Media:

...And all those techniques are the inventions of Roone Arledge, and the Super Bowl, which has to be the most solemnly observed ritual of post-Nixon America, is their culmination, transfiguration, and validation...

...If you can't pray, blaspheme, advised many devotional writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...

...Damn right I do...

...The president, who has struggled throughout his career with the wimp image, quite naturally wants to establish himself as a jock-type...

...Because it is the myth in which we believe, and the myth that impels us to watch it and insist that it not be staged...

...Not that I'm saying one game is somehow better than the other...

...And what's wrong with that...

...Which is why, I think, some of the best films of the last few years-Stealing Home, Eight Men Out, The Natural, and Field of Dreams-have been baseball films and, in a curious way, have been much better baseball than the games you see being "really" played on TV...

...FRANK McCONNELL...

...Such movies, like the game they portray, can be taken as a judgment on the decade of politics that generated them...

...No problem: Sport, the most ephemeral of human artistic activities, has always relied on other, less ephemeral arts, to preserve its own special radiance...

...Do I sound bitter...

...But I do spend a lot of time watching the TV altogether, and trying to figure out how what I see there gives hints about the direction of the endangered and listing republic in which you and I live...

...weekend-coverage...

...The game might almost have been invented as an allegory of the pathos of the American experiment: trusting enlightened ambition to play the game fair and win on those terms alone...

...Baseball is the national past-time, the sport through which we maintain our last tenuous connection with the small-town, neighborly America that was never really there in the first place...

...Or, to put it another way, what happens when a game-an event you watch-becomes an "occasion"-an event you stage...

...But what happens when the bards become more central than the heroes they sing...

...And-here comes the bad news-it was never innocent, never as pure as we needed it to be, and always tinged with the pallor of the Fall...

...TV football is...

...Problem is, though, that the idea of "jock"-thanks to the very media mavens who built his image in the first place-has been sucked up, etiolated, and freakified to the extent that we can no longer tell whether "hero" in sports means a strong, smart contender, a hypermedicated mutant, or simply the Floto-style spectacle of the last five minutes...

...Roone Arledge may be the most important single person in the history of athletics: Because Arledge, in the 1960s as director of ABC Sports Broadcasting, understood that the new technology of TV could make a game-any game-a staged as opposed to a watched event...

...Football is easier: Break through the line and crush the opposition...

...All the films I have mentioned-and, I'd guess, all films about baseball made since 1980-are films about failure, loss, and betrayal, and the chances for living with the psychic aftermath of those terrible things...

...No one seems to have observed that to ask this is to ask for a nation of heroes...

...The World Series started later than usual this year...

...The diamond, Robert Coover wrote in 1969 in The Universal Baseball Association, is the true cathedral of America, the place its citizens come to worship their own community...

...So that the game has always been the acting-out of our frustration at not living up to the challenge of its purity...

...Well, nothing, really, until you begin to think about how uncannily close to a Super Bowl-an event for the spectators in which the participants were secondary-was our invasion of Panama and is our current adventure in the Middle East...

...By "staged," of course, I don't mean "fixed...

...Easier, more telegenic, and more Reaganesque...

...They will all, however, be able to tell you where and how they spent Super Bowl Sunday...

...We want to believe in DiMaggio, in Shoeless Joe, in Roy Hobbs, even while we know we finally can't believe in them...

...At least in blaspheming you put yourself in a relationship to the most high, and having a relationship to the most high is better than having no connection at all...

...and also because they wanted to make sure that the playoffs didn't conflict with the "NFL Game of the Week" on Monday night, an assured source of astronomical advertising revenue...

...In the same way, these films memorialize the national past-time as a "game"-as opposed to insider trading or the hypocrisies of international oil-jockeying-where moral choice was still a viable concept: where "winning" and "losing" still meant something...

...That's why the fate of baseball bothers me...

...No, staging the event, at least in the TV universe, means preparing for the event to the degree that our watching predominates over what we watch...

...By the time this sees print the Cincinnati Reds' stunning World Series victory will be fading from memory, and everybody will have settled down to watching the hibernal cycle of the NFL...

...Bad for sports: bad for politics based on a sports metaphor...

...I was never very good at either and, truth to tell, I spend very little of my TV time watching sports at all...

...Baseball and TV, I want to suggest, hate one another: and baseball loses...

...If you throw the fight, you throw it once and for all...

...It is, of course, no longer the national pastime...

...Multiple-camera coverage, directional-mike eavesdropping on the players as they play, smarmy/smart/"expert" commentary on the game from burnt-out jocks in the control booth: all of these, now common details of watching a game, are ways in which the Tube tells you that the event is not just open to you, but for you...

...Fixing or throwing a game, like, say, the 1919 White Sox, or the LaMotta-Wolcott fight, is an old-fashioned perversion that, in acknowledging the authenticity of the event itself, is almost pure...

...And where does this leave baseball...

...And that occurrence, like winning the fight, can never, never be repeated just the same...

...Its rhythms are slow, majestic, and every TV screen in the world is too large or too small to cover even the multiple tensions of a single pop-up to short right field...

...By March at least two out of three people you ask won't be able to tell you who won the series...

...It did so because the season had been delayed by the owners' spring lockout, and then because the networks wanted to make sure that the playoff games got maximum-i.e...

...So, as I said, TV wins, and sports becomes increasingly product-as the people who run TV like to say...

...It is the perfect game, played by strong and talented lads who are nevertheless close enough to the human norm to be ours...

...As the first game of the 1990 World Series plays in the other room to No One There, having been videotaped-what an image of Reagan/Bush America!-I want to suggest that it leaves baseball a national metaphor, maybe our last national metaphor, for loss...

...It is self-contained, nine innings of three outs per side, and almost as precisely recordable as the game of games itself, chess...

...From Pindar to Grantland Rice to Howard Cosell, sports has always required its bard to immortalize its immortals...

...It is infinitely variable and yet radiantly simple: the whole point of the game, said the great owner Bill Veeck, is to see if a running man can move faster than a thrown or hit ball...