A collection of baseball essays written over 1970-2000, reflecting on the sport’s seminal figures and movements, and how ‘America’s pastime’ reflects the country’s life. Games are a ‘space for ordered living’, according to Bart Giamatti, made not by nature but by free choices. Unlike football or basketball, baseball is played with a rhythm alternating between concentration and relaxation, as befits a 162-game season. Since teams will generally win and lose 40 percent of the time regardless, it’s the habit of the quotidian athletic performance that helps them achieve results in the balance – the thesis of

Men at Work

. Donald Kagan denigrates the thesis as unheroic in a

Public Interest

review republished herein; Will responds this is a Romantic fallacy, lionizing will without disciplined, sustained effort. (Elsewhere he comments that because sport compresses life’s trajectory, sports writers often display facile pathos.) As the author notes, the Greeks considered sport a moral undertaking: by witnessing grace, the soul learns to beauty, by seeing fair competition, the passions are educated. In ‘Good Character, Not Good Chemistry’, he sets forth the case against steroids (and other types of cheating). Winning is valued for praiseworthy attributes, while becoming better (self improvement) implies not only improvement but also the loneliness of the individual regimen. The purpose of umpiring is to regulate striving, not to eliminate violent effort but to regulate it, enabling excellence to prevail. Fans, for their part, are to derive enjoyment for the whole of the contest since pleasure cannot be predicated on outcomes (i.e., losing) that will so often be negative. Will often makes the case that the game has in fact improved. New York teams won 41 of 102 pennants from 1903-53, and 20 of 50 World Series, while there were no teams south of Washington DC or west of St. Louis, whereas since the fall of the reserve clause, very few teams have been repeat champions. As further evidence, he cites attendance: in strike-shortened 1995, 5 teams outdrew Cleveland’s record 2.6 million in 1948; average game attendance [probably tickets sold] in 1954 was 13,000. But the case mainly rests on the feats of the players, which are generally comparable – notwithstanding ‘live balls’, the introduction of the designated hitter, and steroids. There are sociopolitical essays on Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood, the former including the observation that Larry Doby may have been more important than Robinson because he was ‘merely’ talented (by comparison with the surreal Robinson). Will echoes the view that blacks are ‘underrepresented’ in baseball because of the game’s historic connotation with the color line – similar to rugby and apartheid – but does not observe that this helped opened the door to Latin Americans. On Pete Rose-Bart Giamatti, he writes that the important result was baseball’s institutions (i.e., the commissioner’s office) maintained its integrity rather than succumbing to supervision of federal judiciary. Less predictably, he is generally hard on owners during the labor turmoil of the 1990s. John Miller, then broadcasting for the Orioles and Washington DC layer Earl Bennett Williams, is lauded for attention to details: his ‘respect for listeners’ includes fastidious scorekeeping and absence of hyperbole. By contrast, Billy Martin (and Rose) is excoriated for violating baseball’s equipoise – he couldn’t sustain a winning culture. Some nuggets: the introduction of better fielding equipment in the 1880s change the game from a contest between fielder versus hitter to pitcher versus hitter, as prior to, 1 in 2 runs was unearned; players left gloves on the field through the 1940s; the Penn Law Review found the infield fly rule would be superfluous if baseball were to emulate cricket’s sporting ethic – but in America the purpose is to win; a winning team scores more runs in 1 inning than the loser does in 9; the end of the American League umpire’s chest protector lowered the strike zone, but the AL zone remained smaller than the National League’s. In all, the columns hold up well some 30 years later, and Will’s Aristotelian thesis (‘we are what we repeatedly do’) looks no worse for the wear either.