The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History : Spring 1985, No. 1

The National Pastime offers baseball history available nowhere else. Each fall this publication from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) explores baseball history with fresh and often surprising views of past players, teams, and events. Drawn from the research efforts of more than 6,700 SABR members, The National Pastime establishes an accurate, lively, and entertaining historical record of baseball. A Note from the Editor, John Thorn: What is baseball to America? Each in his own way, the writers in this edition of The National Pastime confront that question and suggest different answers. Where all agree, however, is that while baseball is surely a game—a fact sometimes obscured in a gumbo of "rites of passage" and "cosmic resonances"—it is also more than just the game of our youth. (Why else study a box score, or read a publication like this?) Merritt Clifton, in "Where the Twain Shall Meet," points out that America's national pastime has long since gone international. Now baseball may —perhaps must—provide a model to all humanity of how the values of the individual and those of society can be in harmony. For Clifton, "the twain" signify not only East and West but also male and female, winter and summer, farm and city, war and peace. Can baseball light the way for the world's tribes to come together as one? Read this provocative piece, beginning on page 12. Baseball is sport, and it is business. John McCormack, in "Let's Go Back to Eight-Team Leagues" (page 2) proposes a revolutionary plan—in the sense that the old has revolved 180 degrees to become new again—to make baseball better sport and better business. He makes sense—here's hoping that those in a position to effect such change consider the reasoning. In the same vein, Gary Hailey looks back to the events of seventy years ago—particularly, the dismantling of the Federal League. This chaotic retreat culminated in the famous Supreme Court ruling of 1922 exempting Organized Baseball from anti-trust legislation. Hailey clears up many misconceptions about baseball's legal standing—including the erroneous notion that the Court ruled in favor of baseball because it was "not a business"—and poses to today's owners and players a highly cautionary tale. Baseball is mathematics (what isn't, all you Pythogoreans must be muttering). It is governed by the laws of nature, the laws of man, and the laws of probability. In its order and regularity, it seems an exemplar of fairness in that what one sees is what one gets. For dissenting views, see Pete Palmer's "Do Clutch Pitchers Exist?" (page 7) and Frank P. Bowles; "Statistics and Fair Play: The Oliver System" (page 74). Baseball is a myth machine, writer-fodder for remembrances of things past. See David Sanders' "Farrell as Fan" (page 85) and Jack Zafran's "The Last Brooklyn Dodger" (TNP's first entrant in the realm of fiction, page 23). And baseball is, as the current TV spots rightly put it, a game of fathers and sons, a bridge across the generations. It not only has tradition, but in this experimental, diverse, volatile society of ours, baseball is tradition, the tie that binds where faith, community, and family fall away. Fred Ivor-Campbell writing of the Providence Grays of a century ago; Bill Mead recalling the Flint Rhem caper of 1930; Mark Gallagher exorcising the "Damned Yankees" of 1959: The skein of baseball's history is all of a piece.