Why baseball matters

Susan Jacoby

Baseball, first dubbed the "national pastime" in print in 1856, is the country's most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball's greatest charm--a clockless suspension of time--is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position--in reality and myth--in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War--when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps--to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online...