Why has Sky Sports never embraced baseball? One would imagine that a broadcaster with a target audience that is perfectly happy to follow the exploits of grown men playing a stick-and-ball game which sometimes carries on for five days and still does not produce a victor would see the potential appeal of the US's pastime.
Indeed, the popularity of one-day cricket, with its attacking mentality and time constraints, suggests there is a natural fan base for baseball waiting to be tapped. Think of the merchandising opportunities.
Because baseball is a great game. The late Stephen Jay Gould, the populist palaeontologist who died of cancer in his 61st year in 2002, had the fortune to be born into a time and place of one of the game's great eras: New York immediately after the war. This was when the neighbouring Yankees, Dodgers and Giants held a virtual monopoly on the championship, and it seemed that every October brought the parochial drama of a "subway series" which could hold the nation's attention. DiMaggio, Mantle, Maris, Campanella - that spells pure romance.
Mudville is a collection of Gould's writing on the game (he began dabbling in this sideline in the early 1980s), from short newspaper pieces to the more considered essays he produced for his famous column in Natural History. Like any collection, it needs to be dipped into rather than consumed consecutively, for the pieces were written over 20 years and there is inevitably some repetition. In particular, an early section largely comprises short bits for newspapers and, as anyone who has written for these ephemeral organs will attest, there is an irresistible temptation to recycle the good bits. So here there is much regurgitation of childhood memoir, entertaining though it is.
The book opens with a warm evocation of a childhood spent playing stickball on the streets of Queens and with the scientist Gould dissecting the received truth that US intellectuals are inherently attracted to baseball above other games. He argues that it is merely a matter of circumstance, a question of time and place, convenience and tradition:
A serious personal affection for the sport does not follow, either logically or intrinsically, from any particular inherent property of the game's uniqueness, but rather needs to be explained in the same basic mode as most autobiographical phenomena - that is, as a contingent circumstance that did not have to unfold as it did, but that makes perfectly good sense as a reasonable outcome among a set of possibilities.
Although Gould can revel in the game's romance, he never allows that romance to cloud his vision. For example, later, and although baseball has engendered a tradition of fine literature, he takes a swipe at some of the excesses of the genre:
The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity . . . by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum. (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway.) When people ask me how baseball imitates life, I can only respond with what the more genteel newspapers used to call a "barnyard epithet".
Among the finer pieces are two long Natural History columns, one tackling the "origin myth" in general by examining baseball's in particular, the other which proves why no one will ever bat .400 again. The first is a humorously vicious deconstruction of the Abner Doubleday legend (and brings to mind Bob Newhart's wonderful skit: "You've got a new game, eh, Mr Doubleday? How many couples?"), while the second is simply the stuff of dreams for the anorak statistician. The collection closes with a selection of insightful book reviews.
Gould's lifelong hero was the clean-living, upright Joe DiMaggio, so it was quite disappointing to see the author stepping up to bat for Mark McGwire, the St Louis Cardinals slugger who broke the home run record in 1998 while admitting to using the (legal, in baseball) steroid, androstenedione. To my mind there should always be an asterisk beside McGwire's name in the record books.
Mudville is full of delights for the fan, but if the mere mention of Mickey Mantle doesn't stir something inside, then this collection is unlikely to make you think that it should. After all, as Gould said, if you're not a fan you're unreachable anyway.
- Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball By Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathan Cape, 342pp. £16.99
- Joe Culley is an Irish Times journalist Sport