Take Me Out to the Ballgame

But Spare Me the Lies About Anything Being Possible

Baseball, like America, is based on a lie: that the past doesn’t hold us back; that the old ties and old bonds can be cast away; that each new season offers a fresh opportunity for all contestants to triumph.

Baseball’s Opening Day might be the Christmas of this American myth of renewal. On most Opening Days, fans and announcers speak the shiny optimism that all things are possible, that the pitiful Pittsburgh Pirates and the rich and talented Boston Red Sox have the same record (0-0) and the same chance. But these days Opening Day feels different and less hopeful. Perhaps that’s because the country feels different.

Baseball and America are each stuck, and in similar ways. The game and the country rode high for a long time. They seemed to reach new heights of individual achievement (record home runs, record personal wealth) and economic growth (baseball and Americans had never been richer than they were in 2007). And then the bubbles burst, and we saw that our gains had mostly been illusory.

We had stumbled before. What was different this time was what tripped us up: Our belief in our own lies, our own unwarranted optimism in our ability to conjure fresh starts.

We built teams and lives on the shiny optimism that everyone could be a home-run hitter and a homeowner. That it was entirely reasonable to assume that pitchers and retirement accounts would grow bigger and bigger forever. We came to believe that success was a birthright, achievable in an age of unprecedented opportunity, when technology would relegate old constraints to the dustbin of history. No one except a few outcasts (a handful of reporters, a few federal agents in Northern California, short sellers, and other notorious pessimists) noticed that our growth was based on a heavy consumption of performance-enhancing drugs and sub-prime mortgages and our own bullshit.

The bust came, and baseball and the country remain stuck. This is not strange. What’s strange is that we’re not stuck because of the bust. Baseball feels stuck because we had been living on lies for so long – we no longer knew what was real. Which pitchers and hitters were drug cheats? Which were truly great? What banks were solid? Which homes were really worth their sales price? We can’t rely on the records – whether they are Roger Clemens’ strikeouts or Barry Bonds’ slugging percentage, or Bank of America’s mortgage files – because we don’t know their real value.

Maybe we can be certain of the temperature on Opening Day, but we’ve lost most of our other objective measurements. The hardest lesson of the crash is that when we buy into delusions about inevitable happily-ever-afters, we poison the future. We can’t make plans without a reliable past against which to benchmark the present, and plot a future course, in a truthful manner. This is what it means to be stuck.

Take the New York Mets. It turns out that the franchise’s growth, players and new stadium (named after a bailed-out bank) were made possible by profits that the team’s owners made via their investments in the Ponzi scheme of their friend Bernie Madoff. The result: the team is paralyzed, with its fans, owners and players uncertain of who is in charge, if players will be paid, if there is any real chance of on-field success.

When you’re in purgatory, as baseball and the country are, the arrival of a new season is not a cause for celebration but rather an unsettling reminder of how little has changed, and how stuck you are. The new season is not new enough. After all the fraud and failure, why does everything look so familiar? Wall Street remains all powerful, unchastened. The New York Yankees still have baseball’s largest payroll. The drug cheat Alex Rodriguez is still hitting home runs, making $30 million a year, and dating Cameron Diaz. The divorce of the McCourts, the couple who own the Dodgers, is hardly the change we can believe in.

Some of us are angry, and shocked, and hurt by all of this. But should we be? After all, the rich and the powerful and the famous and the talented have been awful disappointments to the rest of us only since the beginning of recorded time. Might the problem be with our expectations, our belief that contests should be fair and honest and that the winners should be the deserving?

The historian John Thorn writes in his new book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, that baseball has always been something of a fraud, its principles mostly fictional inventions of the game’s promoters. “In no field of American endeavor is invention more rampant than baseball, whose whole history is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community and fair play,” Thorn writes. “The game’s epic feats and revered figures, its pieties about racial harmony and bleacher democracy, its artful blurring of sport and business – all of it is bunk, tossed up with a wink and a nudge.” The chasm between baseball’s story of itself and reality feels just about as wide as the gap between the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and a U.S. constitution that enshrined slavery.

The gap between myth and reality leaves us a choice. Swallow the myth whole (one could call this the Tea Party option). Or turn in anger from baseball (there are other sports) or the U.S. (there are other countries).

There’s also a third way, the one Thorn suggests in his baseball history: embrace the contradictions and celebrate the flimflam. We should love the game not because of its ideals but for its gloriously low entertainment. And we should love this country not because of its perfect ideals but because it is a perfectly crazy place of hucksters and frauds.

So the best news about the new baseball season may the revival of the stolen base, which had become a lost art in recent years as teams preferred to wait for steroid-fueled sluggers to hit home runs. Smaller men are now practicing theft on baseball diamonds in the broad daylight around second base. And why stop there? Let’s find joy in the dirty old tricks of stealing an opponent’s signs, of corking bats, of adding illegal substances to the ball (and not to the ballplayer). The pitcher Gaylord Perry once wrote a memoir about his spitball. And he’s in the Hall of Fame.

This attitude offers the best way of keeping our good humor, while also reminding ourselves that we are surrounded by con men and should hold onto wallets.

And Americans, especially those who are baseball fans, would do well to remember that this country – and the people in it – never got very far by being good. We’ve prospered when we ran away from home and stole and grabbed and warred and conquered. This country’s winners, to paraphrase the legendary Yankee hurler Lefty Gomez, have always been lucky, and not often good.

We should not head to the ballpark – or to the school board meeting, or to participate in our government in Washington – out of any strong faith in equal opportunity or fair play. The game is crooked. The Yankees will win. The Pirates won’t.

No, the reason to buy a ticket and join the crowd is that, in this world, life is a bit easier when we can be with each other. Because there are no truly new beginnings, we should cling to our fellow fanatics, spend beautiful evenings watching the game played on beautiful fields, and enjoy listening to each other’s sweetest lies.

Joe Mathews, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is associate editor of Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo courtesy of Brandon Doran.


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