America’s Pastime on Global Stage

When you talk of the greatest baseball teams in the game’s history, the conversation gets around pretty quickly to the 1927 Yankees, the 1934 Gashouse Gang in St. Louis, the 1961 Mantle-Maris Yankees, the Jackie Robinson-Roy Campanella-Duke Snider-Gil Hodges Dodgers, the 1929 Philadelphia Athletics of Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, Lefty Grove, Mule Haas and Jimmy Dykes.

What about the 1984 U.S. Olympic team?

You think John McGraw or Connie Mack ever had a better lineup than these guys? 1, Will Clark; 2, Mark McGwire; 3, Barry Larkin; 4, Cory Snyder; 5, Chris Gwynn; 6, B.J. Surhoff; 7, Oddibe McDowell. Could you make a pennant run with those guys on your side? That’s half an all-star team.

You know something? They lost. Japan beat them in the final.

What this illustrates, mostly, is the growth of baseball around the world.

Not too long ago the game was losing ground, even in this country. Pro football was pushing it to the ledge on all sides. Pro basketball was coming fast.

It was becoming as quaint as cricket. A kind of acquired-taste sport. It was considered too slow, too intellectual, too sedate for the violent States of America. Too contemplative for an action-hungry audience of Rambos.

No one is quite sure how baseball scrambled back into high public favor. Maybe its conservative hue matched the temper of the times.

But one of the ways it moved to keep its image alive was in the foreign field. Baseball believes in the capitalist maxim, expand or die.

Against all odds, it pursued a dream of making the game a global sport. Not the major leagues. They weren’t even sure they wanted to move the game west of the Mississippi River even when the rest of the country was trending that way.

No, it was a whole bunch of amateur sportsmen, led by a country college president, Bob Smith, who formed something called the International Baseball Assn., which was the surviving umbrella group of a series of warring factions who had ministered the game--poorly--since the ‘40s.

The IBA, in conjunction with various friends of baseball, encouraged and abetted the pockets of the game that had sprung up in places such as the Netherlands and England and Italy.

They lobbied to put the game in the Olympics.

Impossible, they were told. In the first place, the International Olympic Committee was trying to eliminate team sports from the quadrennial competition. Too much bad feeling in team sports--in the stands and on the field.

In the second place, baseball was held to be a uniquely indigenous American sport, incomprehensible to other parts of the world. Like a wool suit, it didn’t travel well.

The baseball people persisted. Baseball, they argued, was wholly suited to the Olympic ideal. It was a graceful, detached sport. It didn’t have the brutality of American football, the confrontations of international soccer and certainly not the homicidal aspects of prizefighting. It was really a series of solo performances, an opera, not a gang war.

Baseball prevailed. The IOC relented--to the extent that it allowed baseball in the lists as a “demonstration” sport at the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Baseball had been a demonstration sport before--at the ’64 Olympics, for instance, when Japan, as the host country, could put in a sport of its choosing as a medal sport (it chose judo) and a demonstration sport (it chose baseball).

But when baseball was offered as a demonstration sport at the Los Angeles Olympics, it was implicit that it was not only on trial as a sport but as a public attraction.

Rod Dedeaux, whose USC teams had won 11 national collegiate championships--making him the Knute Rockne of the rah-rah game--was the coach of USA-84.

Rod was used to a benchful of all-stars and the art of publicizing them, but the crowd swarms at Dodger Stadium for the Olympic baseball surprised even such an old hard-core optimist. The daily average was 48,400 for eight successive evenings. When the USA played, there were turn-away crowds.

Finally, the great god TV wanted a 10 a.m. final--for prime-time viewing in the East. The sponsors balked. They didn’t want their premier event showcasing before an audience of gaping empty seats.

Baseball won’t be an official Olympic sport till Barcelona next year. But its Olympic status has already impelled nations who never even heard of Babe Ruth or Willie Mays to take up the sport seriously. Even the Soviet Union, in spite of its other troubles, is immersed in the arts and mysteries of the infield-fly rule as we speak.

I bring this up because on Saturday night at Dodger Stadium a very important baseball game will be played. No, not the Dodgers-Atlanta, but the second annual International Baseball Assn.’s All-Star game. It is a contest very important to the global future of the game.

This is an amateur game played by the best such players in the world. There are 22 players representing the Americas (every country from Canada to the Argentine) and designated as the West vs. 22 players representing the other five continents--Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, Antarctica, and designated as the East.

These are fascinating games to watch, such as the old McGraw Giants vs. the Ruth Yankees. It is often the West’s power and home runs vs. the East’s gloves and style. Brute strength vs. finesse. Last year, finesse prevailed when a Chinese, Kuo-Lee Chien Fu from Taipei, Taiwan, was the winning pitcher and a Japanese hitter, Shin-Ichi Sato, who went four for four with three RBIs, was MVP. The East won despite five home runs by the West.

Baseball is alive and well and living all over the world. It’s a gold medal sport, a jet-set sport. It plays in Osaka as well as Dubuque and it’s playing in Minsk and Oomsk.

The day may come when a “World Series” will be just that and not a contest for the championship of New York, as it was so many times; or of the Bay Area, as it was in 1989; or of California, as it was in 1974, ’88 and ‘89; or of Missouri, as it was in 1985. Saturday night’s IBA All-Star game may be another big step in that global direction.