THE IVORY MOUND

Why do intellectuals love baseball?

IF you thought baseball season was boring enough, consider that it is merely the harbinger of something far more boring, the baseball fan. Or, to distinguish the fan I have in mind from genuinely passionate fourteen-year-olds and elderly ex-semiprofessionals, The Man Whose Interest in Baseball Is Transparently Self-Infatuation. This new social type justifies himself with the writings of Roger Angell and is remarkable for a similarly ponderous approach to what used to be considered a very simple game. He is always eager to establish his unaffected interest in the pastime but at the same time wants you to understand that he is a connoisseur of its innumerable fine points. Slugfcsts amuse him in a distant way, but it is clear that he considers the home run (except as a statistic) rather gauche. He much prefers to see the leadoff batter walk, steal second, go to third on a fielder’s choice, and score on a sacrifice fly—and the game to end 1-0. The pitchers’ duel is the summit of his felicity—such a contest is, of course, virtually invisible, but it affords him the opportunity for many exquisite sensations, all of which he will describe at such length that each inning will seem to have twelve outs. As for his complacency at the seventhinning stretch—his bland smile, his exaggerated spasms of relaxation—it is all beyond bearing. Of course, he admires the Orioles. Naturally he drinks beer.

Baseball is in its essential structure a nostalgic game, its spatial organization reiterating the American myth of lonely heroism. But the Self-Infatuated Fan is nostalgic for something else, the old days before he became sophisticated and affluent. Or so he would have you think. For his ostentatious delight in simplicity is no more than a way of drawing your attention to his present state of successful cultivation. He is like one of those eighteenth-century aristocrats who affected an enthusiasm for Rousseau. Many of those poseurs ended on the guillotine; by World Series time you too may develop a nostalgia for those simpler days!

Harry Doyce