On the baseball
book that serves as a professional inspiration for this AmericanStudier.
I first read
Daniel Okrent’s Nine
Innings: The Anatomy of a Baseball Game (1985) as a kid, and the book—in
which Okrent uses a single June 1982 game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the
Baltimore Orioles to tell literally hundreds of different baseball stories—has stuck
with me ever since. Partly that’s because I love baseball, and in particular
the way in which the game’s slower pace allows for an awareness of all the
stories and histories and statistics (among other things) that are in play in
every moment; I don’t know of any work that captures that side to the sport as
well as Okrent’s book, and so I’d say it’s a must-read for any baseball fan. But
it’s also because Okrent’s book serves as a model for what I’d call two central
goals of all public scholarship and writing, and certainly of mine (here and
elsewhere).
For one thing,
Okrent knows that the best histories, however much they connect to huge communal
and social and cultural issues, are made most compelling when they’re also and
centrally connected to individual stories. That’s one main reason why I focused
on individual lives and personal narratives in my
second book; why my upcoming third includes at length the stories of Yung
Wing and his Chinese
Educational Mission students; why I’m beginning to flesh out the idea for a
Hall
of American Inspiration. Each time Okrent pauses in the game’s action to
narrate another individual story and identity (I particularly remember the one
about Baltimore’s Lenn
Sakata, but they’re all compelling), I suppose it might seem digressive or
like delayed gratification; but to me, those individual stories not only
complement the unfolding communal drama but greatly enhance it, making clear
all of the lives and histories on which each and every such moment depend.
And for another
thing, Okrent creates that sense of drama. Granted, a baseball game, like any
sporting event with a winner and loser, is inherently dramatic (although some
might disagree about baseball!). But I think there’s still a broader lesson for
public scholars, particularly after a few decades in which the idea of writing
as narrative or story has tended to be supplanted by theoretical and academic
modes that entirely resist those goals. What Okrent demonstrates, on the other
hand, is that writers can be nuanced and analytical and yet still create
narratives and stories, and deeply dramatic and compelling ones at that.
American history is full of such stories (Yung Wing’s and the CEM students’
being two of my personal favorites, but two of many), waiting to be re-told and
communicated to American audiences. They’re not simple, and our work with them
shouldn’t be. But if they’re worth telling ,they’re worth telling to as broad
and deep an audience as possible—and Okrent gives us great guidance in how to
do so.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So what do
you think? What takes do you have on baseball in America?
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