baseball game essay

Essay on Baseball

500+ words essay on  baseball.

Baseball is a bat-and-ball game that two opposing teams play. To put it into simpler words, it is one of the most loved games of America. It is as big as cricket in India. Americans are crazy about this game. Therefore, one might wonder what makes this game such a big hit amongst Americans? This essay will aim to clear that by describing the game.

All About Baseball

There are nine periods of play in a baseball game. Each of these periods is known as an inning. Similarly, when an inning ends, the team with the highest runs becomes the winner. In this game, the pitcher will throw a ball towards the batter who will be playing from the opposing team.

The batter will attempt to hit the ball into the field. When they hit the ball and run around a series of bases, they will score runs. However, this must be done before a field player puts them out.

So, you see that it might look like just any other ball game. It has a ball, bat as well as players. But, the people of America don’t consider it just that. They do not wish to bring this game down to simply as a ‘hit and run’ game.

While a five-year-old child will easily understand the meaning of this game, there also lies a subtlety. This very same subtlety is what attracts older people as well. While some may find it to be slow, Americans believe that the slow pace is what makes it interesting.

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Baseball- Not Just a Sport but a Passion

Baseball is not simply a sport for people, especially Americans. It is much more than that, it’s their passion. If people are not watching it live, they’re watching it in pubs or at their homes. The sound of the cracking gloves and ball hitting the bat is like a melody to the fans of the sport .

The game which entertains most people is that has a low score or no score until late in the game. Moreover, the homerun is one of the most anticipated events of the match. The home run is not simply about the great hit but also the speedy running and sacrifice.

In other words, this game gives an adrenalin rush to Americans. You can view it as an opera. The buildup is quite systematic that will occupy you till the very end. The climax is the ultimate reward which is incomplete without a slow buildup.

Alternatively, it is also about strategy. For a lot of Americans, it is a tradition. People spend time with their loved ones at baseball games. Kids look forward to going to the games with their fathers .

Moreover, it also has the ability to bring an end to long-time rivalries. All in all, it’s about the great feeling it brings for one and all. Baseball got its community status from Americans only. Thus, it went on to achieve a national identity.

Everything ranging from baseball caps to tee shirts is a common sighting in America. In New York, there is a Baseball Hall of Fame that is known for immortalizing the great players of the game from the past to the present.

Thus, the game is all about passion. It can make a passerby standstill on their feet to watch the homerun. Similarly, it can diminish rivalries and bring people together. It is a passionate game with passionate fans.

FAQ on Essay on Baseball

Question 1: Where is Baseball most popular?

Answer 1: Baseball has the most popularity in the United States. The people are ardent lovers of the game in America and have made it a popular game.

Question 2: Baseball is the national game of which country?

Answer 2: It is the national game of the Dominican Republic.

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101 Baseball Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Baseball is a sport that has captivated the hearts and minds of millions of fans around the world. From the excitement of a home run to the strategy behind a well-executed double play, there are countless aspects of baseball that can be explored and analyzed. If you are tasked with writing an essay on baseball and are struggling to find a topic, fear not! We have compiled a list of 101 baseball essay topic ideas and examples to inspire your writing.

• The evolution of baseball: From its origins to the modern game.
• The impact of Jackie Robinson on breaking the color barrier in baseball.
• Analyzing the influence of Babe Ruth on the game of baseball.
• The role of statistics in baseball: How sabermetrics changed the game.
• The rise of analytics in baseball: Its advantages and disadvantages.
• The impact of performance-enhancing drugs on the integrity of baseball.
• The importance of sportsmanship in baseball: Examining famous incidents.
• The role of umpires in the game: How they shape the outcome.
• The impact of technology on baseball: From instant replay to pitch tracking.
• The significance of baseball in American culture: Reflections on its symbolism.
• The role of the designated hitter in baseball: Should it be adopted universally?
• The importance of team chemistry in successful baseball teams.
• The influence of the media on the perception of baseball.
• The significance of baseball stadiums: A comparison of iconic venues.
• The impact of international players on Major League Baseball.
• The role of baseball in promoting social change and activism.
• The psychology of baseball: Examining the mental aspect of the game.
• The role of managers in baseball: Their strategies and decision-making.
• The rise of women's baseball: Analyzing its growth and challenges.
• The impact of baseball on the economy: From ticket sales to merchandise.
• The role of youth baseball in developing future talent.
• The evolution of baseball equipment: From wooden bats to advanced technology.
• The importance of scouting and player development in baseball.
• The role of superstitions and rituals in baseball.
• The impact of free agency on player movement and team dynamics.
• The significance of baseball records: Breaking down the most notable ones.
• The role of baseball in promoting physical fitness and health.
• The impact of baseball on local communities: Case studies of minor league teams.
• The role of baseball in promoting diversity and inclusivity.
• The importance of teamwork in baseball: Lessons learned from successful teams.
• The influence of baseball on literature and popular culture.
• The role of baseball in fostering national unity during challenging times.
• The impact of the designated hitter rule on offensive strategies.
• The significance of the World Series: Examining its history and legacy.
• The role of baseball in promoting tourism: A study of baseball-themed attractions.
• The influence of baseball on other sports: Comparing strategies and techniques.
• The impact of globalization on the popularity of baseball.
• The significance of baseball cards: Their historical and monetary value.
• The role of baseball in promoting education and academic success.
• The psychology of a successful pitcher: Examining their mindset and strategies.
• The impact of the steroid era on the perception of baseball's golden age.
• The significance of baseball in wartime: Analyzing its role during conflicts.
• The influence of the media on player endorsements and sponsorships.
• The importance of sportsmanship in youth baseball: Lessons for young players.
• The role of baseball in promoting civic engagement and community service.
• The impact of the designated hitter on the National League: Should it be adopted?
• The significance of baseball in overcoming societal prejudices: Case studies.
• The evolution of baseball strategies: From small ball to power hitting.
• The role of baseball in the integration of immigrants into American society.
• The impact of injuries on player careers and team performance.
• The significance of baseball rituals and traditions: A comparative analysis.
• The influence of baseball on American slang and idioms.
• The importance of sportsmanship in the rivalry between baseball teams.
• The role of baseball in promoting gender equality and women's empowerment.
• The impact of rule changes on the pace of the game: Analyzing their effectiveness.
• The significance of baseball in building character and life skills in young athletes.
• The influence of baseball movies on popular culture and fan perception.
• The importance of baseball in preserving local history and heritage.
• The role of baseball in promoting environmental sustainability: Green initiatives.
• The impact of baseball on the tourism industry: A study on baseball tourism.
• The significance of baseball in shaping national identity: Case studies.
• The influence of baseball statistics on player contracts and salaries.
• The importance of baseball in promoting resilience and perseverance.
• The role of baseball in promoting social integration and breaking down barriers.
• The impact of analytics on player development and scouting.
• The significance of baseball in promoting community cohesion: Case studies.
• The influence of baseball on the development of sports broadcasting.
• The importance of baseball in teaching life lessons to young players.
• The role of baseball in promoting cultural exchange and diplomacy.
• The impact of baseball on the physical and mental health of fans.
• The significance of baseball in promoting patriotism and national pride.
• The influence of baseball on fashion and popular trends.
• The importance of baseball in promoting discipline and self-control.
• The role of baseball in promoting volunteerism and community service.
• The impact of baseball on the entertainment industry: From movies to music.
• The significance of baseball in promoting intergenerational bonding: Case studies.
• The influence of baseball on the development of sports journalism.
• The importance of baseball in promoting fair play and respect for opponents.
• The role of baseball in fostering a sense of belonging and identity.
• The impact of baseball on the physical and mental well-being of players.
• The significance of baseball in promoting social justice: Case studies.
• The influence of baseball on the development of sports photography.
• The importance of baseball in promoting teamwork and cooperation.
• The role of baseball in promoting cultural diversity and inclusivity.
• The impact of baseball on the tourism industry: A study on baseball-themed vacations.
• The significance of baseball in promoting physical education in schools.
• The influence of baseball on the development of sports broadcasting technology.
• The importance of baseball in promoting leadership skills and responsibility.
• The role of baseball in fostering a sense of community and belonging.
• The impact of baseball on the physical and mental health of youth players.
• The significance of baseball in promoting national unity: Case studies.
• The influence of baseball on the development of sports journalism ethics.
• The importance of baseball in promoting perseverance and resilience.
• The role of baseball in promoting cultural exchange and understanding.
• The impact of baseball on the tourism industry: A study on baseball-themed tours.
• The significance of baseball in promoting physical fitness in schools.
• The influence of baseball on the development of sports broadcasting techniques.
• The importance of baseball in promoting teamwork and collaboration.
• The role of baseball in fostering a sense of cultural diversity and acceptance.
• The impact of baseball on the physical and mental well-being of amateur players.
• The significance of baseball in promoting social cohesion and harmony.

With these 101 baseball essay topic ideas and examples, you are sure to find the perfect topic to write about. Whether you are interested in the historical aspects of the game, statistical analysis, or the impact of baseball on society, there is something for everyone. So grab your pen and paper, or fire up your computer, and start exploring the fascinating world of baseball through your essay!

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Why is Baseball the Most Literary of Sports?

Lincoln michel goes deep into the prose of america’s pastime.

The World Series is here. Even though it’s the (ugh) Braves vs. the (ugh) Astros, it’s still time to put on a ballcap, break out of a box of Cracker Jack, and head on out to the old ballgame… or least stream one online. Baseball has been known as America’s “national pastime” since the 1850s. While the sport may have been surpassed by football in the TV ratings, there’s still something about wooden bats, leather gloves, and grass-and-dirt diamonds that feels distinctly American. And distinctly literary.

Baseball has a tremendous literary history, one that stretches back through decades and across literary genres. Baseball appears in postmodern comedies like Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association (1968) , horror stories like Stephen King’s Blockade Billy (2010), fabulist novels such as W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982), YA fantasy like Michael Chabon’s Summerland (2002), and works of literary realism like Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League (2020). Pick a literary genre and you can find baseball books.

I added my own contribution with my science fiction novel The Body Scout . My novel takes place in a future New York City ravaged by climate change, pandemics, and body modifications, in which genetic editing is as common as cellphone apps are today. When I started writing, I knew I wanted to explore questions of the body and technology and center it in a future sports league run by biotech and pharmaceutical corporations. I had a lot of hard decisions to make about worldbuilding and plot and character, but there’s one thing I didn’t think twice about: the sport would be baseball.

Sports and literature aren’t always the best pairing. Novelists are classically weirdos and introverts, more likely to be bullied by the jocks than compete with them. There are some hugely popular sports that have almost no novels about them. So why is it that baseball has had such an enduring literary appeal?

I. A Quick Look at the Literary History of Baseball

Baseball novels stretch back to the 19th   century with the first such novel apparently having been written by Noah Books in 1884 . As the sport grew in popularity, it found its way into the popular dime novels of the day. Zane Grey is mostly remembered for his Westerns, but the author had gone to college on a baseball scholarship and wrote several books of baseball fiction.

When we talk about baseball as literature in the more snooty sense, one of the earliest classics—and indeed arguably the classic baseball novel—is Bernard Malamud’s 1952 debut novel The Natural , which was based in part on the life of Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus. Malamud would go on to win the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for later work, and his debut helped cement baseball as a thoroughly literary topic. This novel was famous enough to be parodied in the classic The Simpsons episode “Homer at the Bat,” in which Homer—like Malamud’s Roy Hobbs—has a lucky bat carved by a lightning-struck tree.

Malamud’s friend (and sometimes rival), Philip Roth wrote his own baseball novel two decades later with 1973’s satirical The Great American Novel .

The great postmodernist trickster Robert Coover wrote his baseball novel in the early innings of his career. His second novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), followed an accountant who escapes from his dreary life into a dice-simulated baseball game.

I mentioned W.P. Kinsella’s sports fantasy novel Shoeless Joe (1982) above, although most know it better in its film adaptation form: Field of Dreams (1989). Kinsella leaned fully into the mythic quality of baseball in that novel, and he wrote other magic and mystic baseball works. His collection The Dixon Cornbelt League: And Other Baseball Stories (1993) includes, for example, a werewolf baseball story titled appropriately, “The Baseball Wolf.”

One can’t bring up the literary history of baseball without Don DeLillo’s phenomenal Underworld (1997), which opens with an extended fictionalized account of the New York Giant Bobby Thomson’s game-winning homer against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951. The real life homerun was so famous it’s simply called the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” DeLillo’s own version was also famous enough, at least in literary circles, that it was eventually published as a standalone novella, Pafko at the Wall , in 2001.

More recently, Chad Harbach’s college baseball novel The Art of Fielding (2011) famously secured a massive $665,000 advance—extremely rare for a debut novel, much less one about sports—and was released to wide acclaim. In 2020, when COVID forced the MLB to play a shortened season in empty stadiums, we saw two more notable baseball novels: Gish Jen’s dystopian The Resisters saw baseball as location of resistance in an authoritarian future America while Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League explored the lives of a wide variety of characters during spring training.

These books are of course only a small sampling of the baseball literature out there. The Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology includes Amiri Baraka, John Updike, Annie Dillard, Robert Frost, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many more poets and novelists who found baseball making an appearance in their work.

II. The Quirks and Lingo of America’s Sport

Why does baseball translate so well to the page?

Part of the answer is the basic nature of the game. Baseball plays out largely in a series of one-on-one matchups with very clear dramatic stakes. Do you hit the ball or swing and miss? Get on base or strike out? Catch the ball or get an error? Not only are the stakes clear from moment to moment, but the game is played out over a lot of tension-building downtime punctuated with short bursts of dramatic action. While haters will say this makes the game boring to watch, it certainly makes it easier to render on the page. The chaotic non-stop action of sports like hockey and basketball are trickier to pull off in text.

Of course, the literary appeal of baseball runs much deeper. For one thing, the sport is simply unique. It has runs instead of points, managers instead of coaches, a diamond instead of a rectangle, and an offense that never gets to hold the ball. The uniforms feel time-warped from another era. It’s weird. But even more than the quirks, the language of baseball is everywhere in America.

We talk of “knocking it out of the park” when we do well and “striking out” when we fail. We “touch base” with old friends, guestimate “ballpark figures” in office meetings, and take a “rain check” to reschedule a plan. (Back in the day, if it rained too heavily to continue the game fans would be given a “rain check” voucher to use at another game.) We separate things into the “big leagues” and “bush leagues.” Sometimes life “throws a curveball” when something comes right “out of left field.” Other times we have to “play hardball” with someone or apologize for talking too much “inside baseball.”

Baseball’s long cultural importance in American life means that the sport has given us far more terms, phrases, and idioms that most other sports. Its language is part of America’s language—and what are authors if not people attuned to language?

III. Baseball as the Flexible American Metaphor

All of the above combines with baseball’s long and storied history, which has often dovetailed into larger American narratives. Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the racist color line. Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech . Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. The 1990s steroid era. Baseball also winds its way through people’s lives, from elementary school t-ball to middle age office softball leagues. It’s perhaps the sport that best cuts across class, race, gender, age, and the urban/rural divide (even as it’s infused with the conflicts of those categories).

So baseball in literature tends to stand in for America. It might represent an earnest nostalgia, such as in Kinsella’s work. It may reflect the small anxieties of average Americans as in Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association. Or it might be used to examine the great forces of history that shaped the country, as in DeLillo’s Underworld when J. Edgar Hoover is informed of Soviet nuke tests during a game, or in Roth’s The Great American Novel when the Cold War is fought out over a fictional baseball league. In literature, baseball can represent any part of American life the author needs.

Elements used in literature accrue meaning the more they are used. The fact that baseball has appeared in so many literary works—not to mention films like A League of Their Own and The Sandlot and the countless other movies, video games, comics, and television shows—has imbued it with extra meaning. This is why, I think, baseball is at home in a horror novel or science fiction TV show as it is a Pulitzer Prize’s winners work. It’s a flexible metaphor, one artists can use to explore all different aspects of America. This is why I knew my novel would be about baseball. I wanted to tap into that rich and storied tradition.

So this World Series, if you’re looking for something to do between innings why not pick up a baseball novel and read?

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Descriptive Essay: Baseball Essay

Baseball has been called America’s pastime. It’s a game that epitomizes summertime in the United States. People in every major city flock to the baseball diamond, eat hot dogs and caramel corn and cheer for their home team. Most of us today take baseball for granted without thinking about how it all started. If you’re a true baseball fan, learning as much about it as you can is something you owe yourself and the entire baseball community.

Baseball originates from similar bat and ball games that date back to the 1300s. In the United States, the game evolved into what was called town ball. The mid 1850s saw a huge increase in the game across America and it began being called a “national pastime.” In 1858, the first baseball games where admission was charged to watch were played in Corona, Queens New York. The baseball league was formally started in 1876 and became what is known today as Major League Baseball.

By 1903, there were two leagues and professional baseball was becoming increasingly popular all over the country. 1903 also saw the very first World Series, an event that would take over the hearts of people all over America for years to come. Professional players from all the teams began to get famous and become household names. Perhaps you’ve heard of some them.

Such greats as Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson changed the face of baseball. Their abilities on the diamond turned them into national icons who would have their moment of fame and create a legacy that continued long after each of them retired.

America isn’t the only country that plays baseball, however. Though it is considered “America’s pastime,” there are teams and players with incredible talent in other parts of the world as well. For example, Canada has a pretty famed baseball scene too. There are a number of European countries that have baseball teams as well. Baseball is also an Olympic sport and many greats have played for the country in addition to their hometown team.

The rules of the game haven’t changed too much. Each team has nine players in the field at one time. They stand at each of the bases, between second and third base and in the outfield. The object of the game is to score the most home runs in each inning and prevent the other team from scoring by getting outs. An out occurs when a player is tagged running between the bases, when an opposing team member touches the base first or when a player catches the ball when it is thrown or hit with the bat. The score of a baseball game is usually not high scoring with the number of runs typically being 10 or under.

The biggest cultural impact that baseball has had on American life is the baseball card craze. For many decades, baseball players have their own card, which fans can collect. Some cards are worth a lot of money, while others are not. The fun is in collecting an entire set for a certain team from a certain year, or getting a rookie card for a big name. Kids have been trading baseball cards for years and years and they will likely continue to do so for years to come.

Baseball is a sport that has had a huge impact on American culture and life and has played a part in the life of many people. Baseball isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and if you’ve never experienced a baseball game under the lights on a summer evening, you are missing out. Change that by getting a ticket today.

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How to Write an Amazing Essay on Baseball

We’ve all heard the stereotype about dumb jocks, but the truth is that sports wouldn’t be the same without academics. Physiology of movement, player psychology, the effects of weather on a game: these are only a few of the more technical aspects of the world of sports. Baseball is a particularly diverse topic to write about, especially considering the ever-changing rules and regulations of the game. Take a look at the following advice to learn how to write an amazing essay for baseball. Who knows, it could be the difference between a home run or a swing and a miss.

Choose your topic carefully

Baseball has been America’s favorite pastime for over 200 years, so there’s a lot to write about. The best way to start is by deciding what facet of the sport you’re going to cover, then narrow down from there. Some of the broad areas are:

• The history of the sport,
• rules and regulations,
• game mechanics,
• place within American culture
• and umpires.

It’s best to pick something more specific within the broad topic for the focus of your essay. Unless you’re writing a thesis, it’s probably not a good idea to try to cover the entire history of baseball regulations in a single essay. A better method would be to pick one specific umpire and discuss how their contributions changed the sport; or you could compare and contrast player performance and world records between decades. Continue narrowing down until you have a topic that provides enough information for your essay, but not so much that it can’t be feasibly expressed within the expected word count.

Make sure you use the proper format and style

A baseball essay should follow the standard essay format of introduction, body, and conclusion. However, the type of essay and style of writing will depend on what topic you choose and what your goal is with writing. Are you trying to present old information to say something new about the game, comparing player performance, arguing for a change to the rules, or something else entirely? Decide your focus before you begin writing to ensure you stay on track, then keep the following advice in mind as you write each portion of your essay.

Introduction

This is where you’re going to let everyone know what you’re writing about. You should have a clearly defined thesis statement, offering just enough background information to inform the reader of the topic’s relevance. In addition, you will also want to address the flow of information in the body of your essay. This will help the reader know what to expect. Just make sure you stick the format laid out in your introduction!

The body is the real meat of the essay. This is where you will provide in-depth background information and research to support the relevance of your thesis. Then you will combine this information with your interpretation and analysis to help the reader understand your point of view and further lend credence to your thesis statement.

The body should follow the format outlined in your introduction, and the information should be presented logically and with consistency to avoid confusion. Use transitional phrases to let the reader know when you’re shifting your focus in the essay. Provide analysis and the conclusions you have drawn from them here.

This comprises the final paragraph of your essay and should never contain new information or analysis. It should sum up the essentials while also revisiting the primary conclusions drawn in the body of the essay.

If you keep this information in mind while you’re writing, you’re sure to knock one out of the park with your essay.

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Baseball — How To Play Baseball

How to Play Baseball

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Words: 529 |

Published: Mar 20, 2024

Words: 529 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

Basic rules of baseball, skills and techniques, base running, teamwork and strategy.

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When New York Made Baseball and Baseball Made New York

By Adam Gopnik

Of all the arenas gone from New York, there are two that a sports-obsessed New Yorker may regret most never having seen. One is the old Madison Square Garden, with its Saint-Gaudens statue of Diana dancing on the skyline, and its memorable murder, when, in 1906, Evelyn Nesbit’s deranged husband shot and killed the architect Stanford White . The other is the Polo Grounds on 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, with its one-of-a-kind horseshoe shape, its oddly rural placement within Coogan’s Bluff, and a dramatic death of its own, when, fourteen years after the White murder, Carl Mays struck and killed Ray Chapman with an inside pitch, still the only on-field death of a player in the history of major-league baseball. There are other places it would have been nice to see: notably, Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn, the home of the Dodgers until they were snatched by Los Angeles. But Ebbets at least has had its façade and some of its dimensions replicated in today’s CitiField, which Fred Wilpon built, the way moguls can, as a monument to his Brooklyn-baseball boyhood.

But the Polo Grounds uptown still touches hearts while having truly disappeared. Jimmy Breslin, in a fine new collection just published by Library of America, conjures the childhood memory of seeing the green park in the gray city: “I start squeezing and pushing through these men because the moment I get near the top of the subway stairs I can look around and see the ballpark, the Polo Grounds . . . and for me that was the best part of the whole day at a baseball game, coming up the subway stairs and seeing the park for the first time.” The Polo Grounds holds our hearts in part because in photographs it still looks so weird . Staring at an antique panoramic picture of the great pitcher Christy Mathewson on the mound in 1913, one can hardly believe how bathtub-shaped the stadium is, how close the right-field bleachers, how wildly distant deep center, how high the overhanging porch. Damon Runyon, writing in 1911, exclaimed, “The Polo Grounds! It means the Big Town; it means the Big City Club; it is all the lights of Broadway and the lure of Gotham summed up in two words. . . . It is a place of surpassing magnificence, sparkling beneath the silver sun like a great green jewel, and best of all, it is the abiding place of the Giants!” One notices that Runyon seems indifferent to how bizarre an anachronism the name was for a baseball stadium—it’s a holdover from an earlier, failed life with the horsey set—and also that newspaper copy editors were much kinder to the beautiful semicolon than they are today. When Yankee Stadium opened, a few years later, Runyon treated it more cynically, as an outsized commercial venture that might or might not work.

Glory! Romance! We can’t help elevating our experience of games into the epic realm. The cartoonist Randall Munroe, the creator of the comic “xkcd,” once had his stick figures decide that they would use the output of a weighted random-number generator to build narratives; “All Sports Commentary” was the caption. True enough. Kevin Baker, in “ The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City ” (Knopf), tells stories about the development of baseball, many of them involving the Polo Grounds, and, as with earlier baseball bards, the narratives come complete with morals. But his have a harder, more disabused edge than the familiar sporting sort. The gentle haze that lay over the legendary history book “ The Glory of Their Times ” (1966), which was edited by Lawrence Ritter and which covered much of the same territory, here evaporates under the brighter sun of candor and confession. We get sharper engravings of brutal exploitation and raw appetite, with the team owners mostly favoring the first and the players mostly favoring the second.

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Baker’s point, doubtless annoying to fans elsewhere, is that the rise of baseball as we know it was centered in Gotham, the one place where the necessary density of big money, large stadiums, daily tabloids, and assorted crooks could remake the game from “base ball,” the nineteenth-century country (and soldier-camp) sport it had been, to “baseball,” the big business it became. Baker therefore takes on the familiar role of the hardboiled Gotham reporter, maintaining a knowing “Let me dry you out behind the ears, kid” tone throughout. And so the tale of how the Giants established themselves at the Polo Grounds is told, accurately enough, as a piece of complicated capitalist skulduggery in which the team’s desperate owner bought a controlling interest in the Baltimore Orioles and then dragged its stars north. (It is useful to be reminded, for those fans still mourning the loss of the Dodgers to L.A., that New York baseball, too, was made by greedy wanderers coming to a growing town.) Baker also details how Hilltop Park, the first home of the Highlanders—an American League team that, in the nineteen-tens, would become the Yankees —was developed and leased by a rogues’ gallery of Tammany politicians and cops, hidden, in the classic Mob move, behind a figurehead owner.

Yet Baker, an iconoclast by temperament, is a mythologist by vocation. Someone writing about sports has to have a taste for myth, or else it all dissolves into numbers. So Babe Ruth gets the same Rabelaisian introduction that he has received since the nineteen-twenties, except that the stories are franker and the words ruder: “The Babe liked to eat and drink and fuck, too, even if he wasn’t big on reading. . . . The Babe was said to have rented out entire whorehouses on the road for a night; the ladies revived him for another round by pouring champagne over his head.”

Baker’s account of Christy Mathewson, who, starting in 1900, pitched seventeen seasons for the Giants, is more worshipful—all the revisionists in the world can’t shake the legend of Mathewson as a captain of men and a gentleman of integrity. (Umpires were said to consult Matty on close calls, trusting that his honest eye would be keener than his club loyalty.) But Baker grasps that Mathewson’s was a deliberately willed and crafted persona, one that enabled him “to be a magnet to the fans . . . without provoking the jealousy and suspicion of teammates.” And he shrewdly points out that, though Joe DiMaggio and Derek Jeter both learned to adopt this mask with minimal slippage, Reggie Jackson and Alex Rodriguez, equally big stars, were unable to do so, to their detriment. In Runyon’s Big Town, you have to be a fine gentleman and a regular guy. Baker finds a wonderful quote in which Matty discusses the importance of having what he called “an alibi”: “You must have an alibi to show why you lost. If you haven’t one, you must fake one. Your self-confidence must be maintained.” Baker rightly connects this remark to Ring Lardner’s great comic story “Alibi Ike,” certainly the single funniest baseball story ever written, which we can now see provides a mock-heroic version of something actually heroic: a great baseball player’s imperturbable façade.

Mathewson’s opposite number, Hal Chase—a brilliant first baseman and a compulsive gambler, who did more than anyone to bring the corruption of betting to the game—is just as vivid and demonic here as he has been in earlier tellings. Chase and Matty ended up playing together on the 1916 Cincinnati Reds, in a collision that has the inevitability of tragedy and that would have made a fine film for, say, Tom Hanks as Matty and Tommy Lee Jones as Chase. Before long, Mathewson discovered his new teammate’s predilections, and had him suspended. When Mathewson was in retirement and ailing (he’d been accidentally gassed during military training exercises in 1918 and subsequently contracted tuberculosis), he was practically the only member of the baseball establishment to catch the scent of what the sports gamblers were up to.

Though the teams involved in the great World Series fix of 1919 were from Chicago and Cincinnati, the scheme was, in essence, a local game, too, rooted in New York gangsterism—in particular, in Arnold Rothstein’s gambling empire. Baker notes that the Chicago White Sox players put out the word that they were “for sale” only after years of mistreatment by Charlie Comiskey, the team’s owner. Soon they were inundated with offers. Then Rothstein, after first apparently making an ostentatious public show of denouncing all such cheating, decided to finance the fix. (He used his public rejection of the scheme as another kind of “alibi.”) Watching the series, Mathewson circled the suspicious plays in red on his scorecard. No one wanted to believe it, not even Mathewson. Only when the scandal blew up the following year was it clear that his unease had been well founded.

Chase, to be sure, ended up forlorn and alone. “I’m the loser,” he said on his deathbed. Mathewson had died two decades earlier, saying to his wife, in one of the most touching of American farewells, “It’s nearly over. I know it, and we must face it. Go out and have a good cry. Don’t make it a long one.” From Homer’s Hector on out, heroes take a familiar shape.

Baker is both up to date and persuasive in his treatment of nonwhite players and teams in the city. Curiously, Native Americans were accepted as ballplayers and athletes from early on; Charles Bender and John Meyers, of Ojibwa and Cahuilla ancestry, respectively, and both called “Chief,” were major stars in the early nineteen-hundreds. But, for Black players, the “color line,” despite some brief stabs at breaking it, was absolute, and the myths on which generations were raised were bereft of essential truth. The tale of how Jackie Robinson , with the backing of the Dodgers’ general manager Branch Rickey, integrated major-league baseball was inspiring gospel for generations of American liberals. In “ Portnoy’s Complaint ,” Philip Roth’s narrator explains that his father was kept well below the executive level of the New Jersey insurance firm he worked for not simply because he was Jewish but also because, with his eighth-grade education, he “wasn’t exactly suited to be the Jackie Robinson of the insurance business”—and Roth could be sure that everyone would get the admiring joke.

Yet, well before Robinson’s arrival, the Negro Leagues were already major league, in the simple sense that, had there been a World Series between a team from the Negro Leagues and one from the white leagues, either could have won. The story of how Robinson braved bigotry to break the color line is heroic, but it shouldn’t distract from the cruel absurdity of there having been a color line to be broken. Baker makes the reasonable case that the Negro League’s Lincoln Giants, with its short-lived offshoot, the Lincoln Stars, was “one of the greatest New York teams ever assembled, in any sport.” Among its players was Oscar Charleston, who, by increasing consensus, is considered one of the four or five finest center fielders ever to play the game. But the Lincolns played at Olympic Field, which Baker describes as “a small crude long forgotten park” in northern Manhattan, and later at the Catholic Protectory Oval, a still more obscure park, built for an orphanage in the Bronx.

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Baker is also very good on the extraordinary story of the entrepreneur Alex Pompez and his New York Cubans. Pompez, who represented himself as a cigar tycoon, in fact made his fortune in the numbers racket. He assembled the first great team of Latino players but initially imposed an ethnic barrier of his own, excluding Black American players and arousing protests from the Eastern Colored League. The petty cruelties of American racism are a permanently depressing subject.

Baseball in New York was also a well-written sport. Though Baker pays attention to the role of the New York newspapers in creating a city of baseball, and he quotes from Runyon, he rather condescends to the sports pages of the early era, as amounting to so much “ballyhoo.” (“In other words, hoopla, hype, publicity, press . New York was the world capital of it.”) In his account, the papers and the writers are something of a Greek chorus, helping narrate the action but not sharply personified as individual voices.

Yet a reasonable case can be made that two essential manners in American prose—the laconic, tight-lipped style (Hemingway began as a newspaperman and sportswriter, too) and the loquacious high irony that A. J. Liebling passed on to Tom Wolfe —began in the baseball stories of the New York papers. The sportswriters were there to write , in ways that the other people on the paper weren’t. Here’s Runyon on a single play in a single game:

This is the way old “Casey” Stengel ran yesterday afternoon, running his home run home. This is the way old “Casey” Stengel ran, running his home run home to a Giant victory by a score of 5 to 4 in the first game of the World Series of 1923. This is the way old “Casey” Stengel ran, running his home run home, when two were out in the ninth inning and the score was tied and the ball was still bounding inside the Yankee yard. This is the way— His mouth wide open. His warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride.

Old Casey Stengel is a hero, even if the author is aware that this is just a contest being played for money by men of dubious honor and tawdry appetites. Runyon knew that these two things were true: the contests were epic in the enjoyment they provided, and they were miniature in their importance. This practice, of remaining close to the field but also distanced from it, evolved into the smooth, smilingly detached narratives of such writers as Red Smith and Liebling. This magazine’s own Roger Angell shifted that mode into unapologetic fandom, in which the point was not to be an insider at all but to watch from a perspective as bemused and engaged as that of Henry James watching Daisy Miller—empathy without undue explication. Philip Roth used to say that listening to Dodgers games as a boy, with the eloquent Southerner Red Barber narrating the adventures of the Brooklyn Bums, taught him more about the power of point of view than any English class did. You could write that way about other things than baseball, but baseball was a good thing to write that way about.

Is the romance of baseball in New York coming to an end? The anchoring of sports in community seems further and further away, and the modern American curse of a capitalism that makes people feel miserable without visibly immiserating them affects sports just as it does everything else. One turns back to the real question: Why do we care? Why can the narration of these long-lost and in themselves insignificant contests still enliven our imaginations? Confucius says—an old-fashioned locution, perhaps, but appropriate here—never to take interest in feats of strength. And, in the main, we don’t. Sports are an artificial, deliberately narrowed activity that we create, in order to have moralizing stories to tell. If we didn’t have the legend of Christy Mathewson or Willie Mays, if we ascribed to such men merely feats of strength and speed rather than ebulliences of character, we would be bored.

There are passions that have to be private to be felt, and others that have to be communal to be real. Making up morality tales about small differences in physical performances is as necessary a human occupation as offering wildly differing rewards on the basis of equally minute differences in physical appearance: he’s a god, she’s an angel, he’s a star. We live within our bodies and honor them by admiring ones nimbler than our own. There seems no way out or up from this preoccupation. It gets its grace by becoming common.

The strength of our moralizing instinct is shown in the vindictive nature of our assessments of right and wrong in sports. We’ve kept Shoeless Joe out of the Hall of Fame, for the same reason that we’ve kept out Pete Rose and Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, even as we recognize inconsistencies in these judgments. Pete Rose’s sin—betting on baseball—is scarcely a sin at all for those outside the game, but it is rightly a capital offense for those within it. We accept the inequity of banning Shoeless Joe for having helped throw the 1919 World Series while enshrining the White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey, even though it was Comiskey’s greed and stinginess that pushed Shoeless Joe to take the gamblers’ money. We may recognize that the ban on performance-enhancing substances is hypocritical—pretty much everything that an athlete takes is in some way “performance enhancing.” Yet it is the cost of the activity to the nonparticipants that makes us rebel. The cost of corruption is the cost it imposes on those who would rather not partake in it.

We want clean games because games are so valuable to our self-making. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, in his fascinating book “ Games: Agency as Art ” (2020), argues that we have tended to overrate or sentimentalize “pure play” as an ideal while condescending to organized and commodified games as secondary or corrupted forms. He insists that, instead, all games are structured forms of play that teach us, through abstract, stylized example, the ins and outs of agency. In most of life, he points out, we pursue disorderly means toward reasonable goals: we want to get into the right college, or find a perfect life partner, or raise our children well, and we make foolish mistakes before we do. Only in games do we pursue orderly means toward ridiculous goals: touching home plate with your toe is by itself a meaningless purpose, but we learn to do it in ways that are beautifully shaped and orderly and teachable. Watching baseball, we learn cause and effect, strategy and tactics, the uses of delayed gratification, how potent the anticipation of other minds can be. We obsess about games, because they instruct us on how to accomplish things, and on the varieties and strategies of achievement. Certainly, generations of American teen-agers, in their torrid fumblings, took to heart the “model of agency” supplied by baseball. James Thurber made a cartoon of this: “And this is Tom Weatherby, an old beau of your mother’s. He never got to first base.” The segmentation of the game suggested the sequences of seduction.

The constant transmutation of play into games and games back into play is at the heart of our fandom; something that, for the athletes, is done for money—often in pain or without much pleasure—becomes, for the fans, an unstructured escape from responsibility, the thrill that Breslin felt on running away to the stadium. But what is a serious game for the fans—their own fandom—becomes play for the athletes, who, knowing how similar they are to the ones in the other uniform, cannot take most results too solemnly. The fans regard the game as joyfully ridiculous and the players regard the fans as deeply ridiculous, and there’s a fluid interchange between the game we see and the play we share.

That’s why diehard fans, on the whole, take losing harder than the players do. Pro athletes can often say, “They just played better than we did,” or, alternatively, “That’s just the way it broke,” more serenely than the fans can. When we watch the players congratulate one another after the game and exchange warm words, the social ritual they’re enacting is a way of turning a game back into some decent form of play: Hey, we competed, we all did well, see you next year. For that matter, it’s when we hear of the players admitting helplessness that we recognize their humanity. The legendary remark of the Yankees’ great Mickey Mantle on being once again struck out by the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax—he shrugged and said to the catcher, “How the fuck is anybody supposed to hit that shit?”—suggests just the state of fatalistic acceptance that professors used to admire in Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. Stoicism suits center fielders, and princes. People contrast “passive” spectatorship with active play, but there is nothing passive about fandom. The player may be passive in a Zen sense, cultivating a zone of quiet concentration; the fans, on the other hand, have a critical, leaping voice running in their head.

It seems unlikely that any sport will now bind a city together as baseball once did New York. But, then, another version of this bonding is already under way, around the multiplayer video games that form communities—stretching improbably and beautifully across age cohorts—and they do teach agency of a kind. (Those games, indeed, are what Nguyen primarily has in mind.) A century from now, someone will write a book like Baker’s about how the cultural broadband of the country, and then the planet, got wound around Assassin’s Creed and Halo, whose now stunning graphics will look, in an approaching age of 3-D illusion and tactile immersion, as charmingly period as those photographs of the Polo Grounds seem to us. Play into game and game into play: it’s a permanent story. All we can do is tell it again. That eulogy from Runyon about the glory of the Polo Grounds was written right after it was razed by a fire, in 1911, only to be rebuilt and back in business the same year. In the Big Town, as Runyon knew, you can always burn it down, and start over. ♦

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By Louisa Thomas

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By Ian Frazier

By Emily Witt

Pete Rose's record, Babe Ruth's eulogy: These books remind us why we love baseball

Baseball is more than a game. A new season is accompanied by feelings of hope and optimism – this’ll be our year . The renewal that’s inherent in springtime, along with the nostalgia of yesteryear.

It brings us back to the time we fell in love with the game.

Perhaps trying to recapture that feeling, just about every year when Opening Day rolls around I turn to read a baseball book, nonfiction or novel. There are many great ones out there.

“Eight Men Out” by Eliot Asinof, a page-turner on the infamous Black Sox scandal, is perhaps my favorite. Asinof reconstructed the twist and intrigue surrounding the 1919 World Series – which the Cincinnati Reds won, incidentally, though their victory shall always be tainted. Early 20th-century Cincinnati and Chicago come to life, when baseball was just becoming America’s pastime and ballplayers were more approachable.

Here are a couple baseball books on my shelf now.

‘Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero’ by Waite Hoyt with Tim Manners

Baseball Hall of Famer Waite Hoyt was a born storyteller. Longtime Reds fans may have grown up listening to Hoyt call Cincinnati games on the radio from 1942 to 1965. He was notable for calling games in the past tense – a habit he got from recreating the action of away games on the air from play-by-play reports sent over teletype.

But it was the stories he told during rain delays about his playing days with the New York Yankees and his teammate, Babe Ruth, that folks really remember.

Surprisingly, Hoyt has another story to tell. His own. His new memoir, “Schoolboy, ” comes out 40 years after his death on April 1.

The memoir was assembled by Tim Manners, who stitched together material from eight banker’s boxes full of notes, letters, interview transcripts and Hoyt’s own memoir attempts. He served as a ghostwriter using Hoyt’s own words.

“It was only right that someone revered as a master storyteller should be allowed to tell his own story as it had never been told before,” Manners wrote in the preface.

Hoyt was nicknamed “Schoolboy” when he signed a professional contract with the New York Giants as a 15-year-old high schooler. He earned his Hall of Fame credentials as the ace pitcher of the 1927 Yankees, considered perhaps the best team of all time.

Hoyt wrote of his close friendship with Babe Ruth, but also the time the two came to blows in the locker room. Of pitching to Ty Cobb. Of getting to know teammate Lou Gehrig. But he also reveals a life beyond the baseball diamond. How, when his salary playing ball wasn’t enough, he performed on vaudeville in the offseason.

Or when, moonlighting as a mortician, he left a body in the trunk of his vehicle while going to pitch a game at Yankee Stadium.

After his playing career, Hoyt transitioned to radio broadcasting. He was one of the first to do it.

In 1942, the Burger Brewing Co. hired him to call Cincinnati Reds games for WKRC. Listeners particularly loved when it rained. Hoyt had to fill airtime while play was suspended. So he dipped into his limitless supply of baseball stories.

His most memorable was the day Babe Ruth died in 1948. After the game, Hoyt gave an impromptu eulogy on the air.

“There was no preparation, no script, no research,” Hoyt wrote. “I just raked through my memories and improvised for more than an hour and a half, sharing all I could recollect, sparing him nothing and still trying to give the man his full due. My sorrow and admiration were sincere, and no one took offense because I did not gloss over the rough spots. Indeed, this proved one of the most popular programs I ever offered and drew a warmer response than any other I had ever received since arriving in Cincinnati.”

Hoyt also didn’t pull any punches about his battle with alcohol. In July 1945, he disappeared for three days on a bender while people looked for him all over the city. His wife and the press spun his disappearance as “Waite’s amnesia.” Babe Ruth sent him a wire: “I heard you had a case of amnesia. I never heard of that brand!”

But it was a serious problem. On the third day, Hoyt wound up at a seedy bar at the corner of Reading Road and Broadway and had his last drink.

He then called Good Samaritan Hospital. A man introduced him to Alcoholics Anonymous, still a relatively unknown organization in 1945. He sobered up and became an advocate for AA, but it was not really anonymous. He was too well known.

There was a lot more to Hoyt than his stories.

‘Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments’ by Joe Posnanski

Joe Posnanski spent two and a half years writing sports columns for the Cincinnati Post from 1994 to 1996. He moved on to the Kansas City Star, then Sports Illustrated, and was named national sportswriter of the year several times. Poz, as he’s known by sports readers, also wrote the book “The Machine” on the Reds’ 1975 season.

His latest offering, “Why We Love Baseball” that he released in September 2023, is the blueprint Major League Baseball should use to reach out to new fans.

Baseball fans are fans for life. We love baseball because of the moments that hook us, generally when we’re kids. For me, it was following Rickey Henderson’s quest in 1982 to steal the most bases in a season. (I was 6 years old and wondered where he put all those bases he stole. A big closet, maybe.)

Posnanski chose to highlight the top 50 such magical baseball moments.

“These are moments that have exhilarated us, enchanted us, lifted us, and, yes, broken our hearts,” Poz wrote. “These are moments that have for more than a century made people fall in love with baseball.”

A few of them involve the Reds. Such as Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, the one where Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk waved his game-winning home run fair. Posnanski paints the scene from many angles, including the backstories of players and how the cameraman captured the shot of Fisk “waving at the ball like a madman.”

The Reds, as we know, went on to win Game 7 and the World Series . But it was the Fisk home run that most fans remember.

Pete Rose catching Ty Cobb is moment No. 18.

Posnanski first explained how Cobb actually had two less hits than believed. In the 1910 batting title race between Cobb and Nap Lajoie, the St. Louis Browns gave Lajoie space to lay down several bunts to increase his batting average over Cobb’s. But American League president Ban Johnson wasn’t happy with the shenanigans and “found” two more hits for Cobb. This went largely uncovered for decades.

By that measure, Rose’s 4,192nd hit at Riverfront Stadium on Sept. 11, 1985, was not the record breaker. That was hit three days earlier at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

An interesting tidbit of baseball history, but that doesn’t change that monumental day in Cincinnati we all know.

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Guest Essay

Hey, Losers! Here’s How to Bring Baseball’s Very Boring Era to an End.

By Rafi Kohan

Mr. Kohan has written extensively on the business, culture and psychology of sports and is the author, most recently, of “Trash Talk: The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage.”

Last year, Major League Baseball instituted a slew of new rules that were largely intended to have a single effect: to speed up the game and make it more watchable for fans.

Despite some early wariness from players about things like pitch clocks and the predictable moaning of baseball traditionalists, who’ve always measured their openness to change in geologic time, the updates were eventually celebrated as a near-universal success story. Action in the form of runs scored and stolen bases went up, even as the average time of a nine-inning game went way down — sliced by nearly 25 minutes from the previous season.

Additional rule tweaks are in store for the 2024 season , as M.L.B. hopes to chart an even brighter and more boredom-free future. But if baseball truly wants to up the drama of its games and win back the hearts, minds and eyeballs of fans who’ve been abandoning America’s pastime in favor of other sports, perhaps it needs to look to the past. Which is to say: It’s time to bring back bench jockeying.

In its early days, in the mid-19th century, baseball was seen as a genteel sport, defined by guidelines of ethical behavior that were agreed upon by gentlemen’s clubs. All that changed in the 1880s, when a ballplayer named Arlie Latham started making a whole lot of noise. As a player, Latham peaked in the 1887 season, in which he batted .316, stole 129 bases and scored 163 runs. But his biggest contributions can’t be captured with statistics: Latham’s legacy was built on his pestering antics — a voluble and ruthless brand of psychological gamesmanship that laid waste to the sport’s gentlemanly mores.

In those days, ballplayers served as base coaches, and Latham in that role was unrelenting in his efforts to antagonize and disconcert the other team. He’d yell, insult and heckle; he’d try to interrupt a pitcher’s concentration by running up and down the baseline — a tactic that was widely frowned upon and led to the adoption of the designated coach’s box. Newspapers noted his “insane whooping,” “incessant howling” and “disgusting mouthings,” but Latham’s team kept winning. Before long, other teams started howling, too.

Thus emerged the great baseball tradition known as bench jockeying — the practice of showering one’s opponents with verbal abuse in an attempt to disrupt their focus or otherwise screw up their on-field performance. The legendary baseball scribe J. Roy Stockton once called it “probably the greatest cruelty in the American sports picture.” Today, we’d just call it trash talk.

For decades, bench jockeys — also known as “holler guys” — were a standard feature of professional baseball. The best and most effective bench jockeys, who may have owed their success to a fierce wit, a piercing voice or a penchant for creative slurs, could even cling to a roster spot after their actual baseball skills had so degraded that they were as useful to a team as an empty tin of chewing tobacco.

Bench jockeying took many forms. Satchel Paige, the legendary pitcher, would do his talking from the mound. Paige named his pitches — the bat dodger, the trouble ball, the midnight creeper — and psyched out hitters by telling them exactly which one he planned to throw or by calling in his fielders, confident in his ability to strike out the side. “I’m gonna throw a pea at yo’ knee,” he’d yell toward the batter’s box. Meanwhile, as a manager, John McGraw, who was said to have “a genius for making enemies,” would go so far as to hire private detectives to dig up dirt on opponents, which served as distracting grist to be bellowed at critical moments in a game.

At the most basic level, talking trash raises the stakes of a competitive confrontation. It puts more on the line — like pride and possible humiliation — and that makes the outcome of the contest matter more than it otherwise would. It puts more pressure on the performances of all involved, both the talker and the target, and demands to know whether they can handle that added stress and expectation.

It’s not just athletes who become more invested by such bluster and abuse, though. We all do. That’s why trash talk is such a reliable tool for marketers in the sports world and beyond. When professional wrestlers cut smack-talking promos on one another, that makes fans care more about the outcome of the match and draws them into the arena. Trash talk is the secret sauce behind the viral success of Wendy’s social-media accounts , and it’s the foundation for basically all reality television and talking-heads debate shows. It gets us to tune in, to not click away.

In baseball, bench jockeying started to fade from the picture sometime in the mid-20th century. Among other factors, the advent of a players’ union and free agency cultivated a feeling of more fraternity among those in uniform. Athletes also imagined themselves as having more to lose as game checks ballooned in size: No one wanted a retaliatory fastball aimed at his head. (Throughout the bench-jockeying era, violence was not uncommon as a response to verbal abuse.) But without trash talk, baseball has lost more than the occasional dugout brawl and well-timed zinger; it’s lost some of its drama.

For all the success of last year’s rule changes, how many more eyeballs might baseball draw if teams treated one another to a little more loudmouthed bravado, a little more bulletin-board material, before big playoff matchups? Teams and players could talk more trash to one another via social media ahead of a matchup, for one. But even within a game, trash talk could be carried on TV. Many players already wear broadcast microphones to capture the sounds and conversations of the game. There could also be more cameras and microphones embedded on the field itself, like the BaseCam . (In cricket, they have stump mics. )

How much more interesting would an encounter between former teammates like Max Scherzer and Bryce Harper be if the slugger came to the plate barking that Scherzer is too old to still be on the bump? Or if the ace informed Harper he’ll still be making him look silly when he’s 59, as Satchel Paige did with opposing hitters during his late-in-life return to the mound?

In my humble opinion, baseball has always been America’s greatest game. I applaud the willingness of the M.L.B. commissioner, Rob Manfred, to brave the shrapnel by way of punditry last season and make significant changes in a tradition-obsessed sport, because we needed it. Badly. But now that baseball is once again watchable, it’s time to take a page from the past and make each moment on the ball field matter even more. Working together, major-league players can build the sport back up to its former glory and have it reclaim its pre-eminent place in the American imagination — so long as they’re also willing to occasionally tear one another down.

Rafi Kohan ( @rafi_kohan ) has written extensively on the business, culture and psychology of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Trash Talk: The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage.”

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