My early childhood was so steeped in the narrative of baseball that for years I really believed the New York Yankees were a criminal gang. Cal Ripken, Sr., and Cal Ripken, Jr. Moments before the opening pitch of a Giants-Cardinals doubleheader at the Polo Grounds in the summer of 1934, my dad remembers [...]
The ballpark is a paradise into which evil does occasionally come, whenever the Yankees are in town, and this occasionally lends the game a cosmic significance that it would not be improper to call “apocalyptic.” This, in fact, is why that dastardly franchise is a spiritually necessary part of the game in this country; even [...]
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game. That baseball fitly expresses the powers of the nation's mind and body is a merit separate from the glory of being the most active, agile, varied, articulate, and brainy of all group games. People [...]
People have been told that Ty Cobb was a bad man over and over, all their lives. The repetition has felt like evidence... Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, by Charles Leerhsen (464 pages, Simon & Schuster, 2015) Baseball fans familiar with major league records remember Ty Cobb for his .366 lifetime batting average during the dead-ball era. Some [...]
Strong memories—of good times, of challenges met, of shaping experiences commonly shared—are the critical foundation of a good and meaningful life, particularly if you are young. Cherished memories of days passed can spur us on, can exhort us, and can motivate us when our own days seem dark and unendurable. On my desk sits a [...]
More and more Americans, all of them convinced that their side is losing, try to rig the game in their favor. No longer willing to play fair, they want only to win… Born on October 4, 1809 and orphaned at the age of twelve, Robert Cumming Schenck overcame his early difficulties to earn a bachelor’s [...]
"My guiding philosophy was that playing every day for your team was the most honorable thing you could do. They were counting on you. You had a challenge that day, and you came to the ballpark to meet that challenge. You played. That was the highest level you could achieve." —quoted in The Streak: Lou [...]
It's rare that an author billing his work as a piece of revisionism ends up, seemingly unwittingly, reinforcing the traditional interpretation of his subject. But Charles Leerhsen accomplishes this unusual feat in his biography, "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty." Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen (464 pages, Simon & Schuster, 2015) It's rare [...]
"I like your interest in sports ball, chiefest of all base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a [...]
The Yankee franchise represents the worst side of modern baseball and is thus the fittest of villains in the cosmic drama embodied by the game. "They are the 'Dark Side.' They represent all that is evil about baseball, and about our society in general." —Bill Lee, former major league pitcher It was the late winter [...]
When the fielder loves his record More than victory for his team Doubtful chances miss his glances For his caution is extreme. Going after every grounder Means a slip-up here and there, And in terror of an error He will choose the chances fair. Spotless records are enticing In a ball game as in life, [...]
“April is the cruellest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the first lines of The Waste Land, but for baseball fans it is the month of September that marks the time of bitterest disappointment. Whereas April, the opening month of the baseball season, is filled with hope and promise, September is the final full month of the regular [...]
Recently I went to see a baseball game. The New York Yankees were playing the Baltimore Orioles at Yankee Stadium. Usually I am perfectly content to watch sports on TV in the comforts of home and avoid the contingencies of weather and traffic, and the costs of parking, tickets and concessions. I am also sensitive [...]
Baseball is more than just a sport. Its designation as a “pastime” hints at its essential conservatism as an activity borne of a vanished agrarian civilization in which leisure was valued and in which time was to be filled with imaginative human creativity. The beginning of the baseball season is a natural time to reflect [...]