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    Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
    Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
    Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games

    By A. Bartlett Giamatti

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A philosophical musing on sports and play, this wholly inspiring and
    utterly charming reissue of Bart Giamatti's long-out-of-print final
    book, Take Time for Paradise, puts baseball in the context of
    American life and leisure. Giamatti begins with the conviction that our
    use of free time tells us something about who we are. He explores the
    concepts of leisure, American-style. And in baseball, the quintessential
    American game, he finds its ultimate expression. "Sports and leisure
    are our reiteration of the hunger for paradise- for freedom
    untrammeled." Filled with pithy truths about such resonant subjects as
    ritual, self-betterment, faith, home, and community, Take Time for Paradise
    gives us much more than just baseball. These final, eloquent thoughts
    of "the philosopher king of baseball" (Seattle Weekly) are a joyful,
    reverent celebration of the sport Giamatti loved and the country that
    created it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateMar 15, 2011
    ISBN9781608194414
    Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
    Author

    A. Bartlett Giamatti

    A. Bartlett Giamatti served as commissioner of Major League Baseball from April 1, 1989, until his death on September 1, 1989. He had previously been the president of the National League, starting in 1986. He was a scholar of the English Renaissance at Yale University, a beloved professor, and later became its youngest president.

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    Reviews for Take Time for Paradise

    3.5/5

    97 ratings38 reviews

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    • 4/5
      When a piece of sports writing references, in the first few pages of the first chapter, Shakespeare, Thomas Carlyle, historian Allen Guttman, and Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1621-95), you can be pretty sure it's about baseball. No other sport seems to produce quite the kind of prose baseball does. Bart Giamatti was a master of that prose -- his "The Green Fields of the Mind" is a stands out even among the many great pieces of writing collected in Baseball: A Literary Anthology -- but also a master of the quality of thought required to keep that sort of prose from being pretentious or downright ridiculous. "Take Time for Paradise" won't take long to read, but its reflections on the nature of cities, of sports and leisure, and ultimate of being human, will stick with you for a long time.The second section of this essay, called "Community," includes some thoughts on why home plate on a baseball diamond is called "home." It brought to mind, of all things, George Carlin's bit contrasting pastoral baseball, where the object is to get safely home, with martial football, where the objective is to penetrate the opponent's defense and rush or throw a bomb into his end zone. Carlin plays it for laughs, but it's making much the same point Giamatti is. There's a reason baseball carries so much nostalgia with it. As Mary McGrory said, "Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become." If football is a metaphor for war and empire (and hardly even a metaphor anymore -- see Gregg Easterbrook's new "The King of Sports: Football's Impact on America"), then baseball can be a metaphor for life. Or as George Will might, and probably already has, put it, life is a metaphor for baseball. Either way, take time for "Take Time for Paradise." You don't have to be a philosopher to enjoy baseball (fortunately), but sometimes a little philosophy can help.
    • 5/5
      In this magnificent gem of a book, Bart Giamatti argues for a classical view of sports and leisure generally. Drawing heavily from Aristotle and Shakespeare, he argues that the mark of truly free people is in how they use their freedom. Many areas of our public and private lives have some element of "work" to them, some compulsion to produce in a particular way, but in our games, we live by the rules which we choose for no particular reason at all. When we play a game, we choose to create the game's world for a while, and even when we participate as spectators, we hope to see a spectacular performance within that created world. This is a philosophical, abstract section; beautiful but (as other reviewers have noted) deceptively deep in places.In the second section of the book, Giamatti considers the role of sports in cities, pointing out the social benefits and tensions in our arenas. This section is somewhat more practical and less theoretical. With twenty-some additional years, we can see Giamatti's predictions coming through in some places, such as his concern over athlete's salaries and the cost of the sport becoming a barrier between the athlete and the fans. In others, such as the issues around steroids and cheating, we can only wonder how he might have handled the 90s or 2000s. As the first section makes you think about theories, the second section makes you consider our current world of leisure.The third section is a smart man's paean to his beloved sport of baseball. The baseball section of your local library or bookstore is chock-full of this kind of writing, and Giamatti's is as good as anyone else's I've read. That said, it's not particularly better, nor does it reflect his status as commissioner in any obvious way. Perfectly nice to read, though, and a dense volume like this probably does need a lighter ending.
    • 4/5
      Giamatti certainly had a high love of baseball, and of sport in general, as you can see by this treatise. It comes across clearly, even through the more formally written, philosophical prose. He situates it within the ideas of what the purpose of life is, what we really should seek to do, and the amount of freedom we can get, the way that freedom and enjoyment can be enhanced by a set of rules to work with it in, and connecting that with American ideals. Overall, yes, this is well-written and thought provoking sports philosophy.That said, man, it's slim... and if I didn't know that it actually was completed and out for publication before Giamatti died, I would have figured it for an incomplete posthumous publication. I don't think I really got a summation of his arguments, as I often expect from academic pieces of this length, and it's quite svelte for a non-academic book, indeed. I did enjoy it, and you can try to imagine what else he might have had to say had he left longer, but I can't see this as much but a library read, if you run into it.
    • 2/5
      I love baseball, but I couldn't get through this book. Too dry. Maybe another time.
    • 4/5
      Before his death, A. Bartlett Giamatti was a Yale University professor and Major League Baseball commissioner. In Take Time for Paradise, he philosophizes on the importance of leisure and sports - specifically baseball - in American life.I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book to the average baseball fan. It takes that special type of fan that doesn't just enjoy watching the game, but enjoys talking about it, for lack of a better word, deeply. I kind of expected this to be more about the game of baseball, maybe with some history thrown in. In fact, it's more of a philosophy book, taking the argument that sports are transformative and more important than "just a game," then spending the last third discussing baseball specifically. I found some of his points interesting to think about: Giamatti's thoughts leisure becoming more of an private than a public endeavor are, I think, even more true today than when the book was first published in 1989. Other times, I struggled to understand what he was saying or thought he was reading too much into things - but then, my favorite sport is football, so maybe if he was talking about that I would have found more to agree with.
    • 3/5
      I first read this slim volume, which is an ode to sports, particularly baseball, back in 1991, shortly after it was released. I recall it as a beautifully written, elegant little book by the late baseball commissioner. I recall it as being one of the best sports-related books I'd ever read.Re-reading it 20 years later, I'm not nearly as enamoured with it as I'd been. I almost wish I hadn't re-read it. My 20 years-younger self loved Big Ideas and putting the commonplace into the Big Picture. These days, I'm less inclined to think like that and so, what I thought was an absolutely terrific book when I read it in 1991 is only so-so for me now.
    • 3/5
      This book is enjoyable on a number of fronts. For me, it was interesting to look back on Bart Giamatti's viewpoints regarding leisure and the state of society when he originally penned his three part essay.Giamatti definitely comes from a different generation, and as a historical and philosophical treatise, it is worth noting the differences between then and now. The book is divided into three distinct sections, one based on the idea of sport and leisure, what a community means based on that context, and, finally, how baseball fits into this perspective. Most people will likely be most interested in the last portion, as the author was, after all, the commissioner of Major League Baseball for a number of years.It is in this last section, though, I feel that Giamatti overstates his case and agrandizes the sport he loves so much. This is understandable, however, given the context of his career as the commish. The measurements mentioned and the extension of the field dimensions to take on some sort of almost cosmic significance, however, stretches credibility and comes off more as waxing poetic and overanalyzation.Given the failing of the final portion of the essay, the other two sections on what is leisure and what defines a community are far more interesting. The societal implications of sport and leisure are discussed and can definitely be extended and applied to today's society, which can make for an interesting intellectual exercise.If you're going to read this looking for something universal about baseball, I don't think there's much here. However, the beginning of the essay does provide good fodder for thought and could spark interesting conversation with others, or even within yourself. It's worth reading, since it's short and very well thought out regarding Giamatti's stances on different aspects of society, leisure, and sport.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting philosophical study of leisure and sports in America. Though Mr. Giamatti was commissioner of baseball, this is not a book about baseball; rather, it holds baseball up as the ultimate example of American leisure.
    • 3/5
      This is a reprint of an earlier work b Giamatti. I contains interesting perspectives on leisure, work and sport. The writing style is unusual. He likes long complex sentences which sometimes make it hard to follow his line of thought. The third section devoted to baseball was the most enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      As perhaps the only Commissioner of Major League Baseball who could be arguably more notable for his time outside of that position than in it, this slim volume from the late Bart Giamatti is best described by its subtitle ("Americans and Their Games"). While it has a cover picture of Fenway Park, its Green Monster clad in an American flag, the game is truly about American culture and leisure that only weaves in baseball periodically. As Giamatti was an exceptionally well-read writer, his readers must expect frequent literary and historical references that support his analysis of American life and its pastimes.After reading this book, the reader should more readily understand Giamatti's time in baseball and his actions relating to Pete Rose. For Giamatti, baseball was more than baseball, it was about America and its people their culture. And in this book, baseball provides him with a backdrop for analyzing the culture's approach to leisure. And thus, the book will appeal to the more literary-minded of baseball readers.As such, this is a book best read slowly, with time allotted to savor the prose and to seek out exceptional passages such as this one: "Home is a concept, not a place; it is a state of mind where self-definition starts; it is origins -- the mix of time and place and spell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original, perhaps like others, especially those one loves, but discrete, distinct, not to be copied"Full disclosure: I received a review copy via the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.
    • 4/5
      This short book is definitely a mixed bag of goods, as they say. My favorite part was the afterword written by Marcus Giamatti, the late Bartlett's oldest son. (Brother to the more famous Paul.) It was, on the whole, just too chewy for me. There are not a whole lot of people I know, not even here on LibraryThing, that I would even consider recommending this book to. It does contain some true gems of philosophical wisdom, but there is much wading to be done in order to find them.
    • 4/5
      I have always admired Bart Giamatti (MLB Commissioner and scholar) particularly for his adherence to and insistence upon integrity in all endeavors, including baseball. In "Take Time for Paradise," Mr. Giamatti's love for the game, and appreciation for its role in society is abundantly clear. Sports, although leisure in its purest sense, can also be a transformative experience for participant and spectator alike. Cheating, which devalues us all, has no legitimate place in his considered view of sport. The specter of Pete Rose is present, although never specifically mentioned. (This book was written as Giamatti took steps to ban Rose from the game.) This is a philosophical exercise, not a book for the casual baseball fan or reader. How does sport and leisure define a community? Is sport meningless and crass or transformative and unifying? Although slim, be prepared to spend time with Mr. Giamatti's volume as he addresses these and other weighty issues.
    • 3/5
      This book has some interesting insights, and I didn't have trouble understanding the book's second section on community, but the first and third sections made me feel like I was facing Randy Johnson with a toothpick for a bat -- that's how out of my league I felt with the rather academic and abstract material. It's not that the book isn't written well, but I'm just not the right reader for it; someone who has more background in philosophy (and more practice discussing baseball in metaphorical terms) would fare much better.
    • 2/5
      A posthumous publication by a former commissioner of baseball, which reads like a doctoral thesis, on the importance of their games to Americans, with an emphasis on baseball. This might enthrall the Ivory Tower folk, but I really had trouble wading through this; it's that deep. And I love good baseball writing. Even the chapter on baseball (Baseball as Narrative) made me a tad uncomfortable. Giamatti might echo the deep-seated feelings I have about the beauty and blissful pace of the game, and the importance it holds as an integral part of the American fabric. But you just don't say it out loud, particularly in such somber stentorian tones. It squeezes all the fun out of it.
    • 4/5
      Delightful essay on the meaning of sport and leisure in our lives, it's a collection of three chapters that address the self, the community, and the special place that baseball has in the life of America.Chapter One discusses the need for separation we all feel between our "real" lives in an imperfect world and the "perfect" world we try to create with our leisure and sports. It really boils down to a desire on all our parts to return to Paradise - or the Garden of Eden, where we can achieve perfection and where the rules make sense.Chapter Two explores mankind's conquest over nature, both in the development of our very "unnatural" cities and in the games we play. Except for a very few which closely approximate nature, red in tooth and claw, such as boxing - most of our sports instead seek to control nature, much as our cities have. This to me was the weakest chapter of the three.Chapter Three was my favorite. Here the author narrows his discussion to our unique American pastime of baseball. He explains how baseball so closely imitates the American values of freedom, self-reliance and a desire for homecoming. He also explores how closely baseball parallels the act of writing and posits that this is the reason why so many of our writers have embraced baseball. Baseball has a poetry about it and a narrative structure that isn't often found outside the field of writing.He finishes in an epilogue that sums up the preceding three chapters. The last line, "Through sport, we recreate our daily portion of freedom, in public" sums up the entire essay nicely.I enjoyed reading this, but I knew I would before I started. Bart Giamatti loved America, writing, and baseball in a wholehearted way that appealed to me and it's still sad that he's gone.
    • 3/5
      Based on his book >Take Time for Paradise>I believe A. Bartlett Giamatti was an extraordinarily intellegent man, a man who loved philosophy and baseball and that this book was a labor of love for him. So it strikes me as sad that he seems never to have learned what so many writers in the academic world fail to learn, that writing is about communication.There are many ideas worth pondering in this book, but Giamatti makes them hard to gain access to, makes the reader work hard. This is not a book to read, rather, it is a book to study. If you are willing to do that, then this is a book for you, but if you want a quick read, pick up some other book.What is really sad is that Jon Meacham's forward has ideas just as important, just as interesting as Giamatti's ideas, and his writing is vastly better. Why? Because it communicates. The opening paragraph of Meacham's foreward is "worth the price of admission."From the forward: "As a Southerner, a Christian, and a baseball fan, I have long considered myself a man with a tragic vision of the world. To me there is a single inescapable fact of life on this side of Paradise: that the human enterprise to arrange things as we wish is ultimately futile. In hours of illness and danger, of decision and anxiety, we cry to the gods. Desperate and hungry and fearful, we plead with them to let the world unfold according to our hopes and affections."I'm sure it wasn't Meacham's intention, but his foreward made want to read his books, not Giamatti's.
    • 4/5
      If you are looking for a light summer read, do not let this slim volume fool you. A. Bartlett Giamatti's book mixes philosophy and baseball, exploring the customs and relationship we have to this All American Sport. Strong writing, but not light reading. This is a book of philosophy -- and those who would enjoy with book must love both baseball and academic, scholarly writing.
    • 5/5
      Bart Giamatti's Take Time for Paradise is a much-needed philosophical treatise on the nature of sport--and baseball in particular as America's sport--and deserves to be read in light of the massive expenditure of both time and resources on sport in our modern society. Giamatti's discussion of the role of self-knowledge and self-perfection in shaping our focus on sport provides a fresh look at a side of sport that is not often assessed fully: its impact on both the performer and the spectator in making him whole. His discussion on community, convention, customs, and the city is a remarkable synthesis of four ideas which are heavily related but almost never put together the way they should be. He assesses the role of sport for the free individual, and the connection between the ancient Greek word for leisure and the etymological root of school, which are very closely related; he digresses briefly to assess obsolete meanings of the word "fun" (which evidently meant "hoax" in the seventeenth century) and places it all into the context of post-industrial America and its sporting life.Most interestingly, I think the essay gives a great lens through which to view Giamatti's decision on Pete Rose, one which is no longer controversial except insofar as it keeps Rose on the outside of Cooperstown and looking in. Rose, who refused to play by the rules--the conventions established for making order out of individuals' performances in sport and for levelling the playing field so that merit and merit alone in the face of chance can count--was the embodiment of the man whose performance made him not more perfect or more godly, but less godly. He became the slave instead of the free citizen.All of which goes to show that Giamatti's essay is no cloudy, isolated philosophical speculation, but instead a grounded, well-considered, useful, practical treatise that can help us determine what values are most important to us when we play, watch, and officiate sporting events both in person and on television.
    • 4/5
      This book shows off the author's scholarly side, using the game of baseball as a springboard for a deep discussion of leisure. I started it in the hopes of easing into the start of baseball season, and had to change my expectations when the book demanded more of me as a reader than mere passivity (much like the game of baseball itself) to appreciate.Worth my time to read, though, and I recommend it.
    • 3/5
      When I was young and stupid, I hated Giamatti for banning Pete Rose from baseball. Over the years I came to realize that Rose is a cheater and a liar, and that Giamatti's premature death was a great loss for Major League Baseball. This charming little book shows why. Giammatti was an intellectual who took time to philosophize over why Americans play games dropping in a few classical references here and there to illustrate his points. It's a pretty little book that should be enjoyed by baseball fans or people who want to understand the games we play.Favorite Passages:I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of each other and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know. - p. 24-25
    • 4/5
      This slim volume is an unexpected gem. The Commissioner of all-too-short a reign penned a concise account of the role of sport in modern life. He distills the essence of work and leisure with persuasive clarity. "Work is partner to duty, and brother to obligation. Work is the burden we assume, not the one we choose." The relation between the two? : "If work is a daily negotiation with death, leisure is the occasional transcendence of death. If the former is the strenuous avoidance of inertia, the latter is the active engagement of a moment of immortality."He marshals a vigorous defense of sport against those who would demean it as the detritus of post-industrial society, the pablum that serves as ersatz nutrition in a world of nihilism. Sport deserves such an articulate defender, one who reasserts the role of sport as art form and as engagement with primordial timelessness. I recommend this book without reservation. But it will be of special help to the sports lover in search of a broader perspective in which to examine his passion; and equally to the beleaguered fan, wounded by ubiquitous disparagements as "ritual violence", "homoerotic warring", "opiate of the masses", and the like. Bravo!
    • 4/5
      A. Bartlett Giamatti's "Take Time for Paradise" is a short, eloquently written paean to American sports in general and Baseball specifically. It consists of three short chapters. The first two are not about baseball, they examine what sports/recreation mean to us, how it relates to religion and what the historical significance is. It's not necessarily an easy read, to me; it gets a bit deep. Mr. Giamatti was clearly a well educated, eloquent writer.The final chapter is about baseball and clearly shows the love and reverence he had for the sport. He talks about the beauty and symmetry of the game and how much it ties generations together, especially when we talk about the game. Baseball truly is a "talking sport." For me the first two chapters are not necessarily an easy read, but this book deserves to be read by all fans of the game.
    • 3/5
      I found this book to be dull for the most part. The last section of the book was interesting, and made the book a worthwhile read. The book is more philosophical than it is baseball. Giamatti is a very intelligent writer, and he makes many good points. I would not recommend this book to most readers.
    • 4/5
      Giamatti certainly had a high love of baseball, and of sport in general, as you can see by this treatise. It comes across clearly, even through the more formally written, philosophical prose. He situates it within the ideas of what the purpose of life is, what we really should seek to do, and the amount of freedom we can get, the way that freedom and enjoyment can be enhanced by a set of rules to work with it in, and connecting that with American ideals. Overall, yes, this is well-written and thought provoking sports philosophy.That said, man, it's slim... and if I didn't know that it actually was completed and out for publication before Giamatti died, I would have figured it for an incomplete posthumous publication. I don't think I really got a summation of his arguments, as I often expect from academic pieces of this length, and it's quite svelte for a non-academic book, indeed. I did enjoy it, and you can try to imagine what else he might have had to say had he left longer, but I can't see this as much but a library read, if you run into it.
    • 4/5
      Professor of English Renaissance literature and later President of Yale University, A. Bartlett Giamatti, wrote the first section of this essay as a classical picture of the practice of leisure as individual time as opposed to work which is one’s chosen vocation. Man participates in leisure activities which he calls sport and in the 20th century these activities may be one team against another team with the teams being a congregation of athletes proficient in the sport in question. A team may be chosen from among various participants that go to the same elementary school, high school and college or it may be professional athletes paid to represent the team. Giamatti says that these college or professional teams become a community of individuals that band together to accomplish certain tasks (win the game) and that included in these teams are the individual spectators who support that team. A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of the National League of baseball, and later Commissioner of Baseball, wrote the final section as an essay on the beauty of baseball as the national sport of America. It is a masterful description of the game of baseball that includes all of the enjoyment of playing and being a fan of the game. It aids the understanding of this section to have been a collector of baseball cards from 1949 and later and to have been a fan of the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox and to know that Bobby Brown was the third baseman of the New Yankees in 1949 who later became a doctor of medicine and who later became a part owner of the Texas Rangers.
    • 3/5
      This book has some interesting insights, and I didn't have trouble understanding the book's second section on community, but the first and third sections made me feel like I was facing Randy Johnson with a toothpick for a bat -- that's how out of my league I felt with the rather academic and abstract material. It's not that the book isn't written well, but I'm just not the right reader for it; someone who has more background in philosophy (and more practice discussing baseball in metaphorical terms) would fare much better.
    • 5/5
      This is a book on philosophy and is not light reading, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. In this slim volume, Bart Giamatti philosophically muses on sports and play. I found this book to be both charming and inspiring. I completely agree with Giamatti’s conviction that how we use our free time tells us something about who we are. He states that the individual comes to fuller self-realization through playing and through watching sports. The importance of sports lies in the fact that they provide a public space for a particularly valuable communal activity. This book is a short, eloquently written tribute to American sports, specifically baseball.
    • 5/5
      Giamatti's thesis, which has become more true in the 20 years since Take Time for Paradise's first publication, is that sport -- particularly baseball, but all leisure -- defines because they express our hunger for paradise.We know our heroes are personally flawed. But Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds no more diminish the sublimity of their game than pedophile priests, adulterous rabbis or murderous imams decrease the transcendence found in cathedral, synagogue or masjid. Wayward priests – and if sport is American religion, then players are priests – challenge the institution but not the experience. An institution that can not police straying mediators may lead the flock to seek transcendence in other venues but the search will continue.But Giamatti's argument still stands. Overarching the sordidnesses and failings of our idols and priests are those moments of transcendence -- for this son of Boston: the Red Sox seizing four games from the mouth of another annual disappointment, Havlichek stealing the ball, Orr scoring though tripped – that hint we might exceed our limits. Sport matters for those glimpses of the divine.
    • 5/5
      My initial reaction to this slim volume was disappointment. I thought, “Is this all there is to say about sports?” The moment I began reading, though, I was entranced. Giamatti’s writing is succinct, yet full of meaning as a haiku. In three brief chapters he captures the essence of the role of sports for humankind, its attractions and challenges. To understand sports is to understand the human aspiration for order, freedom and immortality. If to understand sports is to understand humanity, then to understand baseball is to comprehend the soul of America. I highly recommend this book to anyone who desires a deeper understanding of sports and their role in our lives.
    • 2/5
      I’ve always been interested in leisure – what it is and how Americans choose to pursue it. I particularly liked David Nasaw’s Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements and Waiting for the Weekend by Witold Rybczynski – both of which were written for general audiences, in very accessible writing styles. When I expressed interest in an Early Reviewer’s copy of Take Time for Paradise, I thought it would be written in a similar style. It wasn’t.This book is an essay set in large type with deep line-spacing, wide margins, and blank pages between its three sections. Still, it’s just over 100 pages. In The Soft Revolution, Neil Postman wrote, "If an idea cannot be expressed in language that a reasonably attentive seventh-grader can understand, someone’s jiving someone else." I think that applies to the first section,” Self-Knowledge.” It was very tough to get into and, in many parts, difficult for me to understand. The subsequent two sections (“Community” and “Baseball as Narrative”) were easier to understand, and I actually found one or two ideas that might need some mulling over. Maybe that’s enough to expect. Academics who are baseball nuts might like this better than I did.

    Book preview

    Take Time for Paradise - A. Bartlett Giamatti

    TAKE  TIME  FOR

    PARADISE

    Americans and Their Games

    A. Bartlett Giamatti

    CONTENTS

    Cover

    Title Page

    Dedication

    Foreword by Jon Meacham

    Preface

    1. Self-Knowledge

    2. Community

    3. Baseball as Narrative

    Acknowledgments

    Epilogue

    Afterword by Marcus Giamatti

    Notes

    Bibliographical Note

    A Note on the Author

    By the same Author

    Footnote

    Imprint

    To Abram and Kathryn Smith

    FOREWORD

    Jon Meacham

    As a Southerner, a Christian, and a baseball fan, I have long considered myself a man with a tragic vision of the world. To me there is a single inescapable fact of life on this side of Paradise: that the human enterprise to arrange things as we wish is ultimately futile. In hours of illness and danger, of decision and anxiety, we cry to the gods. Desperate and hungry and fearful, we plead with them to let the world unfold according to our hopes and affections.

    Yet asking our gods—whoever they, or He, may be—to bend reality to our purposes has always been at best a chancy undertaking. No matter what we ask or offer, the innocent suffer, and the innocent die; some are rich, others poor; some lives seem charmed, others cursed. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, writes the cold-eyed author of the Book of Ecclesiastes, neither yet bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, neither favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. From the Hebrew Bible to The Iliad to the mythical American Camelot, a theme runs steadily through the human story. It was succinctly stated by our King Arthur, John F. Kennedy, who appreciated the ironies and tragedies of history. Life, he once observed, is unfair.

    We are left, then, with the work of redemption—of seeking order, however fleeting, in the chaos, and love amid what the Book of Common Prayer calls the changes and chances of this mortal life. Such is the function of familial and friendly caritas, of religion, of poetry, and of philosophy: the imposition of meaning and stability in a world in which all life, at least so far as we can know for certain, ends at the grave.

    In the marvelous meditation of the following pages, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti—Renaissance scholar, president of Yale University, commissioner of Major League Baseball—turns to the deepest issues of human life and how the games Americans play at once restate the questions and point us toward some kinds of answers. Tracing the ideas of play, sport, city, religion, ritual, will, and imagination from farthest antiquity through 1989, the year the book was first published, Giamatti takes the greatest of American games, baseball, seriously—some might say too seriously, dismissing a book like this as an overblown effort to assign cultural, philosophical, and sociological weight to what is sometimes minimized by that falsest of phrases: just a game.

    To wave baseball off as just a game is like referring to the global events of 1939–1945 as just a war. No one can experience Giamatti’s argument for the centrality and the significance of leisure—a concept that includes baseball—and come away without renewed or, for first-time readers, fresh respect for a mind and a heart capable of placing a pastime he loved in the full flood of time, not to the side or as an afterthought or as a distraction.

    For Giamatti knew the tragedy of the game, and of life, in his bones; as he remarked elsewhere, baseball will always break your heart. Yet he also understood that the game has the capacity to allow its participants and its spectators—its priests and its congregants, if you will—to transcend the tragic, at least for a time. He thus arrives at a vision of baseball as a metaphor for the hunger for home, for security and sanctity and shelter from the storms of a transitory life. Think about it: a batter begins there, takes his chances and sometimes ends up on base, working his way around to … well, in the best of all possible worlds, to home. The journey is perilous and the wayfarers fail more often than they succeed—which, when you stop to ponder things, is true of many of us.

    The joy, however, is in the journey, in the quest for the place you love, and where you are loved. So home is the goal—rarely glimpsed, almost never attained—of all the heroes descended from Odysseus, writes Giamatti. "All literary romance derives from the Odyssey and is about rejoining—rejoining a beloved, rejoining parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder."

    Putting things aright: a noble goal, but one that is finally beyond us. Giamatti’s brilliance is that he sees how baseball is, in the end, a story—a Romance Epic, in his formulation—and we tell ourselves stories to stave off the disorder, to make sense of the insensible.

    And not only we as individuals, but we as a nation. If baseball is a narrative, an epic of exile and return, a vast, communal poem about separation, loss, and the hope for reunion—if baseball is a Romance Epic—it is finally told by the audience, Giamatti writes. It is the Romance Epic of homecoming America sings to itself. It is American because it approximates America at her best: a level playing field, a fresh start every day, a value on merit, not birth, and a premium on practice, not publicity, for what matters on the field is what you do, not who you are; the plays you make, not the pay you take home.

    This book was first published in 1989, in another time, another country, another world. Like the game itself, though, there is something eternal about its language, about its insights, about its truths. To read it again is to be pulled home; to read it for the first time is to hear the voice of a Homeric philosopher of a great game, an exemplar of intellectual engagement with the life of the nation that includes but is not limited to the Republic of Letters. Tragedy, romance, epic—it is all here, in this book as well as this life, and with this new edition comes a new season for Giamatti, and for all of us.

    JON MEACHAM is the author of Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship and American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, which was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. He is an unapologetic fan of the New York Yankees and of the Chattanooga Lookouts of the Southern League.

    PREFACE

    It has long been my conviction that we can learn far more about the conditions, and values, of a society by contemplating how it chooses to play, to use its free time, to take its leisure, than by examining how it goes about its work. I am hardly the first to think so, and I trust I will not be the last. However unoriginal my conviction, it forms the basic assumption for this essay on Americans and their games.

    Briefly stated, my argument is that sports are a subset of leisure and that properly

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