Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Read Online Free Page A

stick-and-ball games, played in England and perhaps in other European nations and imported to this country by early settlers. In essentials, the modern form of the game coalesced by the mid-nineteenth century, having evolved as a truly popular sport, played by farm boys and city slickers alike. By contrast, other currently popular team sports, football and basketball in particular, arose primarily as university activities at a time when only a small percentage of Americans achieved any tertiary education. During my childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, professional football and basketball played short seasons and commanded only quite restricted popular attention. Hockey was, and to a large extent remains, an import from a great land just to our north. (I remember going to a hockey game at Madison Square Garden in the late 1940s and reading in the program that almost every starting player for the New York Rangers was Canadian by nationality.)
    And so, I would argue (at least for myself and, I suspect, for most baseball fans of scholarly bent as well) that a serious personal affection for the sport does not follow, either logically or intrinsically, from any particular inherent property of the game’s uniqueness, but rather needs to be explained in the same basic mode as most autobiographical phenomena—that is, as a contingent circumstance that did not have to unfold as it did, but that makes perfectly good sense as a reasonable outcome among a set of possibilities. In this general sense, and for a large array of excellent reasons, baseball became America’s “signature sport.” I can think of no reason why its appeal should be any less or greater among intellectuals than among any other segment of our population. So I would suspect that the appeal of baseball should, at least as an initial hypothesis, be equally strong among intellectually minded fans as among any other group of Americans.
    I am not, however, either in this introductory piece or in the book in general, trying to advance general explanations of the appeal or success of our national pastime. Thus, I can only speak for myself and from my own life. If any of my personal reasons apply more generally, then we will need the confirming testimony of others. I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I myself am the oldest member of the third cohort, the offspring of immigrant grandparents who passed through Ellis Island—that is, the generation destined for university education and professional careers outside the garment district and the world of small shopkeepers.
    I accepted this circumstance gladly (not that we have much choice in such matters). And I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents. In other words, my affection for baseball does not predictably follow from any generality of my being (in a “laws of nature” type of explanation preferred by scientists like myself), but rather from a set of “accidents” arising from the particulars of my personal life.
    Among these particulars, I would single out two for special emphasis. In fact, I rather suspect that versions of these two factors tend to rank high on the list of contingencies for explaining the inclinations and commitments of many serious fans.
    1. Issues of how, or whether, to assimilate to the language and customs of an adopted land stood in the forefront of consciousness for the millions of immigrants (including all members of both sides of my family) who arrived in America during the great wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some chose to retain native