A Model Institution for All of Us
I delivered this talk on Saturday, via Zoom, to friends of Beattie-Powers Place — just up the street from my home in Catskill — and baseball. The brief essay was followed by a lively Q and A on subjects far and wide, yet over the plate.
For this year’s topic I am indebted to my wife, not much of a fan, who asked, in all innocence, whether the popularity of the quadrennial World Baseball Classic might one day surpass that of soccer’s World Cup. We’ll get to that a bit later, so let’s start with how baseball became a beacon to all of America and, like the Statue of Liberty, the world.
Once regarded as the most resistant to change of our major sports, baseball has moved from the national pastime toward, MLB hopes, the international pastime. Slowly since the Brooklyn Dodgers welcomed Jackie Robinson in 1947, Baseball has made good on its 19th-century brainstorm that its game was so good that it ought to be shared with everyone and, in time, adopted by them.
Two teams of baseballists went to England in midsummer of 1874 — “bringing the baby back home, all grown up” — and another tour spanned the globe in the off season between 1888 and 1889. Other notable overseas adventures took all-stars to Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. And of course, all the while, segregated Black baseball was played in many Hispanic nations.
In this past hot-stove-league season, chatter has centered on such names as Ohtani, Soto, Yamamoto, and Acuña, while Organized Baseball continues to shed light upon even the dark corners of its history, notably the former exclusion of Black and Asian players. As a point of pride, I offer that I have long been involved with MLB’s recognition of the Negro Leagues of 1920–1948 as equivalent major leagues, with inclusion of those records in the official database.
International MLB games began in 1996, when the Mets and Padres traveled to play a three-game series in Monterrey, Mexico. In 2024 we will play regular-season games in Seoul, in London, in Mexico City, and — on and around Juneteenth, in special recognition of the Negro Leagues — Birmingham, Alabama, where Willie Mays began his career. Also, the Red Sox will square off against the Rays in a spring training series in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, which since Ozzie Virgil in 1956 has sent 887 additional players into MLB’s ranks.
This is an amazing total, although it’s worth highlighting, too, the influx of 76 players from the Nippon Professional Baseball League since the debut of Masanori Murakami in 1964. Last year, Shohei Ohtani won the Most Valuable Player Award in the American League while inspiring comparisons with Babe Ruth. The National League’s MVP was Ronald Acuña, Jr., born in Venezuela.
In its dedication to present the best quality of play, MLB has welcomed players from more than 50 nations. Before I was born in 1947, matters of race, creed, national origin, ethnicity, and gender got in the way of fielding the very best. Today there are no rules, overt or covert, barring anyone from taking part. Gender seems to be the last frontier, and I hope that I live long enough to see a woman play in Major League Baseball.
Drawing from ever wider pools of talent, our game has seen an advance in the average level of skill in each generation that is undeniable, even if it may be hard to pinpoint without the use of advanced statistics. Here is not the place for that, so consider this old-timer’s contention that fielding plays were visible every day last year that were not made at any time in the 1950s. Today’s game is better because its players are better.
As a game emphasizing individual accomplishment within the context of unified effort, baseball offers a fine model of how one might become part of the team … how an outsider might be an American. To the tempest-tost of Europe, like me — born to Holocaust survivors in a Displaced Persons camp in Occupied Germany — baseball seemed fair: effort would be rewarded no matter where you came from, or the color of your skin.
Baseball was not exactly a melting pot, that model of American inclusion in which differences of birth or origin might merge and then disappear. Baseball accepted nominal outsiders as they were — Jews did not have to be Christians, or Blacks to be White.
Although the baseball playing population of African Americans in the major leagues has diminished from a high of, in some published estimates, 28 percent in the late 1960s — actually it peaked near 20 percent in 1975 — to perhaps 8 percent today, more people of color play the game in the major leagues than have ever done so before. If you count all dark-skinned people — whatever their nation of origin — the number in Organized Baseball is nearing 40 percent today, and the upward trend is inexorable. America is a nation of nations, and for me and millions of others, baseball is its sport of choice.
And yet … fútbol (not the NFL’s game) is the world’s game. Requiring no equipment beyond the ball, it was played before there were bats or bases or wickets. Fútbol is anciently territorial, tends to be low-scoring, and its nuances are appreciated by millions of players, coaches, and fans, if not by me.
In the 18th century baseball was played in England by young people of both sexes, and the ball was struck with the hand. It was a stop-action sport, even once the bat came into play — unlike fútbol, not a continuous one. Like cricket, this made it possible to keep track of events … and bets over minute aspects of play.
The orderliness of baseball, when added to its alacrity when compared with cricket, has appealed to a range of nations in which soccer is also played. Every four years or so, league play in baseball separates into national teams in the World Baseball Classic; patriotism swells, as it does for the World Cup or the quadrennial Olympics, even if the competitive quality of play is diminished.
So, to answer The Lovely Missuz: “Will the World Baseball Classic one day grip fans the way that the World Cup does?” No, and more’s the pity.
The World of Baseball was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.