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| The image of Babe Ruth is from the Erik Overbey Collection in the University of South Alabama Archives. He is pictured during a New York Yankees exhibition game in Mobile, Ala., with Lefty Gomez and Bill Dickey. The image is used with the permission of the Archives. |
Baseball has been a sporting tradition since the middle of the 19th century, providing entertainment for generations of Americans. We asked baseball enthusiasts Stephen M. Grimble, UD vice president and treasurer and author of a book on baseball statistics titled “Setting the Record Straight: Baseball’s Greatest Hitters,” and David W. Smith, associate professor of biological sciences who has coauthored a book titled “The Midsummer Classic: A Complete History of Baseball’s All-Star Game,” the following question:
Q. As we open a new season, what is the game’s unique appeal?
A. Stephen M. Grimble
Until the 1950s, baseball had been America's singular sporting pastime for the better part of a century. During the second half of the 20th century, however, numerous other professional sports were ascendant, and baseball was partially eclipsed, losing permanently its claim to being America's only pastime. And yet for many Americans, baseball retains its hold on the imagination and is evocative of a simpler, seemingly more innocent past that was somehow quintessentially American. The game is an inextricable part of the nation's historical tapestry.
Baseball appeals on many levels. It is a game that is in natural harmony with the seasons, blossoming each spring, blooming in summer and expiring with the arrival of autumn. Unlike any other team sport, a baseball game's duration is not determined by a clock. An average-sized athlete can excel in baseball, and virtually all players have to play both offense and defense. It is a team sport that features the often dramatic one-on-one confrontation between a batter and a pitcher.
Beyond being merely a game, baseball was the vehicle for belatedly launching Black Americans on their long, arduous struggle the past half century to achieve the promise of America as full and equal citizens when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Robinson's pioneering breakthrough occurred long before the rest of American society would become integrated. And has there ever been a greater, more colossal superstar in any sport than the legendary Babe Ruth, whose name and fame to this day are known by young and old alike wherever baseball is played around the globe? That the Babe remains baseball's greatest icon more than 65 years after he hit his last home run is indicative of the game's continuity, appeal and prominence in our country's history.
A. David W. Smith
The question almost answers itself. A major part of the appeal is that the fundamentals of the game have remained unchanged for so long. As a result, a 10-year-old can have a conversation with her grandfather, and they would be talking about the same thing. This cross-generational connection does not exist nearly so strongly with other sports, since the actual playing of the game has changed so much. The second point that occurs to me is that most people can relate to the game and to the players. Even though we can't perform at their level, most of us have played the game and know in general what it takes. For the other major team sports, very few of us have any solid notion of what it would be like to play at a serious level.
March 19, 2002
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