As the threat of terrorism looms, the economy deteriorates, and the culture flounders, one thing remains a constant in America: there will be baseball. It is true that football long ago surpassed baseball as the nation’s most popular sport, but Alexander Cartwright’s much beloved brainchild remains America’s pastime and purportedly the favorite sport of many conservative intellectuals. Inherently American and merit-based, baseball and conservatism appear to share as tight an embrace as Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson after game seven of the 1955 World Series. “It has no clock, no ties and no Liberal intrusions into the organized progression,” conservative columnist and baseball enthusiast George Will once wrote.
I love baseball. My beloved Minnesota Twins just clinched the AL Central, I just got to see them play in Seattle, one of those places when nothing else on the outside matters. Neither politics, religion, famine, or pestilence matter on a beautiful sunny day when you sitting in the center field bleachers watching Joe Mauer drop an extra-base hit down the left field line.
Imagine my dismay when I read about Conservatives trying to claim baseball as their own. Yes, I suppose if you want to, you can find virtues in anything that can be used to support your philosophy or ideology. Really, though; baseball is about as Conservative as universal health care…and it’s about as Liberal as tax cuts for the wealthy. Regardless of who you are and whatever your political/ideological orientation happens to be, baseball is simply not yours to claim. Some things in life just are what they are. They’re not Liberal, they’re not Conservative…they just are. Baseball is one of those things. It’s American, just like apple pie and extraordinary rendition. So can we please just leave the politics and the self-righteous co-opting out of America’s pastime?
Play ball, y’all….
