Hoops for Madness, Baseball for Lit

basketball1Sports Saturday

March Madness—the American college basketball play-offs—is officially underway.  As is the tradition, the first round has witnessed a host of upsets, including Georgetown, a favorite in my area.  (Another favorite, Maryland, won late last night.)  As I scan the scores, I find myself wondering why there isn’t more good literature about basketball.  In fact, in American fiction baseball seems to be the only team sport amenable to literary masterpieces.  Today’s column is dedicated to figuring out why.

Some of the books I have in mind are Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.  I’ve previously written about Malamud’s novel and will visit the other three from time to time as the baseball season gets underway.

One train of thought I have on the subject begins with Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cold mediums, as laid out in Understanding Media.  I don’t have his work before me at the moment (this post is being written in the Frankfurt airport as I return to the States from Ljubljana, Slovenia), but I remember McLuhan writing that there are linear mediums, which he describes as cold (like literature) and range mediums that are hot (like film and television).  The film spectator, for instance, must negotiate multiple planes of quickly moving images.

This is not to say that either medium is superior, even though (at the time McLuhan wrote) hot may have sounded sexier.  I personally can’t do without either of them.  I remember the one semester where I taught nothing but film: Writing about Film (for freshman composition), Cinematic Images of Poverty (taught in conjunction with an economics class on poverty), and Film Genre.  By the end of the semester, I felt overstimulated, as though I had drunk too much strong coffee.  The following semester I sank with relief into my 18th century British literature course, where everything seemed less frenetic.  Yet when I teach only older works, I eventually feel myself becoming stale, despite my deep love for them.

Back to McLuhan.  He doesn’t apply the hot and cold descriptors only to artistic mediums.  I remember one comment he makes about tennis.  Intellectuals, he says, cannot be great tennis players because they operate in a cold, linear, and rational fashion rather than a hot, planar, and intuitive fashion.  They think before they hit the ball.  Now, this is in fact true of me (I am an indifferent, albeit enthusiastic, 3.5 tennis player), but whether it describes other intellectuals I don’t know.

The cold vs. hot distinction has been applied to sports as well.  I remember reading a Newsweek article several years ago which contended that, as our lives speed up and become more complicated, we find ourselves turning from linear to range sports.  Therefore, the author of the article contended, baseball (a linear sport) was being replaced as our national pastime by football (a range sport).

Basketball, of course, is a range sport, as is soccer.  Cricket is a linear sport.

Think about what a point guard in basketball is responsible for: reading his teammates’ movements, reading the defense, threading passes (do I bounce the pass or not?), deciding in a fraction of a second whether to charge the basket or shoot a jump shot, whether to go for a rebound or fall back on defense–and that’s only the offense.  There are a whole host of other decision made while playing defense.

American football is fluid in its own right.  The ability of quarterbacks to simultaneously negotiate multiple planes of action defies the imagination.  In two or three seconds, with 300-pound defenders attempting to grind them into the earth, an NFL signal caller must figure out who is attacking and who is hanging back, check out the location of two or more of his receivers, look at how those receivers are being defended, and then deliver the ball to a space no larger than a small cardboard box where only the receiver can catch it.  Sometimes the quarterback must even intuit which way the receiver is going to turn.  The quarterback that currently plays the position most effectively is my favorite football player, Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts.

Baseball, by contrast, involves small spurts of action preceded and followed by long and intricate calculations.  The kind of pitch that a pitcher will throw to a batter depends on how many runners are on base, how many outs there are, what kind of batter is at the plate (elaborate records are kept of each batter’s tendencies), the pitch count to this particular batter (the number of balls and strikes), what kind of batter that is on deck waiting to bat next, and so forth.  Given the situation and the particular battle, the infield and outfield defensive players will shift their positions in the field.  All for a single pitch.  Then the pitcher throws the ball and even if nothing dramatic changes—even if just a ball or a strike is added to the strike count—all the calculations for the next pitch are different and the thinking starts over again.

And because baseball is such an individual sport, each player has a vast array of statistics attached to him.

My current theory is that, because baseball is a cold sport, it lends itself better to a cold artistic medium like literature.  The kind of thinking that goes on in a game is comparable to the reflection that occurs in the act of reading.  In football, basketball, hockey, and soccer, one reacts to fairly constant action.  In fact, it is difficult to take everything in.  Whereas one pretty much knows where to look to follow a baseball game and, as I said, one has a lot of time to think about all the options before one.

Novels also tend to be more about individuals than teams so maybe that is another reason why we have great baseball novels.  In baseball, when a batter is standing at the plate, he or she is the absolute focus of attention.  It’s not like in football or basketball where you have a full team involved.

Of course, it is also true that the authors I mention were all writing when baseball still was our national pastime.  Baseball at that time functioned so conveniently as a metaphor for the national character that it makes sense that writers, probably baseball fans themselves, would turn to it.  There may be football and basketball masterpieces appearing today that I just haven’t heard of yet.

In other words, there may be holes in my theory.  But for the meantime, consider the possibility that we have great baseball novels because a linear medium thrives with a linear sport.

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