So I feel a bit as though I knew the man, though he was in the ground 14 years before I was even born. There's something almost impossibly magnetic to me about the footage of his funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan in 1948.



However we parse it out, the story of baseball makes a lovely point of condensation, a nice microcosm wherein the changes and upheavals through which the rest of society has lived can be marked and digested.

First, I think our society has become much less patient, an artifact of a television-driven culture. We have become uncomfortable with silence and inactivity, and in very few spheres of life do we luxuriate and linger. Baseball's early days find us in a different place. We celebrated an afternoon at the ball field, and we did not rankle at the long pauses and stately pace of the game. One talked to one's neighbor, ruminated about the game in progress. By contrast, we seem today to need constant superficial stimulation (though in fairness I must note that though attendance and viewership have been falling, ballparks still attract thousands of people who pay to watch the very same game). Interestingly, sources at the time of baseball's birth celebrate the fast pace and non-stop action compared with other entertainments of the time. This makes an even stronger case for how our culture has changed in this regard.



People even look different. There are lots of bad teeth--crooked, missing, stained. Hair cuts are dated, some of them never-coming-back-into-fashion dated. The cut of clothing has changed. Even body types are different, from an age before widespread good nutrition and health clubs and regular medical care. People are smaller, leaner. Dirty-faced children in knickers play ball in vacant lots.



There's a great sense of community, of a collective activity in our early baseball craze. The great old photos--older than these here--reveal such a different world. Most everyone in the stands is male. Everyone wears a hat--every single person, no matter the weather. Row after row, in thousands and thousands. (It interests me that something that was absolutely indispensible in 1900--a felt hat--became in the succeeding hundred years optional at first, and now is almost seen as an affectation.) They're all in suits, mostly of a dark color, making for a uniform sea of black. Everyone is wearing a vest (or a "waistcoat"). As the documentary's decades pass, these things change visibly.



There are great images of huge crowds clogging the streets front of newspaper offices and telegraph stations where huge animated billboards were set up for baseball games. These billboards were sometimes in the form of a baseball diamond diagram with moving pieces showing balls and strikes and the progress of runners, or they were a scoreboard displaying baseball's everpresent statistics which changed moment to moment. Sometimes there were announcers up on a scaffolding reading off the information as it came across the wire, a predecessor to the play-by-play of a radio announcer. These monochromatic crowds would stand in the street in the hundreds or thousands, huddled like cattle in a winter barn, and thrill at a baseball game being played a couple states away. During the playoffs, the crowds in New York's Times Square were just like our present New Year's Eve crowds. There's a palpable sense of a whole culture's budding enthusiasm for a new thing, a thing which has turned out to have lasting appeal.

It was into this environment that radio burst in the 1920s, and the recordings of those early broadcasts which are featured in this documentary are really riveting. The background sounds, the great skill of the announcers in describing the surroundings and the play-by-play action, these things made for a rich and three-dimensional experience for a baseball-mad country. I think of all the isolated farm kids huddled by this newfangled contraption, listening to a gigantic cultural happening in a bustling city far away, and of what seeds the whole experience must have planted in their young minds. I spent my early years in a rural community, and the sense of the big city as the place where life was marching proactively forward has never left me. Radio baseball still does this to me.



This only touches the surface, naturally, of what the documentary takes 20 hours to cover. In a way it's like one of those sped-up films that shows the growing of a plant or the assembly of an airplane, but this time it's the birthing of contemporary culture being condensed, a vision of our society filtered through baseball. World wars, Jim Crow laws, the industrial revolution, the radio and television revolution, all these things and many more are reflected back to us from the remarkably steady societal mirror of baseball. In this light the concept of baseball as our national game hits meaningfully home; the cliché is made good when one sees games played between opponents in the Civil War, or played by our enemies in WW2, or when we see the same game played over a century and a half in spite of changes in the audience and the game's participants and in the society that produces them.



If you want to give your enthusiasm for the sport a shot in the arm--or if you want to discover the sport--this is the best possible place to start.