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I spotted the latest exercise in Sunday’s New York Times. “Is the Game Over?—How baseball lost its place in American culture” announced the headline to the lead article in the Sunday Review section. The author, Jonathan Mahler, acknowledges up front that he’s making a tricky case, as Major League Baseball profits, over the past 20 years, “have grown from roughly $1 billion to nearly $8 billion.” He goes on, “The game, in other words, has never been healthier. So why does it feel so irrelevant?”
Barzun went on to say some fancy things about baseball. For instance: “Baseball is Greek in being national, heroic, and broken up in the rivalries of city-states. How sad that Europe knows nothing like it!” I would say that soccer fans in Manchester, Barcelona, and most other major European cities have a very good idea of what Barzun was talking about, but maybe back then it was different. At any rate, Mahler, though he doesn’t mention Barzun, tries to make a similar point. “Before the 1950s, baseball had 16 franchises in 10 cities, not one of them west or south of St. Louis,” he writes. But expansion erased those frontiers. “You might think that spreading baseball across the country would be good for the game, and in some ways it was: more franchises equaled more spectators,” Mahler reasons. “In the process, though, a lot of teams wound up in cities without deep roots in the game.”
So Mahler’s case against baseball boils down to culture and emotion. America has given its heart to faster, more rough-and-tumble sports like—well, like football of course. But perhaps it was ever thus! He allows: “It’s fair to wonder how golden baseball’s golden age really was—and how much our perception of that era is just a function of baby-boomer nostalgia. After all, when Roger Maris hit his 61st home run on Oct. 1, 1961, Yankee Stadium wasn’t even half full.”
Is this a joke? Do the fans in blue Cubs T-shirts I see loping along Irving Park Road after games—drunken revelers, balmy sweethearts, dads with kids on their shoulders—realize what elitists they are? Is Mahler’s point that the World Series doesn’t get big numbers on TV these days, but you know what!—neither does modern dance?
