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Literature, Sociology, and “Our National Game”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Allen Guttmann
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When John J. McGraw, the cocky, colorful manager of the New York Giants in the days of their glory, toured the British Isles with his team in 1924, Arthur Conan Doyle ventured a prediction. He thought that baseball might well sweep England, as it had the United States. Doyle seems, in this instance, to have been less insightful than his beloved Holmes. Baseball, the American version of several English ballgames, never caught on among the British. Why not? The easy answer is that our national game is peculiarly American, fitted to American conditions and to the American character. Allan Nevins has placed his considerable prestige as a historian behind the proposition that baseball is “a true expression of the American spirit,” and Jacques Barzun has urged foreigners to learn about baseball if they want to understand America. While it is unquestionably true that games and sports are cultural phenomena which differ from one society to another, the easy answer is too easy. Baseball long has flourished in a culture as different from ours as Japan, where the first club was organized in 1879, and whose two leagues drew nearly 10 million fans in 1962. If baseball is the peculiar product of a peculiarly American culture, how can it be that the English balk while Latin Americans and Japanese, whose cultures are surely further from our own than England's, flock to the bleachers? Perhaps, if puzzles like this one are ever to be worked out, it is best to ask what there is about baseball which enabled it to enjoy, for nearly a century, an almost undisputed claim to the title “our national game.”

Type
An American Tragedy: A 50th Anniversary
Information
Prospects , Volume 1 , October 1976 , pp. 119 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

NOTES

1. Durso, Joseph, The Days of Mr. McGraw (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 187.Google Scholar

2. Voigt, David Quentin, American Baseball, I (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1966), p. viiGoogle Scholar; II (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1970), p. 240.

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4. Basketball's claim appears in a remarkable comment by the sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg: “Societies reveal much of themselves, and of their differences from other societies, in their preferences among sports. Basketball, for example, seems to me to provide an abstract parody of American middle class life.” Foreword to Slusher, Howard S., Man, Sport, and Existence (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1967), p. ix.Google Scholar

5. Quoted in Boyle, Robert H., Sport: Mirror of American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), p. 17.Google Scholar

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10. Quoted in Betts, John R., America's Sporting Heritage (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1974), p. 93.Google Scholar

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22. Bang the Drum Slowly (1956; rpt. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1962), p. 29.Google Scholar

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24. Ibid., p. 13.

25. Ibid., p. 73.

26. Ibid., p. 139.

27. Ibid., pp. 197–198.

28. The Natural (1952; rpt. New York: Dell, 1971), pp. 8, 23.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., p. 66.

30. Ibid., pp. 9, 185.

31. Ibid., p. 25.

32. Ibid., p. 26.

33. Ibid., pp. 34–35.

34. Ibid., p. 63.

35. Ibid., p. 74.

36. Ibid., p. 190.

37. Ball, Bat and Bishop (New York: Rockport Press, 1947), p. 4.Google Scholar

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