Time Capsule

Baseball, maybe more than any other major sport, draws fans who like to allegorize it and its varied parts. This happens in part because professional baseball has a longer history on the national stage than do its companion sports, so its changes since the late 19th century connect with changes in our nation's society and culture.

But are these allegories real, or are they just sappy sentimentality? An awful lot of them play on nostalgia and could be just airy statements without a lot of basis in fact or reasoned thinking. Richard Skolnick decided to examine several of them in the early 1990's and created Baseball and the Pursuit of Innocence: A Fresh Look at the Old Ball Game. In it he reflects on those allegories and whether or not they really can indicate the "old-fashioned" values they are said to represent.

From Skolnik's point of view, there's a way of looking at baseball that does exactly what baseball fans claim it does. The value of patience, for example, that a 162-game season requires in order to succeed can easily serve as a model for the way patience helps people navigate regular life issues as well. The high failure rate -- the best hitters miss the ball more than half the time -- models how much of life can be a struggle to get back up again after falling down.

Innocence offers a way to reflect on baseball that supports the idea it reflects time-honored values, but Skolnik takes care not to imply his vision is the only way to see the game. He's also clear-eyed about the way that some players, managers and writers romanticize the sport, and about how some of the allegorical lessons we are to draw from it contradict each other -- which makes it clear that some aspects of baseball can be molded to fit whatever the eye of the allegorizer wants to see.

In one way Innocence came at an odd time. Team owners had pushed Commissioner Fay Vincent out of office in 1992 and replaced him with an ownership committee kind of structure headed by Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig. Players' union representative Donald Fehr had zero trust in Selig's good faith and not much more in the owners as a whole. The collective bargaining agreement ended in December 1993, just two months before Skolnik's book was published. The owners' proposed agreement contained a salary cap and several other provisions that Fehr and the players' union rejected. Barely five months after a book about baseball's expression of longtime virtues was published, major leaguers walked off the job. A month later the World Series was canceled. Business bumped Skolnik's ruminations aside and the vices of greed, dishonesty and double-dealing supplanted the virtues he'd considered.

After several years fans finally began coming back in numbers that matched pre-strike totals. Toughened by the exposure of the seamy business side of the game, fans weathered revelations of performance-enhancing drugs and how they fueled some modern stars' big numbers. Still, read today Innocence shows a quaintness, more connected to the way people might have thought of baseball and its players in the middle of the century. The game's values and virtues remain, but Innocence seems like an account of them written in Eden. We consider them today in a more fallen light, but Skolnik provides a good reminder of both the virtues allegorized by the way the sport is played and the way we once looked at them.