baseball

occupation / innovator as

diplomat

ambassador

is essential to any understanding of American is jacques barzun's famous assertion which really amounts to little more than the tautology that: Baseball is American because America is baseball because baseball is American.

If you want to understand America, goes the saying by Jacques Barzun, you had better learn baseball. Barzun's legendary assertion is the most cherished comment on the game for American baseball writers, the ratification of their interests by a genuine Continental intellectual. The statement is a curious tautology, however. It is really nothing more than a slogan that tries to make the listener feel good about both baseball and America. How would one test Barzun's assertion' How ''American' is baseball' To answer that, one would have to define America, but here one is perilously close to starting with attributes like mom and apple pie, and . . . baseball. Baseball is American because America is baseball because baseball is American.

is ideologically American in that, of all American sports it most offers and mythologizes the possibility and attainability of perfection, embodied in the truly perfect game (27 up and 27 down).

baseball is the acme of regulation-perfection-attainable. Although one could conceive of a shutout in basketball, or a football game where the opponent does not gain a single yard, only baseball allows for the truly perfect game (twenty-seven up and twenty-seven down) or for smaller icons of perfection such as the triple play (all the outs of an inning on one ball in play). In baseball fiction the perfect game and the triple play occur far more frequently than they do in reality.

is the most perfectly meritocratic social organization in modern America where better players rise higher in the organization, become more famous, and make more money.

If baseball is, as [Timothy] Morris argues, 'the most perfectly meritocratic social organization in modern America,' where 'better players rise higher in the organization, become more famous, and make more money' . ..

Timothy MorrisThinkers

Timothy Morris