By George, This Book Beats All

I always thought I had this understanding with political pundit George Will. He would take care of the day-to-day stuff, such as what to do about Lithuania, how to handle Kadafi, who should be President. You know, the minutiae.

I, on the other hand, would handle the really important matters of our time, such as how to pitch to Tony Gwynn with men on, whom to start in the All-Star game, whether the designated hitter is good or bad for baseball.

I would leave the running of the world to him. I had more pressing responsibilities--running the American or National League.

I figured he was busy enough telling George Bush what to do next. I had the tougher assignment--telling George Steinbrenner.

So, you can imagine my chagrin the other day when I picked up a book by Will and found he had left the posh areas of journalism--the relative inconsequentialities of Mideast policy, the European Economic Community, what to do about Noriega--and ventured into the treacherous shoals of infield fly rules, bunt signs, pickoff plays, back-door sliders and double steals.

The title of the book was “Men At Work,” so I knew right away it wasn’t about Washington, D.C. What I didn’t bargain for was that George would presume to instruct me in the nuances of a game that I’ve been covering, man and boy, since--well, since Brooklyn was still in the league, the Braves were in Boston, the Athletics in Philadelphia and the Orioles were the St. Louis Browns.

I think the only fair thing now is for me to write a book analyzing the State Department’s policy in Latin America which, come to think of it, is not too different from the St. Louis Browns’ at that.

You would not expect George Will to be handling any subject sub-Arnold Toynbee and a book by him subtitled “The Craft Of Baseball” would be a form of literary slumming.

Not to George Will. To George Will, baseball is an American institution as lofty as the Supreme Court, State Department or Capitol Hill. Gibbon never put more devotion, concentration and attention to construction in “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” than George puts into his examination of the grand old game.

“I feel as if my life will be downhill from here,” he notes. “It was the hardest work I’ve ever done. There was always more to say. You know, W.H. Auden once said that no poem is ever finished. It is abandoned. That’s the way I felt about this book. I had to yield it up to the publisher, but I made changes in it right through the first press run.”

Will feels his lifelong love affair with baseball is requited. “I wrote the book as a kind of thank you letter to baseball,” he explains. “A thank you for what it has meant to me and my family. To me, baseball is a gift. A legacy. I see baseball as a realm of excellence, a pool of craftsmanship in an ocean of shoddiness.”

Adds Will: “If America made its automobiles with the same care and precision baseball brings to its craft, the streets of downtown Tokyo would be jammed with Fords and Chevys.”

George’s book is not for the casual fan. It delves into the clockwork of baseball. It is a surprising book to a fan used to a chronicle of the frivolities of our national pastime. It lingers lovingly on the inner game, the microchips, if you will. If you want to know what Bo Jackson is really like, or what Jose Canseco had for breakfast, or is driving these days, this book is not for you. If you want to know how to pitch to Bo or Jose or when to pitch to them, George brings you the answers of experts.

It is not an ivory-tower book. George crisscrossed America’s locker rooms in search of baseball’s secrets.

George Will has been known to come down hard on the striped-pants diplomats of Foggy Bottom, but the pinstripes of baseball draw his unbounded respect.

He defends the game as eloquently as any man who ever collected a bubble-gum card or caught a foul ball. So far as George is concerned, the national anthem should be “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He doesn’t care if he never gets back, either.

Will reserves his scorn for those who find the game dull: “Red Smith put it best. He said baseball is a dull game only to dull people.”

Says Will: “People speak of the game as ‘unhurried’ or ‘leisurely.’ That’s silly. There’s something going on every minute. There’s barely enough time between pitches for all the thinking that’s going on. Baseball action involves blazing speeds and fractions of seconds. The pace of the action is relentless. Folks from the serious quarterlies like to say baseball ‘has the pace of America’s pastoral past.’ This is nonsense on stilts. Any late 20th-Century academic who thinks a 19th-Century farmer’s day was a leisurely and unhurried stroll from sunup to sundown needs a reality transplant.”

A born-and-bred Cub fan, Will knows what makes a true baseball fan: suffering. The book was more than a labor of love. It was an effort to know the game better. “I don’t write to tell what I know. I write to find out what I know.”

What he has found out he knows about baseball is considerable. The book is replete with nuggets of facts more often overlooked in the grand scheme of things. For instance, did you know that Babe Ruth, no less, stole home 10 times in his career, Ty Cobb stole home 45 times, while the all-time base-stealing champion, Lou Brock, never stole home? Rickey Henderson, has stolen home only four times and not once since 1982.

Why? Will provides the answer: with the renaissance of base-stealing, with the artificial surfaces, pitchers don’t take a windup with a man on third anymore.

When Will wants to find out why there are no more .400 hitters, he goes to the record book to find out how many hits Cobb got on his fourth and fifth times at bat. (A lot.) Reason: relief pitchers were not in vogue in those days. A reliever was just a mop-up sore-armed ex-starter or a junk-throwing kid without an “out” pitch, not the formidable specialists of today.

But the significant thing is that our important thinkers have finally come to the realization the important concern of our day is not the situation in Berlin or cabinet meetings in Vilnius, it’s can the Cubs ever win the pennant with Don Zimmer?

If the master historians of our day are going to invade our territory, it’s only fair play for us to move into the political arena and tackle comparative issues such as, can George Bush go to his left? Can Dan Quayle bat cleanup? Is James Baker a sucker for Reds’ pitching? Frankly, from what I can see, George, America needs more power in the lineup. We’ve become a bunch of Punch-and-Judy hitters, we need the big inning.