Baseball's reliquary: the oddly possible hybrid of shrine and university

Second, the sad history of racism, where baseball has ever so much to answer for but finally responded well, albeit so belatedly. Again, humble items, easily bypassed, tell deep tales once one knows the context. Consider, for example, the baseball cards for Pumpsie Green and Larry Doby: Green, a utility infielder of no special merit as a player, wins his poignant role in this sad history as the first black player on the last team to integrate--shameful to say, the Boston Red Sox, from New England's bastion of liberty. Doby, a truly great player for the Cleveland Indians, has never received his proper due because he came second, and our culture remembers only front runners: Jackie Robinson, as everyone knows, integrated baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League in 1947; Doby entered just after Robinson, as the first black player in the American League.

5. Social spreadings and meanings. Baseball has become so enmeshed with our general culture that I can only feel sorry for Europeans who, in watching American movies, have to be mystified by the young stud's lament, "I didn't even get to first base with her," or who cannot appreciate the poignancy of a great moment in the history of tear-jerkery--when Gary Cooper, playing Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, asks a physician who has just diagnosed the fatal illness that now bears his name, "Doc, is this strike three?"

Yes, you can use baseball to understand more general culture. But the process can also work in the less-appreciated reverse direction by citing cultural norms to understand baseball's peculiarities. To choose two examples, both auditory rather than visual this time: Everyone knows the ritual of singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh-inning stretch, but where did this ditty--second in inanity and frequency only to "Happy Birthday" as an American universal--come from? The piece sounds like a pop song from the Gay Nineties or the early twentieth century--an entirely correct inference, by the way. But as the Edison cylinder in the Museum's exhibition shows, the words that we know and sing comprise only the chorus for a standard pop tune that has several verses as well. And the verses record the pleas of a woman trying to convince her boyfriend to "take me out ..."!

As a second example, I could never understand why such abominable and silly doggerel as "Casey at the Bat" ever became the canonical poem of both American baseball and the normalcy of failure in general. That is, until I heard the poem in an ancient film of a vaudeville performer (as the Victor disc also in this exhibition illustrates). Then I understood. The poem was written to be declaimed, not to be read silently. Declamation of poetry in the nineteenth century represented a standard social recreation in American life, a fixture of nearly every party, and the doggerel succeeds marvelously in this intended aural context.

Finally, if we need any more proof of the vitality of baseball and the power of genius loci, just stare in reverence at the centerpiece of this exhibition: a pile of dirt from Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers (and the greatest ballpark I ever knew--an admission, remember, that comes from a Yankee fan!). I mean, folks, it's just a pile of dirt. And dirt is dirt. Yeah, and nails are nails. But a nail from the true cross and dirt from Ebbets Field--need I say more? We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow such ground. Robbie did, and Campy, and Duke, and Pee Wee, and also the Preacher--and what poor power do we have to add or detract? So of course I don't care if I ever get back, because I'm there already, and there's no other place to go. Truly we are all in this particular game together, and if we play our collective cards right (after all, my family's going on four generations and still counting), we may ward off strike three for the evolutionary equivalent of forever.