Susan Jacoby, _Why Baseball Matters_

 FROM 2018, A volume in the Yale University Press's "Why X Matters" series. Judging from the other chosen topics in the series--poetry, the museum, dance (the high art kind), Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, the New Deal, the Dreyfus Affair--the secret name of the series must be "Why X Still Matters Even Though It Gets a Lot Less Attention Than It Used to." I have read only this volume in the series, but I would venture that the slightly defensive, somewhat curmudgeonly note audible in Jacoby's book recurs in other contributions to the series. (In the case of Adam Kirsch's book on Lionel Trilling, that note is probably a low hum from beginning to end.)

Jacoby concedes that some of the complaints about baseball have merit--that it is has lost the interest of Blacks in the USA, that it is not doing enough to interest the young, that it continues to exclude women from visible roles. She is decidedly testy, though, about the complaint that it is too slow and that games take too long. 

All the suggestions for speeding things up, like the pitch clock or starting extra innings with a free runner on second base, she dismisses with what Albert O. Hirschman, in The Rhetoric of Reaction, called the "Futility Thesis" and the "Jeopardy Thesis"--that is, arguments that the proposed change (1) would not achieve its end and (2) would damage baseball. 

Five years on from the year she published her book, with both of those rule changes now in effect, I wonder...does she still think they are wrong? Most fans seem to have accepted them, and most of those I talk to are a bit grateful that games are running closer to two-and-a-half hours than three.

There is plenty to like in the book, though. Jacoby explains the genesis of her love of baseball well and does a fine job of explaining the uniqueness of the sport (leaning a bit on Roger Angell). I loved her account of the climactic game of the 1986 National League Championship Series. She wasn't there--she was watching it on TV, as I was--but the peculiar rhythms of remote spectatorship are certainly a part of baseball, and she renders them beautifully.