Allow us, for a moment, to stretch the boundaries of cause and effect. Of reason and assumption. Of proof and conjecture.
Allow us to view the nation’s political landscape, to witness the bickering and the thuggery and the meanness, and to draw a conclusion that likely would not stand up to academic scrutiny: It’s football’s fault.
Yes, this is merely a working theory. But it was sparked last week with the opening of baseball season, a rite that inevitably is accompanied by glowing, eloquent, verbose tributes to the majesty that is the erstwhile National Pastime. Make no mistake, football has supplanted baseball as the National Pastime — well, football and reality TV. But baseball retains a particularly poetic place in America’s psyche.
One of the game’s most prominent wordsmiths is Washington Post columnist George Will, who long has had an unofficial second career as baseball’s poet laureate. And it was a video from Will and Prager University that led to this pondering of the sport’s role in American politics.
In the video, Will highlights the parallels between baseball and democracy, pointing out items such as, “First, democracy celebrates ordinary people. Of course, baseball players have extraordinary talents. But most players resemble ordinary people.” And, “Today, baseball is a career open to talented people from around the world. About 20 percent of major leaguers are from outside North America. This is because in baseball the only race that matters is the race to the base.” And, “Baseball generates an enormous, constantly enriched sediment of numbers. And these numbers make baseball a game that embraces what a free society requires — personal accountability.”
There is more, of course. And Will is hardly the first person to draw a connection between American democracy and the egalitarian meritocracy that is baseball.
As historian Jacques Barzun once said: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”
As legendary announcer Ernie Harwell once said: “In baseball, democracy shines its clearest.”
And as the James Earl Jones character preached in “Field of Dreams”: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.” A Sermon on the Mound, if you will.
And so, as we ponder a presidential contest that has given rise to the indefensible Donald Trump and the insufferable Ted Cruz, as we consider a race in which five candidates remain and only John Kasich appears reasonable, mature, trustworthy, and presidential, it is impossible to not ask, “How in the world did we get to this point?” The answer: It’s football’s fault.
Making a connection
You see, football has been America’s most popular sport since sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. It’s my favorite sport. And yet it is difficult argue with Will’s frequent critique of the game: “Football combines the two worst things about America. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”
Football is a sport of aggression and anger and the imposition of will through brute force with little regard to thought or compromise. Kind of like a Donald Trump rally, reflecting in one small way how politics has embraced the ethos of a sport that has come to symbolize our national condition.
But baseball? Baseball evokes pastoral images of sunshine and patience and endless possibilities. It is a game that combines individual achievement with necessary teamwork. It is a game of hope, one in which every action is measured and batters who fail 70 percent of the time still are considered successful.
Yes, another baseball season has arrived, providing a contrast between the renewal of spring and the desperate disappointment provided by our political landscape. But, like we said, that’s just a theory.
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