Change, tradition; a walk through the Baseball Hall of Fame
“The best part of baseball today is its yesterdays,” Lawrence Ritter, the author of one of the game’s finest and most celebrated books, “The Glory of Their Times,” liked to say.
We hear a lot these days, from the offices of Major League Baseball on down, about how baseball needs to change, to adapt, to evolve so the problems adversely impacting attendance and attention can be solved.
There are too many strikeouts, they say. Not enough hits. Too much shifting. Games that stretch into eternity and bore people, driving them to the high-intensity pop of the NBA and the NFL.
But baseball’s different, right? It’s the national pastime, a secular religion. It’s about tradition and a shared past and history. Change it and you change us. Right?
This weekend, brings the latest crop of inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame — the ultimate repository of the game’s yesterdays — Vladimir Guerrero, Chipper Jones, Jack Morris, Alan Trammell, Jim Thome and Trevor Hoffman. Modern players who now belong to the ages.
Baseball is at a crossroads these days. Revenue is up, but attendance is down. People are worried. The game is struggling to clarify its identity — to balance tradition and marketability so that people will keep coming, drawn by what is increasingly being called “the on-field product.”
This is not just a business conundrum. It is also a very American one — the tension between what was (or what sorta kinda was) and what actually is.
Like the country around it, baseball often gets pulled toward a mythic past that, like all myths, has just enough fact embedded in its story to endure. Both game and nation have been upended by the Information Age and its distractions and diminishing attention spans. Both are buffeted by the complexities of an increasingly demanding and disenchanted constituency.
But our yesterdays, real and imagined, are an alluring siren, as baseball fans who make the summer pilgrimage to Cooperstown know or quickly realize.
Everything about the place — Victorian architecture, green spaces, ubiquitous bunting and constant reminders of its hand-spun farming heritage — seems designed to pull you back in time to a baseball past, and an American past, that kind of existed and kind of didn’t.
Even the choice of Cooperstown was an elaborate transaction between truth and myth aimed at helping an agricultural community transition to a tourist economy.
When I was a kid, the signs here all said “Birthplace of Baseball,” an ode to Cooperstown’s Abner Doubleday, who invented the game one day in 1839.
Except, of course, he didn’t. Like so many good things, baseball emerged not from one single event but from a murky soup of predecessors — things like “town ball,” “old cat” and perhaps even the English game of rounders.
The commission that venerated Doubleday in the early 20th century, and led to Cooperstown’s elevation, was motivated as much by a desire to prove that baseball was a purely American game as it was by historical accuracy. The title of the Hall’s official magazine sums it up nicely: “Memories and Dreams.”