An Essay / Bill Shirley : Grand Old Game Holds Special Place in American Hearts

In this sports-crazed land of ours, two games have seized the imagination of the masses as no others have.

To millions of Americans, baseball and football are more than mere games; they are religions. Their appeal is to all regions and classes, urban and rural, black and white, rich and poor, the lettered and the unlettered.

More people probably play tennis or golf, bowl or jog, but no other games command the overwhelming attention of the public as baseball and football. They are the American sports. Americans invented them, and play them better than anybody else.

Americans invented basketball, too, of course, and play it better than anybody else, but it does not have the mass appeal, tradition and television ratings of football and baseball.

Football wins most popularity contests today, but if there is truly a national game, it is baseball. Not even football can match its tradition or its appeal to the young and entire families. Baseball’s roots are buried deep in the lives of most Americans. It truly is the grand old game.

Its World Series is better theater and usually more exciting than football’s premier event, the Super Bowl, which is often dull. Its statistics are more meaningful, its legends more colorful. What other American sport can match such storied teams as its Murderers’ Row, Hitless Wonders, Gas House Gang and Miracle Braves?

Baseball is Babe Ruth calling his shot before hitting that home run against the Cubs in the World Series, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, a notorious boozer, staggering to the mound for the Cardinals to strike out the Yankees’ Tony Lazzeri. Historians have disputed both stories, but the legends live on.

Baseball is Ty Cobb sharpening his spikes and cutting down infielders. It is the Big Train, Larrupin’ Lou, the Sultan of Swat, the Flying Dutchman, Shoeless Joe, Merkle’s boner, Three-Fingered Brown, the Black Sox scandal, the spitter, Joltin’ Joe, Carl Hubbell striking out Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons and Joe Cronin in succession, the Fordham Flash, Matty’s fadeaway, Louisville Sluggers, the Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium, the Say Hey Kid and the Splendid Splinter.

Baseball has been around for nearly 150 years. It began, probably, as a loose copy of the English games of cricket or rounders, or both. Legend has it that it was invented by Capt. Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N. Y., in 1839, but not many historians believe that. A young New York bank teller named Alexander J. Cartwright probably did more than anybody to shape the game into its present form.

Cartwright organized the first professional team, the New York Knickerbockers, in 1845 after determining that there should be nine men on a side, four bases 90 feet apart on a diamond-shaped field, three outs to an inning and three strikes to an out. By his rules, an infielder could no longer put out a baserunner by hitting him with a thrown ball. You can see how little the game has changed.

Soldiers on both sides reportedly played the game during the Civil War, swinging sticks and fence planks at homemade baseballs.

The first professional baseball league was formed more than 40 years before George Halas and friends organized one for football. College football was not played until late in the 19th Century, long after baseball was established on the American consciousness. Professional football and basketball, in fact, did not become serious rivals of baseball until the 1950s.

Meanwhile, baseball had been rhapsodized over by poets, playwrights and songwriters, and made the subject of novels, movies and comic strips. “Take Me Out to The Ballgame” and “Casey at The Bat” are American classics. A double play combination for the Chicago Cubs inspired Franklin P. Adams to write:

“These are the saddest of possible words: “Tinker to Evers to Chance. “Trio of bear Cubs, and fleeter than birds, “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” Despite its history of resisting change and choosing incompetent commissioners, baseball has survived wars, depressions, scandals, outlaw leagues, strikes and bungling, fractious owners. When Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis asked President Roosevelt at the outset of World War II if baseball should shut down, Roosevelt wired back: “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.”

Happily, in these first warm days of spring, the game is back on the sports pages, a healthier sport than ever. That’s good news for the country and those sports fans who are weary of tall men in short pants dunking basketballs, or playing keep-away with one.

Baseball news, in fact, is reported by sportswriters virtually every day of the year for readers who have a seemingly insatiable appetite for gossip, trivia and statistics. Probably no industry receives as much free publicity. Stories on the Dodgers and Angels and other teams appear in The Times every day once spring training begins in late February, even when there really isn’t any news worth reporting.

A recent two-day sampling of Times headlines:

“Dusty Baker Is Starting to Feel Unappreciated Again.”

“Bream Seems to Be Steadily Working His Way Into Lasorda’s Plans.”

“Lynn Seems to Be at Home With Orioles.”

“Zahn Will Go as Far as Left Knee Takes Him.”

“Castillo Makes Strong Bid for Job with Former Club.”

“Brunansky Is Swinging Hot Bat.”

“Re-Armed Don Aase Ready to Help the Orioles.”

Once upon a time, when professional football was a minor sport and nobody talked much about basketball, fans passed winters in front of wood-stoves, reading of and debating such trivia. No other sport has had a “Hot Stove League.”

Ernest Howard Crosby, a 19th Century New York social reformer, was a baseball fan. He was said to have observed once that he found more “genuine religion at the baseball match than I do at my father’s church on Fifth Avenue.”

Crosby probably was exaggerating, but Michael Novak, author, scholar, professor of religion and sports fan, has said he finds the elements of religion visible in baseball.

He listed them as the “dramatic re-enactments of struggles representing life and death, involving moral understanding and development, evoking awe for powers not wholly in an individual’s control, and employing public liturgical figures who stand in for the people as a whole.”

Baseball has also long fascinated novelist James Michener, who wrote this accolade of the game in his “Sports in America”:

“Football is to baseball as checkers is to chess. I would suppose that any thinking man or woman who loves finesse would, after a season of exposure to both games, realize that baseball was the game worthy of closest attention, the one with the most subtle variations, the one that has the capacity to make the viewer hold his breath with sheer joy.”

The game that pleases such sophisticated fans as Michener and Novak is an intricate, curious match of strategy and skill. Yet it thrives on statistics and the mysticism of numbers probably more than any other American sport. Remarkably, an entire game can easily be recorded on a scorecard by a code of numbers and letters and reviewed at one’s leisure.

Keeping score is such a simple task that most fans can do it. If they don’t know the proper symbols, they invent their own to record outs, hits, runs and errors. An out on a fly ball to center can be scored simply as an 8, the 8 designating the fielder. An out recorded at first base on a ground ball to the shortstop is reduced to 6-3. A strikeout is a K. Ever see anybody keeping score at a football or basketball game?

In the good old days, a summer afternoon at the baseball park was a pleasant diversion. It has been less pleasant for many fans since Larry MacPhail installed lights at Cincinnati 50 years ago, but even a night game is still an attractive bargain for a sports-minded family.

Baseball is less brutal than football, less frenzied than basketball. A game is timeless. There’s no clock to limit play as there is in football and basketball. There is no freezing of the ball, no eating up the clock, no stalling to protect a lead. Teams have played for more than 20 innings and longer than seven hours. The cliche, “a game is never over until the last out,” still holds.

With a clock running, it is often impossible for a football or basketball team losing by a big score to catch up. But in a baseball game, the home fans always have hope.

William Saroyan once observed, “With a score of 6 to 0, two outs, two strikes, nobody on, only an average batter at bat, bottom of the ninth, it is still possible, and sometimes necessary, to believe that something can still happen--for the simple reason that it has happened before and very probably will again. And when it does, won’t that be the day.”

Baseball is considered a team game but the action always focuses on an individual. The pitcher catches the eye first, then the batter, then the fielder, then the runner.

One of the most exciting plays in American sports is the direct confrontation between a pitcher and batter, a duel Steve Garvey calls a game within a game. What a memorable moment it must have been when Babe Ruth dug in against Walter Johnson with a game on the line. And picture Bob Feller rearing back and pitching against Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio.

“Whereas the batter goes to the plate in total solitude, a football player is (so to speak) part of a committee,” Novak once said.

To my wife, an astute observer of sports, baseball is “a nice, quiet game for the family.”

Michener wrote that it is a “quieter game than football, yet it has the capacity to excite and astound.”

My fascination with the game began in the late 1920s when, as a boy in Little Rock, Ark., I watched Southern Assn. games from the “Knot-Hole Gang” bleachers out near the right-field fence. I rode a streetcar to the park for six cents, and carried my own jug of water.

When the team went on the road, I followed re-creations of the games on radio, and when atmospheric conditions were favorable, I tuned my Atwater-Kent to Cardinal games on St. Louis station KMOX.

I read every word and statistic in The Sporting News, which was then a full-size newspaper uncluttered by ads and news of other sports. Early on summer evenings, I listened to Fred Waring’s radio show to hear announcer--and later actor--Paul Douglas give the major league baseball scores.

I was a typical kid. I played catch and pepper and shagged fly balls with pals for hours. Alone, I threw a battered ball wrapped in black friction tape against concrete steps, catching it on the rebound and pretending I was Rogers Hornsby, Charlie Gehringer, Lou Gehrig or Al Simmons.

Vacant lots and gravel streets in my neighborhood were turned into diamonds. Our bases were either rocks or empty rice sacks filled with dirt. Our bats usually had been broken, nailed back into one piece and taped. If you owned a ball you got to pitch.

There was no Little League for parents to mess up. Our leagues were organized by the Boys Club and our games supervised by a WPA employee, who was also the umpire. Our only spectators were inmates from the Arkansas State Hospital for Nervous Diseases, which owned the diamond. Boys from each neighborhood formed teams without parental interference. There is no record that we were disadvantaged or did not have fun.

Barnstorming major league teams on the way home from spring training often played in Little Rock, giving me a chance to see Ruth and Gehrig and a rookie pitcher named Feller. My father took me to Hot Springs to watch such stars as Hornsby, Simmons and Dizzy Dean work out. They sweated off weight in the spa’s famous baths before going to Florida for spring training.

Simmons was my favorite player, and I was partial to Connie Mack’s great Philadelphia teams of 1929, 1930 and 1931, probably because Simmons answered a letter I wrote him and sent me an autographed picture. No team, including the Yankee Murderers’ Row of 1927 has ever had four such stars as Simmons, Foxx, Mickey Cochrane and Lefty Grove in the lineup at the same time.

There is an inexcusable tendency for a fan of my vintage to carry on about the past, but in an essay on baseball there is some reason for it. Football and basketball players undeniably are more skillful today, but baseball players don’t seem to have improved. They play mediocre defense. Batters hit less often, strike out more frequently and left-handers can’t hit left-handers. Pitchers win fewer games and rarely complete nine innings.

Of all the men who have played the game, one has overshadowed all the others. George Herman (Babe) Ruth was a remarkable performer, even though, as Novak has observed, he had “the shape of a pear on spindles.”

As a pitcher in 1917, he won 24 games and lost 13, completing 35 of his 38 starts. He also had records of 18-8 and 23-12, and once pitched 29 scoreless innings in the World Series.

As an outfielder in 1921, he hit 59 home runs, 16 triples, 44 doubles, scored 177 runs, drove in 177 and batted .378. In 1927, he hit 60 home runs, drove in 164 runs and batted .356. His career average was .342.

Virtually every player had a nickname in Ruth’s time. Babe’s was one of the least colorful. Walter Johnson was the Big Train. Jerome Herman (or Jay Hanna) Dean was Dizzy; Vernon Gomez was Goofy. Some others were Noodles, Dummy, Piano Legs, Bones, Ginger, Klondike, Cozy, Snags, Iron Man, Snake, Socks, Mule, Boileryard, Daffy, Big Six and the Wild Horse of the Osage. Every left-handed pitcher was Lefty.

Probably the most colorful team of all time was the 1934 Cardinals, a raucous, brawling bunch managed by Frankie Frisch, the Fordham Flash, and known as the Gas House Gang. The roster included Dizzy and Daffy Dean, Pepper Martin, Ripper Collins, The Lip Durocher and Ducky Medwick. They fought opponents, umpires and each other.

Dean was the Yogi Berra of his day. “They X-rayed my head and didn’t find anything,” he once said after being hit by a thrown ball. Later, as a broadcaster, he entertained the nation with such phrases as, “He slud into third base.”

Baseball has contributed colorfully to the language. Players choke when they become too nervous or frightened to cope with a difficult situation. A minor or semipro league, or conduct below major league standards of dignity or quality, are bush.

Fixed forever in our speech are duster, bullpen, on deck, rhubarb, seventh-inning stretch, slugger, southpaw, squeeze play, stuff, hot corner, beanball, blooper, bobble, gopher ball and Texas Leaguer.

In his book, Baseball America, Donald Honig reported that early-day players, as a group, were considered crude and were not favorably accepted. They gambled, drank and were, well, rowdy. Hotels did not want their business.

One-third of the players in the 1890s were Irish, men on the bottom of the social ladder looking for a way up, Honig said. Today, players are more socially acceptable, although some are on booze or drugs and some are rowdy.

In baseball, Novak has noticed, “There is the inevitability of defeat. Teams rarely win 100 of 162 games, yet almost all win at least a third of the time.”

Reporters, limited either by time, space or a lack of perception, do not describe for their readers all the exciting plays in a game. Defensive gems by gifted fielders often go unreported.

How does one adequately describe the exquisite timing of a double play? Or a throw relayed from the outfield to nail a runner trying to take an extra base?

A diving catch of a ground ball followed by a sharp throw that prevents a runner from taking an extra base may make a difference in a team winning or losing, yet it is a play that often is not reported and it will not show in the box score. Michener calls such plays, “one of the unforgettable pleasures of sports.”

Baseball has not been without flaws. It took 100 years for baseball to discard racism and allow a black into the major leagues for the first time in 1947. As good as the first one, Jackie Robinson, was, such black stars as Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige may have been better. Paige finally got to play in 1948, when he was well into his 40s.

What’s so great about throwing or catching a ball, some may wonder? Jugglers in a Russian circus probably can do it better, can’t they? In fact, many sports fans find baseball tedious and boring and, in truth, for those who covet violence in their games, it probably seems that way.

The only hope for such nonbelievers, Novak suggests, “is prayer and fasting.”