It's All in the Game

Amid the hoopla surrounding Mark McGwire's new major league home run record, the sages of the national pastime are unanimous on one thing. McGwire, they say, has saved baseball. Writing in Sports Illustrated, Tom Verducci declared that McGwire "has rekindled the country's interest in baseball." Peter Gammons, the normally reserved analyst for ESPN and The Boston Globe, wrote yesterday that "in this season...baseball regained one generation and gained another that some felt never would turn its MTV/Nintendo eyes."

McGwire isn't the first man to save baseball in the last few years. Sometime around 1995, the phrase "good for the game" entered the vocabulary of sports commentators, and has lingered ever since to honor those admirable players who have taken it upon themselves to save the sport. Cal Ripken Jr. saved the game in 1995, when he passed Lou Gehrig's consecutive games played record at 2,130. The next year, the New York Yankees again saved the game from imminent demise, pulling together a scrappy and inspirational team of rookies, recovering drug addicts and itinerant veterans to claim the World Series crown, with the illness of Yankee manager Joe Torre's brother Frank providing a dramatic subplot. I have no doubt that the next underdog to win a World Series, the next player to break some hallowed mark, will be duly hailed as the game's newest savior.

But what exactly is baseball being saved from? What dire threat requires McGwires and Ripkens to stave off? I sometimes wonder if anyone knows. The standard answer is that the lingering acrimony from the 1994 player's strike--which caused the World Series to be canceled for the first time since 1904--still plagues the game, and that more generally, as Gammons wrote, our generation has abandoned the national pastime for electronic entertainment, or, worse yet, other sports.

This simply isn't the case. While the strike was a devastating blow to many fans, its effects have been neither as deep nor as dire as the media consensus, and baseball is ill-served by having each new star anointed the game's messiah.

To be sure, the national pastime has seen better days. Greedy players, the disparity between small-and large-market teams and competition from other sports has eroded the supremacy of baseball in the national consciousness. Football, and sometimes basketball, finishes ahead of baseball in polls of sports popularity. Since the '50s--the era Ken Burns and Bob Costas would have us call the "Golden Age" of baseball--other sports have made inroads into the pool of athletes where baseball used to have first dibs.

Still, the game remains remarkably popular. Attendance rebounded quickly after a dip following the strike, and the average attendance now is far higher than it ever was, even in the romanticized '50s. Despite competition for American athletes, the talent pool is now far deeper than ever before. Players from the Caribbean, South America and Japan play in the majors, raising the level of play and expanding the sport's fan base.

And among the much maligned MTV/Nintendo generation (that's us), the level of interest in baseball is not as tepid as the baseball punditocracy seems to believe. The diamonds continue to fill with little leaguers in the spring. Fathers still bring their sons--and daughters--to games. People still rent "Field of Dreams." Other sports may have gained in popularity, but it is a fallacy to assume this has come at baseball's expense. It is possible (at least theoretically) to be both a fan of baseball and a fan of another sport. So why the apocalyptic commentary?

Baseball is mired in nostalgia--a nostalgia more virulent than that which any other sport faces. Change is interpreted, inevitably, as decline. Chattering sports-radio reactionaries decry free agency while forgetting the reserve clause that bound players to their teams, remember fondly earlier eras while forgetting the major leagues were segregated until the late '40s. The mythology of baseball is at once a blessing and a curse; a sense of history can never hurt, but clinging to the past can.

And why the fashion to turn each new star into a savior? I suspect this has something to do with the frenzy of millennial predictions, spawned by the strike, of the death of baseball. None of these predictions have come true, of course, but nevertheless the attitude lingers that baseball is in deep trouble and needs the Herculean feats of McGwires and Ripkens to keep from teetering into oblivion. This is a myth. Suggesting that baseball needs saviors is to suggest it is in a worse state than it actually is, and only further perpetuates the myth.

Baseball can always use home run kings, great teams and great moments. But what it really needs is something more complex than a record-smashing hitter or inspirational underdog. The sport--or rather, the media that reports on it--needs to get over the strike, quit appointing saviors where none are needed and realize that the game ultimately will survive on its own merits, as it always has.

Mark McGwire's significance to baseball should not be downplayed. He has broken--indeed, shattered--one of the most sacred and enduring marks of baseball, and has brought excitement to a season bereft of pennant races. But he also should not be elevated to something greater than he is. He is a great ballplayer, a hero to millions, but not a savior. The game can take care of itself.

Alan E. Wirzbicki '01, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House.