Baseball and the Pursuit of Innocence
"Hell, if this game was half as complicated as some...writers make out it is," Bucky Walters once remarked, "a lot of us boys from the farm would never have been able to make a living at it." That's one of the many quotes found in the recently published Baseball and thePursuit of Innocence by Richard Skolnik '60, and there's just a little irony in it. Indeed, Skolnik devotes most of his book to exploring the symbols, contradictions, and complexities that lie beneath what he calls baseball's "surface simplicity."
He ranges broadly in his exploration. Along the way he draws parallels between the sport and the mythic Old West, examines America's tendency to view the game through the hazy filter of a lost, idealized youth, and ruminates on statistics, law, patience, fear, and the morality of fly balls lost in the sun. It's a compelling and optimistic book. And an unexpectedly poignant one for me, reading it, as I did, on the 206th day of the Major League strike.
Skolnik, a lifelong fan and a history professor at the City University of New York, approaches his task from both of those perspectives. (The book, published by Texas A&M University Press, is rich with anecdotes and reminiscences, ft also contains 45 pages of footnotes.) From the perspective, though, of this reader (a long-suffering Red Sox fan who played competitively for a lot of years, including three at Dartmouth), he is only partially successful. In order to support his theses, Skolnik must—by necessity and by profession, I suppose—also explain the rules and terms of the game in somewhat tedious detail. Readers who need that amount of detail, unfortunately, will miss much of the richness in the well-chosen quotes and insider anecdotes: the pleasure of recognizing a passage from Roger Angell, say, or the series of emotions triggered by a single name "Carlton Fisk." Baseball and the Pursuit of Innocence, it seems, is best pitched down the middle: to an audience somewhere between veteran fan and rookie. Call it intro-level, college. If you're a student of the game at that level,I give you the green light and say, "Go for it."
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