Benjamin Samuels, 23’

If you didn’t watch the World Series last week along with your 96.8% of the country, I will take the liberty of alerting you to that you are deserving of the disapproval of every American baseball fan.

    How do the strings of our cultural fabric feel? Does it give your inferiority complex a sense of gratification to actively chip away at our country’s institutions?

    You can’t say you were busy because the series takes at least four days. Your excuses get you nowhere. Before the grand jury of Americanism, unless you watched at least one game in the series, you are given until the end of this article to rent your clothes, donate to charity, and repent for your repugnant crimes against this nation.

Still, maybe you’re just not a sports fan: men (or women) running around in tights seems silly to you. Why should you suffer for a preference? And indeed at first glance, baseball may seem no different from anything else in its category, a different mix made from the same two or three ingredients. The same might be said for our country..

    There’s a ball, running, throwing -- what’s baseball bringing to the world?

Let me first take it upon myself to dispel the fantastical idea, concocted by the self-hating adherents of lesser sports that baseball stands on an equal playing field with all other physical contests. Soccer, basketball, hockey, et al, can be called “sports.” Baseball is baseball, and defies your silly labels.

    Imagine the barest starting point for a sport: person A tries to get an object somewhere while person B tries to stop them. 

(What about running, or wrestling, you ask? Physical contests are for uncultured wannabee oxen, and will not be given space on the pages of this hallowed publication). .)

    Rugby is the most obvious example of a basic game. But rugby is not very popular, and, with good reason. Look how close it is to this starting game, after all! It’s just people trying to move something and other people trying to stop them. It’s crude, brute, devoid of meaning. You could get the same satisfaction from watching particles collide or drawing lines in random directions across a page.

Now, how many people stop sniffing when we allow ourselves one -- one! -- complication on the base, A-B game. Immediately you get soccer, basketball, lacrosse, field hockey, and -- apologies, Bardbarians -- Ultimate Frisbee. Suddenly, most people in the world are fans. After introducing just one complication into what we all can agree is a brutish and uninteresting game!

    Yes, all of our game consists of people ramming into each other… but the ball is bouncy! Civilization central. Aren’t I quite intelligent, the NBA thinks to itself. 

    Giving yourself room to add a full two -- two! -- complications on our utterly boring base game, you get hockey (ball on ice, pieces of wood), tennis (rackets, shot boundaries), cricket (a field to hit out of, sides that switch off), and the allegiance of the rest of the world’s sportswatchers.

    Baseball might be said to be the world’s only abstract game. You could try to say that it’s the home team’s goal to get the ball into the catcher’s mitt, and the other’s to stop them, except that the home team is perfectly happy if a hitter flies out. So, it’s the home team’s goal to keep the ball on the ground. Except for groundouts, which they happen to like as well.

    The away team wants to get to home plate, except they start on home plate. They want the pitcher to throw balls too far away to hit, and also want balls close enough to hit.

    The game has no time limit. The defense has the ball, but the offense scores points. 

None of it makes sense, which is why it’s beautiful. There’s no clear evolution between it and two cavemen clunking each other on the head with rocks.

And here’s the capper: baseball as a sport is so strange that it literally only makes sense to four places in the whole world -- America, the Caribbean, Japan, and South Korea. Hockey’s popular anywhere cold. Basketball’s popular everywhere, particularly countries with taller individuals. Soccer’s popular everywhere, period. Like all good products of culture (as opposed to a product of nature, like running), baseball’s only popular in a few places, and in these places it is very embraced. There’s something in your DNA as an American, rather than your DNA as a human being, that inclines you towards baseball.

    Why? I don’t know. I could tell you my theories and cap off the essay with a stirring, patriotic flourish; I could tell you that it treats the players like individuals rather than a means to end, and that a sport with such a diverse range of positions appeals to a country of diverse skill sets -- but I don’t think I need to. I think, deep down, you already know.