By David Walter, Special Writer
Through the good times and the bad — and there have been plenty of both — baseball has held a favored position in the hearts of American writers. Three prominent journalists came to Princeton University Wednesday afternoon to explain why.
”No sport has captured the American writer’s imagination as much as baseball,” said Roger Angell, a legendary New Yorker editor and writer who has published numerous articles and books on the sport since the 1960s.
”It was an urban game played by country people. This connected us — our rural past forming a major phenomenon in our major cities,” he told an audience assembled at Princeton’s McCormick Hall.
For Nicholas Dawidoff, author of the best-selling baseball biography “The Catcher Was A Spy” and a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the sport’s ability to foster connectedness extended to the personal level.
”I felt very close to baseball players,” he said. “I didn’t grow up with a dad in the house and there weren’t a lot of other men around. So for me, the voices out of the radio were really the men in my life. Baseball early on made me feel like a real American boy.”
The players of the past seemed scruffier, scrappier, and more “normal” than athletes in other sports, Mr. Dawidoff said. This made their exploits more relatable to fans and writers.
”Baseball players looked a lot more like us than other athletes. It wasn’t so hard to see yourself as a baseball player,” he said.
However, today’s stars bear little resemblance to the working-class heroes of yesteryear, said Gerald Marzorati, editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine.
”Now we’re interested in players whose connection to place or history may not exist in the same way because from the time they’re 9 or 10, they’ve been de facto athletes,” Mr. Marzorati said.
”They’re put into a sports academies in California or Florida … and if they manage to make it to the Major League they’re these incredible physical specimens. You can’t stand in a major league locker room and in any way feel like them.”
Baseball has also been overtaken in popularity by basketball and football. The rhythms of baseball, Mr. Dawidoff said, do not translate as well to the now-dominant medium of television and viewership has suffered as a result.
”Football has really become the national game,” Mr. Dawidoff said. But, he added, “football is so much less narrative” than baseball in the way games unfold. “And maybe that says something about our culture.”
Baseball has also lost ground with young athletes, Mr. Angell said. “One of the great attractions of basketball as a teenager is that you can begin playing at an early age and make huge amounts of money. It’s about three or four or five years farther away in baseball,” Mr. Angell said.
Mr. Marzorati said the talent problem had a simple cause. Baseball, he said, is “too hard.”
”It just takes too long to get to the point where you can actually be competent,” he said. “And in baseball you’re just so alone in failure.”
The difficulty is what makes baseball so fascinating to watch and write about, they agreed.
”This is why we go,” Mr. Angell said, “because we know that doing things badly — the slump and the failure, and the end of the career — is just hovering all the time. Because we (also) feel this about ourselves.”
