Of Course the Games Still Matter

As Charlie notes, I have little patience for the people whose reaction to Damar Hamlin’s collapse was to move from “some things are more important than games” (which is true and obvious) to “the games don’t matter,” a posture born largely of the self-pleasuring need to arrogate the moral high ground. I have long argued that games, entertainment, and art matter quite a bit, especially to people who make careers out of them, but more broadly to the deep and abiding human needs they meet. It was Earl Warren who once said, “I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.” On the home page today, Samuel Gregg cites a fine example, in a piece on cricket legend Donald Bradman: “In 1986, when former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser visited Nelson Mandela, a cricket fanatic, in the South African prison where Mandela was being held, Mandela’s first question to Fraser was: ‘Tell me Mr. Fraser, is Donald Bradman still alive?’”

Left-wingers on Twitter have jumped on me on several occasions for arguing this point in the aftermath of this or that tragedy intersecting with the worlds of sports and entertainment. I will refer back again to what I wrote two days after September 11, in briefly suspending my then-weekly baseball column after terrorists destroyed my office:

There’s a scene that comes to mind, and I’m placing it in the Lord of the Rings because that’s where I remember it, but feel free to let me know if I’ve mangled it or made it up. Frodo the hobbit has lived all his life in the Shire, where the world of hobbits (short, human-like creatures) revolves around hospitality and particular etiquette and family snobbery and all the silliest little things, silly at least in comparison to the great and dangerous adventure he finds himself embarked on. Aragorn, one of the Men, has been patrolling the area around the Shire for years, warding off invading creatures of all varieties of evil. Frodo asks Aragorn, eventually, whether he isn’t frustrated with and contemptuous of hobbits and the small, simple concerns that dominate their existence, when such dangers are all at hand. Aragorn responds that, to the contrary, it is the simpleness and even the pettiness of the hobbits that makes the task worthwhile, because it’s proof that he has done his job — kept them so safe and insulated from the horrors all around them that they see no irony, no embarrassment in concerning themselves with such trivial things in such a hazardous world. It has often struck me that you could ask no better description of the role of law enforcement and the military, keeping us so safe that we may while our days on the ups and downs of made-up games.

And that’s why baseball still matters. There must be time for mourning, of course, so much mourning, and time as well to feel secure that 55,000 people can gather safely in one place. The merciful thing is that because, save for the Super Bowl and the Olympics, U.S. sports are so little followed in the places these evildoers breed — murderous men, by contrast, have little interest in pennant races — that they have not acquired the symbolic power of our financial and military centers. But that may not be forever.

But once we feel secure to try, we owe it most of all to those who protect us as well as those who died to resume the most trivial of our pursuits. Our freedom is best expressed not when we stand in defiance or strike back with collective will, but when we are able again to view Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens as the yardsticks by which we measure nastiness, to bicker over games.

That’s why the Baseball Crank will be back. This column may be on hiatus for an undetermined time while the demands of work intrude — we intend to be back in business next week, and this will not be without considerable effort — but in time, I will offer again my opinion of why it would be positively criminal to give Ichiro the MVP, and why it is scandalous that Bill Mazeroski is in the Hall of Fame. And then I’ll be free again.