Why Baseball Matters

Just finished one of the smartest books on baseball I've come across in a long time, or maybe even ever: Why Baseball Matters, by Susan Jacoby.

She is indeed the Susan Jacoby, of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, such a hit this past semester in our Atheism course. Add another name to the Church of Baseball register.

Her point in this book is not simply to praise our favorite game but to raise a red flag of concern for its future, in an age that rewards inattention and distraction and discourages continuous (though relaxed) concentration. She understands how true baseball appreciation requires sustained focus, a willingness to notice how much is happening both on the playing field and in the annals of institutional memory when casual semi-observers are sure "nothing is happening" in the game unfolding before them.

My concerns about the future of baseball—a $10 billion sport enjoying an unprecedented era of financial success and labor peace-are not based on misplaced nostalgia for a "pure" game that never existed. They are based on the dissonance between a game that demands and depends on concentration, time, and memory and a twenty-first-century culture that routinely disrupts all three with its vast menu of digital distractions.

Just look around, the next time you're in a ballpark: how many spectators are actually watching the game? How many are instead texting, watching other games in other places via smartphone, playing video games on that same dumb "smart" device? If you're in my town, Nashville, how many are playing shuffleboard or engaging in some other irrelevant diversion in the right field grandstand, backs turned constantly to the field? How many are seated, watching the game while conversing with family and friends? How many people under 30 are even there at all?

It's depressing, but Jacoby's a meliorist with constructive suggestions for how the great pastime can reclaim its rightful place. Most important is for those of us who love it to "make an effort to show the young why we love the game and why they might love it too if they surrendered themselves, as an experiment, to time uninterrupted by clocks and clicks... One kid at a time, one adult at a time."

So for my part, I'll continue to track participation in my classes with a baseball scorecard. Least I can do.

All mean egotism vanishes

May's already more than half gone? How time flies when your family's expanding!

We met Pita and Nell at the Nashville Humane Association on May 1. The place was closed on May 2. We were there waiting for the doors to open on May 3. It's been a blur ever since, they're the highest-energy canines I've ever been around. But life feels right again. Life is just better with dogs.

Better and busier, and disruptive of my old early-morning writing routine. But among the many lessons I've learned from dogs is flexibility and resilience, in the face of loss, disappointment, or just change. A change would do you good, as we heard Jeff Trott sing last night at a terrific Bluebird-style benefit show. (He wrote that Sheryl Crow hit, along with Soak Up the Sun, If It Makes You Happy, and lots more.) Fun night!

Did somebody say resilience? That's just another word for returning to life, bouncing back, making a new plan, getting on with it, and maybe sometimes changing your mind.

I'm in the middle of Michael Pollan's remarkable new book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Toying in chapter four with the notion that mind-altering organic compounds might actually trigger noetic experiences with a profound spiritual dimension, but uneasy about "spirituality" that's not been disentangled from discreditable supernaturalism, he quotes Emerson's famously strange line:

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into
infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball.

And then Pollan speculates that genuine spirituality just may be that condition of egolessness, the transparency of vision without an overbearing sense of subjective selfhood, however arrived at. I'm with him on that. I've stood on the bare ground of transparency myself, not catalyzed by mushrooms or acid or toad venom (!) but by the footsteps that carry me away from all mean egotism.

I'm always carried by my own footsteps, for sure, but am happily accompanied again now by my four-footed companions' pawsteps as well. We three don't need psychedelics to change our minds.