Growing up in a mostly blue-collar family in rural McNairy County, I had a relatively ordinary upbringing for the people of this ordinary province.
My parents were divorced; we were partly-raised by our grandparents, and we were not an especially religious family. We were uninteresting in nearly all aspects, save one.
The Ballards had a peculiar attachment to that oldest and most storied of American institutions: Major League Baseball.
Yes, it’s true that you could find the odd ardent baseball fan here or there in the Deep South, but it was very seldom that one came across a man more devoted to his favorite baseball club than to his professional football team.
It might have been the case that, in the ’50s, baseball was America’s past time, but in the sweltering summers of the Bible Belt in the early 2000s, you would have been hard-pressed to find an old-timer sitting out on the porch listening to the St. Louis Cardinals game on the radio with rapt attention like you might have 50 or 60 years ago. This leads one to ask an uncomfortable question. Is baseball still this nation’s past-time?
It is as true now as it was then that MLB games will fill a stadium to the brim, and even minor league games will attract a good deal of spectators on a pleasant day.
But I can’t help but notice that much of the cultural ground in these United States that baseball once occupied has been ceded to football.
In a way, I can’t blame people. Football is a thoroughly American sport – a crowd of big men giving one another hard knocks is perhaps the best encapsulation of the American ethos ever invented.
And yet, football suffers from one major drawback in my mind, and that is its relative novelty.
The thing that baseball has that football can never have, truly, is a mythic past. Sure, there was a “way back when” for footballers, but for baseball enthusiasts we have not only a “way back when,” but also a “days of yore.”
One need look no further than Babe Ruth himself, a figure thoroughly mythologized in American history. He is, for the sports world, the closest that an American can get to a Ulysses, a Hector or an Aeneas. The only film we have of the man is that old, grainy stuff with the silver patina of age wrapped all about it that only further serves to ensconce the man within a storied pantheon of baseball giants. He was more than one of the greats – he was a demigod.
Men thrive on myths. I knew this when I was a little boy, nourished on fantastical stories about the Babe or Jackie Robinson. Then I would see the game in action, how it slurred and slugged through the midsummer heat, how the battle between the pitcher and the batter took on the form that I had dreamed of in my head.
I could almost picture Hank Aaron or Bobby Thomson in the batter’s shoes about to bust the cover off of that little ball that had a 1,000 eyes glued to it.
This, I would say, was the stuff of legends. And that is why I feel confident in saying that baseball is still America’s game.
