Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Read Online Free

“cash out” Steve’s suggestion in an opening novella, that I would ever try to discourse (at any length or seriousness) about why the game continues to hold me so tight after more than half a century of serious and continuous rooting. After all, one loves what one loves, and unless the activity causes clear and intrinsic harm to others, no explicit defense need be provided for following one’s bliss.
    Yet I have developed personal answers to the two major questions so often thrown at academics and other professional intellectuals as challenges to their baseball commitments, and my responses might be worth sharing, especially since discussion on these issues never seems to abate. First, why are so many American intellectuals so serious about their baseball commitments? Or (to put the matter more specifically, as this form of inquiry so often does), why has baseball alone among major American sports, with boxing as the only other possible contender, generated so much writing of not insubstantial literary quality? Second, does this favoritism toward baseball arise in any way from the plethora of common claims about baseball’s imitation of the central rhythms and patterns of our lives? Does life imitate the World Series in any way that might transcend lame and meaningless metaphor? Does time begin on opening day in any sense that might help us, at least by analogy, to accept the loud evenings of July 4 or the silly costumes of neighborhood kids on October 31?
    I have devised, over the years, a definite way of treating general questions of this sort, including these two particular inquiries—and though my resolutions satisfy me both rationally and emotionally, I cannot claim for them any abiding status as provable or general truths. These resolutions do, however, set a groundwork for permitting me to begin this baseball book with an autobiographical rationale.
    I have written two general books ( Wonderful Life , 1989, and Full House , 1996) dedicated to viewing the history of life as a sensible and interpretable unfolding of one actual pattern among the countless alternative (and equally sensible) scenarios that just didn’t happen to attain the privilege of empirical realization. We live in a basically unpredictable world, featuring histories dominated by contingency—that is, actual patterns that make good sense and become subject to interesting and sensible explanation once they unfold as they did, but that could have proceeded along innumerable alternative routes that would have yielded just as sensible a history, but that did not gain the good fortune of actual occurrence.
    Thus, if it be true that intellectually inclined American sports fans tend to enjoy and follow baseball at a higher frequency than other popular national sports, I don’t for a moment attribute such favoritism to any inherent property of the game itself. Baseball became America’s pastime for a complex set of reasons, explored throughout this book, but the game is not intrinsically more difficult or inherently harder to fathom than any other major sport—and I therefore reject the common assumption that strong rootership among intellectuals can be related in any important way to the nature of the activity itself.
    Rather, I would argue that sports plays an important role in the lives of many people (either by direct participation or by following it as a fan), and that intellectuals roughly match the norms of any other group in their predisposition to such avocational interests. Thus, if baseball has captured the serious attention of many scholarly fans, I would seek no special cause beyond the general appeal of the game among all aficionados of sport. By this argument, baseball holds its favored place as a general phenomenon in the history of American sport, and not because the game holds any special or intrinsic appeal to the intellectually minded fans.
    As I argue within this volume, modern baseball coagulated from a variety of