GAME THEORIES by Scott Morgan
America at its best and worse is baseball.
For those who doubt that paradigm, consider the history of both entities: forged on hope, mired in corruption, made resolute by a stubborn need to do something dangerous and somehow make it work. All despite the fact that we are often out-manned, out-scored and out of everything beyond prayer.
Baseball, like America, is a place where the sacrosanct falls prey to the revolutions and where each new generation of players is measured against those who played for our fathers. It is a place where tradition is revered and reviled, where benchmarks are seen both as sacred honors and mere starting points for better things to come.
America, like baseball, is a place where great leaps forward are created by innovators who dared to look beyond the status quo, by those who made an old way look new, a new way look easy and an easy way look like no option at all. And it is a place in which every great step forward is a death knell to something cherished, traditional and beloved.
If there is a single convincing passage in our history books that defines baseball so perfectly as our game, it is the Sixties. Divided by a bitter war and the bloody/euphoric fight for civil rights, America and its game fought to maintain their joint innocence. But the genies of war and strife and corruption were out, and by the end of the decade, it was clear that life had changed; the game had changed; going home had changed.
By the summer of ’69, fans were beginning to give up on both games. Idealists clung to new hopes; purists lamented that the exorbitant, uneven salaries given to players spelled the end of things. The best baseball players then made nearly seven times the average workingman’s wage; the shadiest politicians earned something close.
In January of ’68, a man named Pete O’Brien said, somewhat presciently, "They don’t play ball the same way they did nine or 10 years ago." The players had different goals, different means, different ideas of what made the game so perfect, he said. "It’s not like it used to be."
He may well have been speaking of the White House.
By the mid-Seventies, Henry Chadwick, a one-time proponent of baseball, said simply, miserably, "The national game has been degraded." And by the time the Eighties arrived, baseball and its nation were licking the wounds of their scandals.
And yet, here we are, 130-odd years later. In a world of over-priced players, over-adored leaders and consumed in mourning the way life used to be. In a world of crooked bosses, corporate strong-arm tactics and bad decisions. And hope.
After all, there is always another spring. And there is always a way home. Very little has changed since the 1860s.
Scott Morgan is staff writer for The-Messenger Press.

