Baseball or College Basketball? – The Weekly Standard (blog)

The season has begun. Yes, THE season. For the baseball season is THE season. Football, basketball, hockey–they’re all nice sports. But baseball is the national pastime. And even if one might actually enjoy watching other sports more, even if baseball isn’t nearly as central to American life as it once was, one should, I think, pay one’s respect to baseball. For one thing, it seems to capture so well so many aspects of human existence: the demonstration of individual excellence which is however displayed as part of a team; the fact that getting a hit a mere 30 percent of the time or winning only 60 percent of your games is the best you can do; the way in which a mixture of skill and luck determines the result; the fact that character often seems necessary to supplement talent for success.
And what of the fact that, even though Major League Baseball was limited for most of its existence to the United States, and now to the U.S. and Canada, the final round of its playoffs is called the WORLD Series? That’s a nice instance of American pride or vanity, but also a nice reminder that such pride can lead to an aspiration for excellence rather than merely reflecting a kind of boastfulness.
In any case, for those of you fortunate enough to be baseball fans, I recommend a long but very interesting article in Sunday’s Washington Post by Barry Svrluga on the great baseball executive, Theo Epstein. You can read it during one of the slow stretches of this week’s games. For baseball also balances rest, even boredom, and excitement in a way that teaches one more about life than the frenetic action of basketball and hockey, or the “huddles” and “plays” of football.
I’ll admit I don’t follow baseball the way I once did as a kid or even a young adult. I regard my role with respect to baseball as Churchill did his relationship to the Church of England: Asked why he rarely attended church even though he was a defender of the Church, he acknowledged that while he was not a pillar of the Church, he hoped he was a buttress, for he supported it from the outside. So while a few of my colleagues sneak off to the sports bar to watch this afternoon’s opening Nationals game, I’ll stay in the office, occasionally checking the score, perhaps, but mostly buttressing their enthusiastic fandom from outside.
But enough of this pontificating about baseball! How about a competition? Pick the two teams that will make the World Series this year, the winner of the Series and the number of games the Series will go–and you’ll receive a TWS prize of amazing, wonderful, great, really YUGE value. So email us your picks here by the end of the week. This will give you something different to focus on during the summer and the fall in case the political season goes as badly as it might. Who cares about the presidency when you might win a TWS pool?