[jshfast]

Hey guys this is yet another thread for some research. The posts i received on my other thread were great and i would appreciate some posts of similar quality.
Why is baseball appealing to people of all ages and nationalities? How is the sport of baseball similar to our country, the United States?

[Mid-depth_Reporter]

Why is it appealing? I think it's for the same reason that soccer is so big in other countries - you don't need to be rich to play it. It's not a rich man's game. Grab a bat (which can be a stick, piece of pipe, or whatever) and a ball (again, same thing) and find some place to play. A run-down field, a street, a sandlot... and you can play.

It's inexpensive and it's a challenging game that's fun to play.

As for the similarities of baseball to the U.S., as I said in my reason to why baseball is America's past time is that it includes the common man. And America is built on the comman man, not the incredibly rich, not the incredibly intelligent, and not the incredibly stupid, or lucky. It's just a common man's game.

[pete_b]

Sometimes when I watch baseball I get very bored. Maybe its because I just got done watching the Stanley Cup Finals. For whatever reason the games seems slow and boring. However as the season gets closer and closer to the World Series, I find it totally riveting. I think the reason for this is because there is no higher award in sports than a world series ring. Baseball players are the highest paid players and yet most of them would trade at least a year's salary just for a chance to win the world series. When the playoffs arise in October, the intensity is unmatched, and the desire to win is so high that its impossible not to watch. Baseball has that allure. It is the sport of kings. That is the appeal of Baseball.

[Wizard of Os]

Cheers All,

Wow, great question. Baseball is deeper and more ingrained in American culture than we would imagine. Bill Bryson once surmised that more than 100 terms and expressions in English -- e.g. "right off the bat," "cover all bases," "to hit a home run" -- originate in baseball.

No sport is so sentimentalized in film, thanks in part to the saccharine-sweet nature of Hollywood flicks to be sure, but also because the game itself is so dramatic. From Earl Jones' "people will come" speech in one of the best corny (literally, too) baseball movies ever, Field of Dreams:

"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again."

I believe the quote is more or less the same in the absolutely brilliant novel Shoeless Joe by Ray Kinsella.

In City Slickers featuring serious Mets (and sports in general) fan Billy Crystal, the Helen Slater (Supergirl!) character asks our triumvirate of heroes what exactly is up with boys' baseball obsession. Daniel Stern's character explains (i'm paraphrasing here, because i don't have the exact quote) that, even when things were at their worst between him and his dad, they could always talk baseball. Baseball bridges American generation gaps.

And what does baseball today tell us about America today? As the population of the MLB gradually shifts away from homegrown dominance in talent or sheer numbers, we see in the increasingly burgeoning popularity of basketball the clear demographic shift to metropoli and edge cities. Baseball may be easy to play, but you do need one thing: grass. For basketball, asphalt is needed, of which there is plenty in today's America. And sure, they still play stickball in Brooklyn, but this is more like British rounders than baseball.

The next generation is hardly enamored with America's game, as fast-moving, active games like soccer and basketball entertain youngsters brought up in the fast-pased 21st century lifestyle. Pete B said above that "the games seem slow and boring." Slow, yes. While this was once baseball's appeal (take a break from the hectic day and listen to a ballgame or better yet go hang out in that giant playground called a baseball stadium), it is to its detriment today.

My current theory about baseball's future is that it will resemble that of cricket in Britain. Yes, it's still engrained in the national consciousness, but the level of play is often higher abroad. Even the perception of cricket as an elitist and/or highbrow sport could wash up on red, white and blue shores to distort baseball (at least on professional levels) and take the game out of the public sphere as its popularity wanes. Imagine a television situation like that of hockey, and you may be considering the future of god's game.

And me? I talk to my son about -- you guessed it -- hoops.