Absolutely. It's the "most literary" of sports for the purposes of this article, but not really. There have been a lot of novels written which are either specifically about sport or where a sport plays a major part.
A few other contenders off the top of my head which have some literary pedigree:
Fishing - Old man and the sea
Hunting - Practically all the rest of Hemingway from what I remember although it's been a while
Grouse Shooting - Lady Chatterly's Lover
Tennis - Lots of David Foster Wallace, but in particular Infinite Jest[1] which is set in large part in an elite tennis academy
Basketball - The Crossover
American football - End Zone (the author of the OP loved Underworld, but DeLillo didn't only write about baseball)
Table Tennis - The mighty waltzer
[1] Which actually has a lot about punting in American Football also
I haven't read any of his work, but wasn't Hemingway famously into bullfighting also?
I found this quote somewhere (haven't checked if it's real) “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
Indeed, in most of the world football (that is, soccer) is by far the most literary sport. I guess in every country, the most popular folk sport is going to be the most literary sport as well.
No one who knows anything about baseball would think that Japan, or Cuba, or Taiwan, or Korea, or anywhere else would have a chance against the MLB champs. Those teams are decent; that's all, and their best players want to move to the MLB.
The point is that outside a small number of countries, very few people even care at all about baseball. The Netherlands doesn't call their national long distance speed skating championships the "world series", even though they, or the occasional Norwegian, usually win the world championships. In the same way, the epithet "world" does not apply to that American league.
Baseball is a game with plenty of time in between action. This time between pitches is available for literary description and flourishes. The feel of the bat, the silent communication between pitcher as and catcher, etc. The tension is built and can be described in individual, well defined, moments. And while it is a team sport, the unit of competition is largely between the pitcher and batter. It’s a one on one conflict at the heart. This is much easier to write about than the chaos of motion inherent in basketball, football, soccer or hockey.
The other part mentioned in the article is the way baseball has entered the lexicon through phases like “playing hardball” or “knocked it out if the park”. I think this is largely due to the pace of the game. Baseball is a sport for radio. I’ve read before (sadly, I can’t remember where), that the popularity of sport is based on how well it works with the dominant media of the day. American football is built for TV. There are set plays, where you can cut to a commercial in between. Football also has a set amount of time. Same with basketball. And both sports have “TV timeouts”.
Baseball came of age during the era of radio. And there is a lot of time to fill for the announcers. It’s no wonder why there are so many phases in the English (US) language tied to baseball… the game can take between 2 and 5 hours. And in that time, there is a time gap in the action after every pitch that must be filled. In a game where the dominant medium is radio, the time must be filled. And because it is radio, it is filled with description is of the game, the sights, sounds, and tension. In sports that “came of age” with TV, you can let the picture tell a lot of the story. With radio, all of the story needs to be told by a person, converted neatly into words and expression. I wouldn’t underestimate the impact radio has had on the “literary” quality of baseball.
>With radio, all of the story needs to be told by a person, converted neatly into words and expression
Funnily enough, in the early days of radio, the presenters were not actually present at the game - they would read the raw numerical progress of the game off a telegraph ticker, and invent all those sights and sounds and tension for the benefit of their listeners.
I've always thought this is due to the fact that baseball has an extremely high skill ceiling, but great overall physical fitness isn't necessary to be good. There aren't really any around anymore, but look at knuckle ballers like Tim Wakefield, his main pitch he only threw like 60mph and just had perfected this really bizarre skill and was relevant. Also so much of it is mental, which is true in any professional sport, but baseball in particular because you have these intense 1-1 mental battles between the pitcher and the batter, or the pitcher and base runner. If you ever read Tony Gwynn write about what goes through his head when he'd steal home base, it's a mental game of chess he's playing with the pitcher and catcher.
I always felt like baseball was intrinsically a better game than football insofar as "football has to constantly tweak the rules, which baseball's stay (mostly) the same." Whether that was ever true, or mattered, is mostly irrelevant for this.
Also, if baseball's not your game and you thought it was always boring, probably skip the rest of this post.
Now, I think both the application of analytics and the general development of human skills (100+ mph fastballs!) have necessitated tweaking the rules in some basic ways. I'm definitely not the first to note this -- MLB has a whole "competition committee" trying to make the games faster and better, so far without success AFAICT. I saw a postseason game this year that lasted 4 hours (for a 9-inning game).
The symptoms are well-known (long, boring games; batters either hit a homer or strike out or walk) and I don't need to list them all. But if you don't make the games faster and let the other 7 players on the defense get involved, nothing else is going to matter. Four hours when a game only took two just 60 years ago is not OK.
Rather than list all the possibilities, I'll just leave it at this: adult softball leagues have to finish the games in 90 minutes (for a 7-inning game). So how do they pull it off?
* The biggest rule change I can see adopting is foul balls. One foul after two strikes is all you get.
* They also start you at 1-1 count, but I think that one will never fly. There's something sacred about 3 strikes. Sorry.
MLB could make it 3 fouls, or 5, or some high number, and lower it over time. Who really enjoys watching a hitter foul off pitch after pitch? Hitters can pretty much do it all they want nowadays, which is what I meant by "the development of human skills." Eventually, if it's a strike you have to swing at it.
Besides wasting huge amounts of time, it makes for way too many pitching changes. MLB's already tried tweaks to reduce those, but they've had pretty much no effect.
Being conservative about the rules was fine for the last 150 years, but I really think those times are over.
> I always felt like baseball was intrinsically a better game than football insofar as "football has to constantly tweak the rules, which baseball's stay (mostly) the same."
Funny, I haven't seen all that much "tweaking"... They've changed the off-side rule a bit over the years, but that's about it, isn't it?
Oh, sorry, now I get it -- you weren't talking about football, but American Hand-Egg, right? :-D
There is a VAST difference between softball (big ball with relatively lower velocity) and baseball (smaller ball with faster velocity). To the point where they're almost not the same game.
Softball is about putting the hit to a particular spot on the field while in baseball hit control really isn't a thing as it's tough enough to nail the ball.
And why would you make fouls benefit the pitcher? Benefiting the hitter is always more exciting. If you really want to speed things up, make fouls benefit the hitter. 4 fouls and you get on base will add quite a bit to the scoring and make ties quite a bit less frequent. It would also make the pitchers have to put stuff where the batter can smack it also increasing score and decreasing likelihood of ties.
I think you are looking at it from the wrong point of view.
Playing baseball starts at a very young age - 4,5,6 years old. At that point the game is, more or less, a subset of the baseball rules. As a player gets older, they add more rules but aren't really modifying the existing ones that you've already learned. It's a really nice system.
At some point, softball branches off. The rules are generally parallel to each other so switching between the two is just a matter of calibrating your mindset and equipment.
You can say that there is a vast difference between them and be right. But you can also say that they are nearly the same and be right.
You're 100% right about this rule benefiting the pitcher. Parallel to this you have to do something to reduce his advantages. Famously, they lowered the mound to do this.
I'm curious how the 61-foot mound in the minor leagues is working out.
Softball is a bigger ball, yes. But it's not lower velocity, at least if you consider the relevant metric: time from pitcher to plate. Because softball also pitches a lot closer to the plate.
Not to be a pill but velocity (in physics and as-used in the preceding posts) is well-defined and includes both time and distance. So if reducing distance results in the same time then, indeed, the velocity must be lower.
If one is talking abstractly about the “velocity” of the game I suppose a point could be made about that.
Poe's Law strikes again. Is this a parody of the way baseball lovers explain their game in the most boring and least comprehensible way possible, or is it a real attempt?
Then I'll leave you with this description of one of my favorite sports, baseball's cousin cricket:
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side thats been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.
When both sides have been in and all the men have out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game!
Baseball is interesting because there's no game clock. The last 2 minutes of a football game can literally take twenty minutes. It's also equally annoying in basketball, with teams just fouling and doing other hijinks in the last couple minutes.
In baseball, you're required to throw pitches, you can't just stand there and stall like a lot of other sports. I think I enjoy F1 for a similar reason.
The focus of the article is American literature. In that context, cricket has no standing. Across the erstwhile british empire, yes, cricket is quite the snooty sport ;)
I find Baseball kind of interesting (in an academic kind of way rather than a want to watch it kind of way) because it is so different from nearly everything else.
Ball games can be split into two categories.
1. Games where you score by putting some moveable object (typically a ball) or objects in some specific places or regions.
2. Baseball and related games.
American football: ball carrier in the end zone. Soccer: ball across the goal plane. Table tennis: ball on ground. Golf: ball in the cup. Basketball: ball through the hoop. Skeet shooting: bullet hitting target. Quidditch: Quaffle through hoop or Snitch to Seeker. Pinball: ball to specific targets.
The game is all about restrictions and requirements for how you get the ball to the scoring place or region.
Contrast this to Baseball. The ball there is not used to score. In fact the team on offense does not even possess the ball.
The ball is a repository of power, like the One Ring or Mjolnir, granting those who posses it special abilities. In Baseball that special ability is a Touch of Death. The player wielding the ball can symbolically kill a base runner by merely touching them.
To score in baseball the team at bat has to get someone to run the bases without the other team using the ball's death powers on the runner. Generally that is done by the player at bat using the bat to knock the ball somewhere far enough away that runners can advance before the team on defense can retrieve that ball and use it to reestablish their control over the base paths.
One batter vs a team.
Every play is easily delineated into singular acts by individual players.
There is no such thing as a “block” or “assist”.
It’s easier to write about. It’s easier to allegorize.
Baseball depends on individual performance more than most team sports, especially for pitching and batting.
One of the things I remember from being a complete baseball illiterate and reading Moneyball was trying to decode the rules and how the game is played based on the descriptions of statistics and surrounding context. I took it as a challenge to not look up a single term (these are obvious terms to someone who knows anything about baseball, mind you, like "get on base", "walk", and "strike out" – but completely foreign to me at the time).
It went fairly well, but I probably still wouldn't be able to actively follow a real game. If I at some point re-read Moneyball, I would probably want to get a primer on how baseball is played first.
If you are an English speaker outside the US, you probably know about a game called cricket. Baseball was very obviously derived from cricket about 200 years ago and has evolved quite a bit since then. But if you know cricket, baseball is not confusing.
Also, a baseball game takes a lot less time than a cricket match.
I'm in Australia, never watched baseball, consider it un-Australian when I see baseball being played on the local cricket ground etc — really no baseball fan. (Although I did play softball briefly as a kid.)
Even so, a couple of years ago I looked at Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al (1916), and couldn't put it down until I'd finished. Extremely engaging writing, very highly recommended.
"The book consists of stories that were written as letters from a professional baseball player, Jack Keefe, to his friend Al Blanchard in their hometown of Bedford, Indiana. ...Jack Keefe is a headstrong, gullible, cheap, naive, self-centred, egotistical and uneducated rube—but he has a strong pitching arm. ...In his barely literate letters home to his friend Al, he details his first experiences in the big leagues, which ends in disaster as he pitches poorly and gets sent back down to the minors again. Later, he is accepted again by the majors where he gains some success as a pitcher, but is taken advantage of by nearly everyone he meets. ...Much of the humour of the book is from Jack's boastful, oblivious nature, and his utter inability to recognize when he is being manipulated or cheated.
...Lardner was a sportswriter who relocated to Chicago in 1907, where he covered the Cubs and White Sox baseball teams for several city newspapers, most notably the Chicago Tribune." "His contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all professed strong admiration for his writing"
Actually, yesendadam, I was in Australia in 1989 and I went to a baseball game near Sydney. Granted, it was in a park and there were no admission charges. It might even have been girls' softball; I don't remember anymore.
What other game offers so much space to think? Football, soccer, basketball and hockey all revolve around a ticking clock and constant action. Baseball’s expanse of time punctuated by decisive moments feels a lot closer to the human experience.
I have always felt a childlike nostalgia for baseball in a way other major sports do not achieve. It doesn’t surprise me that the ethos of baseball is apparently easier to tap into in the form of literature.
The NBA only recently exploded in popularity. Worldwide too. I think you could say 1994 (MJ’s first three peat) was the establishment of the NBA skyrocketing in popularity. That’s not even 30 years ago.
