Comparing Guttman, Ross, and Mandelbaum on baseball and America

Baseball and the American Character

The three essays on baseball, by Allen Guttman, Murray Ross and Michael Mandelbaum, are all well written and supply unique opinions and ideas about baseball and America that are interesting but quite different. In this paper the writer will take a position on the debate that is going on with these three writers.

Allen Guttman's Essay

Guttmann reviews the phases of the American experience to explain what is meant by "American exceptionalism," and in the process of presenting that information he gives the reader some names of writers who tried to describe. America. For example, the French journalist and author Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in the 19th century, and in that book he explains why Americans are different than Europeans. Americans didn't have any existing social order to deal with when they arrived in North America so they created one of their own and they believed they were the exception to all other cultures, and possibly better than other cultures, is what de Tocqueville was saying. America was "different" is one reason why writers talked about exceptionalism. Americans play sports and their games are like the wild west frontier, according to John R. Tunis, who said the frontier was "…a source of mobility, restlessness and change" and sports, which to me seems unlikely as a description of the games.

What is Guttman's main point about baseball? He believes baseball has seen its better days and he can't find a definite reason that it is still popular. Guttman uses four different things about baseball to try and discover why people have a "fascination" with baseball. Those four are nostalgia, the "ease of access," the "technological impetus," and the "folk heroes" like Babe Ruth. But he comes to the decision that those four attempts to explain baseball's popularity have a "defect," and that is none of them really answer the question he wants to answer. So Guttman tries to locate the reason for baseball's popularity by looking at "extremes of quantification" (the fact that there is no time limit on a game and the statistics keep fans interested). Also Guttman goes into baseball's pastoral feeling (springtime, outdoors, green grass), its secularism, its bureaucracy, and the "primitive…aspects. Whatever he tries to use to describe the reason for baseball being popular turns out to be wrong.

Michael Mandelbaum Essay

Mandelbaum opens his essay by showing all the ways baseball is different from football and basketball, using the time issue (no time limit in baseball) as a reason why baseball is "…leisurely and unhurried, like the world before the discipline of measured time, deadlines, schedules and wages paid by the hour." Baseball is more like "traditional life" Mandelbaum, which means it is like the way things used to be. "Traditional society" means the way things were before society got caught up in a faster way of doing things. Mandelbaum writes that the "traditional world" was not standardized -- and baseball fields are not standardized but football and baseball playing surfaces are all standard size. So Mandelbaum is saying that baseball really belongs to another time, when things were slower and less complicated.

"Traditional life," according to Mandelbaum's essay, was a time when people went hunting and fishing to get food. And he compares baseball to that traditional life because "mind and body" were both used to get those fish and kill those deer and rabbits -- and "mind and body" are far more important in baseball. Mind and body are important in baseball because it is more of a thinking man's game calling for patience and it requires the same hand-eye coordination to hit a ball as it does to shoot an arrow. By that comparison Mandelbaum is linking baseball skills to the skills of early man, who of course lived in a very pastoral world with none of the problems that modern people in big cities have to deal with.

Mandelbaum uses the phrases "traditional world" and "traditional life" often in his essay, and he explains that baseball requires the "emotional capacity to confront and accept failure" because a good hitter is only going to get hits three times out of ten. Those odds are like the odds that the weather and disease will effect one's life; when a batter has gone a long time without a hit, it is as hard to understand as to why the weather changes or why someone gets sick but someone in the same family does not get sick, Mandelbaum suggests.

It is clear from reading Mandelbaum's essay that he sees baseball as a game that brings a person back to his childhood. In the summer, the child was out of school and was "free of adult-imposed disciplines of school," and in baseball, which is played in the summer, all those memories of childhood can come back at every game a person attends. Mandelbaum goes on to explain that baseball players are personally responsible for everything that happens. He infers that baseball fans are not as apt to forgive an error as other fans of other sports are. In football there are 11 players and a lineman can make a mistake and let a defensive player through the line to hit the quarterback. The audience likely doesn't see the mistake made by the guard, but if a shortstop makes an error everyone in the ball park sees it. This is the gist of what he is saying.

In fact if a player makes an error that lets the winning run in and effect loses the game for his team, everyone knows who made the error and who is to blame. That adds a psychological aspect to the game because it can be cruel. It is a game that celebrates "individualism" (that is, each player has individual accomplishments that are more obvious than a football player or a basketball player), Mandelbaum writes. Mandelbaum believes that there are two different kinds of courage that a baseball player needs to have to be successful. He needs to have physical courage because a baseball thrown at 94 miles per hour can cause serious damage to a batter. And a line drive off the bat that goes directly back at the pitcher's face can do serious harm in that way too. Also, a third baseman in baseball gets balls hit at him that are very hit very hard and travel fast, and the ball can hit a pebble or a little bump in the ground and bounce up suddenly and hit the third baseman in the face.

The other kind of courage that Mandelbaum is speaking of is "moral courage"; that kind of courage is needed in order to "…perform knowing that the frequent and inevitable failures will be personal ones," and taking responsibility for those failures is necessary because there is nowhere to hide out there on the field. Mandelbaum says that errors are "recorded forever" and they are "universally known" because, as this paper reported before, those errors are seen by everyone.

Mandelbaum vs. Guttman and Ross: Mandelbaum is the only writer of the three who seems to be a true romantic about baseball. He carefully explains that baseball is more like the society that Americans knew a few years ago, pastoral and relaxing, but he doesn't say that is a bad thing. He likes the pastoral side of baseball, and he compares baseball's season with the "three phases of the growing season"; the beginning of the season in the Spring (when crops are planted), and there are the long "hot days of summer" (when plants grow to their maturity, as baseball teams reach the peaks), and then the season ends, like the harvest of crops, in the fall.

Guttman doesn't identify baseball with an American "character" trait, but Mandelbaum does that. Mandelbaum says baseball characters are like "sturdy yeoman farmers" in the Thomas Jefferson era. Guttman uses a lot of his essay trying to understand why baseball is still popular at all, given the faster-paced society that exists today. Guttman says in so many words that he thinks baseball is going to die soon. Guttman uses fancy words to say that basically baseball's time has come and gone. He writes that baseball is "…a ludic symbol of our ambivalence about our abandoned past and about the unknown future that we are all, willy nilly, bound for."

Guttman makes fun of baseball in a way when he compares Babe Ruth with Jim Brown, a burly hall of fame star who was "muscular" while Ruth had "spindly legs" and a "Santa-sized torso." Ross writes some very nice things and he makes one of the best comparisons between baseball and football that any one of the three made. Ross believes that baseball "…dissolves time and urgency in a green expanse…creating a luxurious and peaceful sense of leisure." Football "reverses this procedure and converts space into time." Ross also explains that in football the spectator is asked to concentrate and pay attention to time; but in baseball, the fan is expected to enjoy the green grass, the smell of hot dogs, and enjoy the peacefulness around him. All three essays are interesting and full of a variety of comparisons, but Mandelbaum's writing shows he is a true blue baseball fan and he understands why baseball has stayed popular and why it will be popular many years from now.