Why Baseball Matters

A best-selling author and passionate baseball fan takes a tough-minded look at America’s most traditional game in our twenty-first-century culture of digital distraction

Baseball, first dubbed the “national pastime” in print in 1856, is the country’s most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball’s greatest charm—a clockless suspension of time—is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction.

These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position—in reality and myth—in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War—when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps—to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online “fantasy baseball” to attending real games.

Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather’s bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball’s history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.

Why X Matters: Featuring intriguing pairings of authors with subjects, each volume in the series presents a concise argument for the continuing relevance of an important person or idea.

“As Major League Baseball attempts to quicken games to appeal to younger fans, Susan Jacoby suggests how to reinvest youth in the National Pastime amid digital distraction.”—Michael Gavin, Newsday

“Baseball may be the only sport that has to justify why people love it. Jacoby, whose scholarly focus is on religious liberty and atheism, wrote this entry in Yale's ‘Why X Matters’ series on the national pastime, detailing how the game connects people to each other and to the past. She also makes an excellent case for why baseball fandom is in decline — and suggests ways to arrest that.”—Chris Foran, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

"A fan is born! I knew nothing about baseball before reading Susan Jacoby’s brilliant book, and now I’m determined to take in the next Mets game."—Louis Begley, author of Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters

"Well-informed, rich in historical information, and lucidly argued, Susan Jacoby analyzes contemporary baseball which, despite the loss of younger, distracted fans and the shrinkage of African-American players, she rightly sees as our "glorious pastime" with a capacity to reawaken loyalty and passion among a new generation of fans."—Murray Polner, author of Branch Rickey: A Biography

A conversation with Susan Jacoby

What compelled you to write this book?  How does baseball figure in your life?  
 
Baseball has been an important part of my life since early childhood, when I learned to understand this complicated game while watching the Chicago White Sox with my grandfather and his friends on the color television set—the first in the neighborhood—in my grandfather’s bar. Apart from reading, baseball is the only pastime that has given me immense pleasure throughout my life.
 
Does baseball matter?  How will baseball have to change in order to keep mattering?
 
In recent years, I became disturbed by statistics showing that baseball has the oldest, whitest, most male audience of any major sport. I wrote this book because I wanted to explore the reasons why this oldest American-made game is having trouble attracting a younger generation of fans. Consumers of digital media are used to instant gratification, and baseball’s attraction is only apparent to those willing to invest enough time to understand what is happening when nothing obvious—like a home run—is taking place.
 
Baseball matters precisely because it stands out as an alternative to our digitally obsessed culture of distraction. In this book, I celebrate the joys of the long game in an impatient world.
 
How is this book in keeping with your other writing?
 
I started my writing career as a reporter for the Washington Post and am best known today for my books about the history of secularism and freethought. But I never stopped being a baseball fan. Most of my books deal, on a number of levels, with the importance of critical and logical thinking—and baseball is, as far as I am concerned, the thinking person’s game.