Every year towards the end of summer a discouraging thing happens in the United States. Baseball disappears from the front of the nation’s sports sections, chased to the inside pages by the first brutish stirrings of the American football season.

For those of us who think of baseball as the finest innovation in pastimes since the dawn of reproduction, this is a painful reminder that America’s heart these days really belongs to gridiron. Compared with the smack and clatter of football, baseball is a hopelessly serene and dawdling enterprise. Its long season of 162 games, stretching from early spring to the wintry end of autumn, demands more fortitude than many fans can muster.

And so at the first hint of big men slipping into helmets and shoulder pads, and working on their grunting noises, millions of sports enthusiasts abandon baseball wholesale for any news of the coming football season.

It doesn’t even have to have a particularly sporting angle. This year baseball suffered perhaps the ultimate indignity when newspapers devoted vast amounts of precious surface area to the news that CBS, the television network, was to be fined a record $550,000 (£300,000) because of a notorious incident during the halftime festivities at the last Super Bowl — seven months ago — when Janet Jackson exposed an unfettered breast while performing onstage with Justin Timberlake (which actually makes for two tits out onstage by some counts) and the broadcaster failed to put hazy pixels over the scandalous part.

CBS responded, not unreasonably, that it didn’t know that Ms Jackson was planning to inflict such wanton trauma on the nation’s eyeballs and so had no hazy pixels standing by, but such a depraved act could not be allowed to pass without many yards of grave editorial comment and anxious analysis.

The upshot is that the story all but squeezed baseball out of the papers for two days — just at the moment when another outstanding season was gloriously and excitingly being concluded.

It is all a little discouraging, as I say. Like most people brought up in the 1950s or before, I was taught to regard baseball as the pinnacle of human contrivance, a game in which every distance has been perfectly (one might almost suppose divinely) calibrated to provide a constant, unimprovable balance between pitcher and batter, fielder and runner, offence and defence. Uniquely among American team sports, baseball has no clock, and thus no conspicuous urgency. So baseball is elegant and intelligent and composed. And the games are played nearly always on exquisitely groomed lawns in stadiums of colossal beauty in the open air on warm summer evenings when the world seems nearly perfect anyway. Watching baseball is one of life’s sublimest pleasures, and once upon a time virtually everyone in America knew it.

In those days, baseball dominated the American sporting psyche in a way that can scarcely be imagined now. Professional football and basketball existed and were followed, but essentially as minor spectacles that helped to pass the colder months until the baseball season resumed. The Super Bowl was years from its invention. The only sporting event that gripped the nation — the one time in the year when even your Mom knew what was going on in the sporting world — was the World Series, the patently over-named (but we don’t care) annual showdown between the top teams in professional baseball’s two leagues, the American and National.

My father was a sportswriter for the Des Moines Register, a newspaper in Iowa, and every year for 35 years, from the 1940s to the 1970s, he got to go to the World Series. It was, by an immeasurably wide margin, the high point of his working year. Not only did he get to live it up for two weeks on expenses in some of the nation’s most cosmopolitan and exciting cities — and from Des Moines all cities are cosmopolitan and exciting — but he also got to witness many of the most memorable moments of baseball history: Al Gionfriddo’s miraculous one-handed catch of a Joe DiMaggio line drive in 1947, Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956, Bill Mazeroski’s series-winning homer of 1960. These mean nothing to you, I know — they would mean nothing to most people these days — but they were moments of near ecstasy that were shared by a nation.

In those days, World Series games were played during the day, so you had to bunk off school or develop a convenient chest infection (“Jeez, Mom, the teacher said there’s a lot of TB going around”) if you wanted to see a game.

Crowds would lingeringly gather wherever a TV was on display. Getting to watch any part of a World Series game, even half an inning at lunchtime, became a kind of illicit thrill. And if you did happen to be there when something monumental occurred, you would remember it for the rest of your life.

Now World Series games are played in the evening when everyone can watch them, but comparatively few do. Almost five times as many people watch the Super Bowl each year as watch any game of the World Series. Even the Super Bowl post-game show — a fiesta of exuberant inarticulacy — attracts 30 million viewers more than the final, climactic game of the World Series. So if something really big happens in a World Series game, it will never be a universally shared experience again.

My father disdained football and once memorably described it as a game played and watched by people for whom the invention of Velcro fastenings was a godsend. (It is he, incidentally, to whom the Babe Ruth photograph that accompanies this article was dedicated. For years I assumed that this image would fund my retirement, but it turns out that Babe Ruth sent autographed photos to thousands of American kids and none was ever thrown away, so they are worth hardly anything. For financial security, I’d be better off with a Justin Timberlake autograph.) My father has been dead for 20 years now and I am not sure what he would make of baseball, for much has changed about the game over the years, besides its tragic relative decline.



One big change that I am sure he would find unsettling — as most normal people do — is how alarmingly nerdy baseball watching has become. Nerdiness has always been a vocational hazard of baseball — because the game is so irresistibly statistical, you see — but it has mushroomed stupefyingly with the rise of powerful household computers.

These days there is almost nothing that committed baseball fans can’t and don’t keep track of. They can tell you — and what’s worse they will tell you, unless you have a gun and are prepared to fire at their feet — how many times a given pitcher threw a cut fastball with the count at two balls and one strike and runners in scoring position during a night game last June with the wind blowing towards centre-right field and an aeroplane flying overhead. And I swear to you that the aeroplane is the only part of that sentence that I made up.

They have even developed a form of statistical analysis called sabermetrics, which uses hypnotically impenetrable formulas — this is a genuine one I copied down from a book: H+TB+1.5x(BB + HBP)+SB+SH+SF / AB+BB+HBP+SH+CF+SB/3 — to calculate something called the Raw Equivalent Average, which simultaneously tells you both how good a player is at reaching base and how desperately some people need to get out more.

What the statistical whizzes can’t determine for you, however, are the really important things about baseball, such as why the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox never win the World Series. They can’t tell you that because these are matters well beyond rational analysis.

The Cubs haven’t been in a World Series since 1945 and haven’t won one since 1908, when William Howard Taft was President and the Tiller Sisters were just starting out on the London stage. The Cubs are so respectful of this tradition that no matter how good a season they have had, they manage always to throw away any hopes of post-season glory. This year they did so by losing five vital games in a row, and eight of their last nine, eliminating themselves on the next to last day of the season and clearing the way for an epic battle between the St Louis Cardinals and Houston Astros to determine which would represent the National League in this year’s fall classic (as we like to say when we get tired of typing “World Series”). At the time of going to press, they were tied at three games each in a best-of-seven qualifying series.

The great rivalry in my part of the baseball firmament is between the Boston Red Sox (the team of people of elegance and discernment) and the New York Yankees (the team of Republicans and the kind of people who take two parking spaces). The Yankee players themselves are, without exception, clean cut and wholesome looking — the sort of young men you would be happy for your daughter to date, though not perhaps all at once. Their owner, George Steinbrenner, is a famous tyrant who doesn’t allow his players to accumulate, or possibly even think about, facial hair. So their smartness is actually imposed by decree, which is kind of creepy, but they do look nice, it has to be said.

The Red Sox, by contrast, look like the sort of fellows you see chained together and working with picks and shovels along highways in Alabama. Their hair is magnificently wayward, and this year, late in the season, several of them began to cultivate odd lush tufts on their chins, which looked, to an uncanny degree, as if they were trying to disguise themselves as armpits. But these grooming quirks are, in a curious way, a vital part of their charm.

The Red Sox live with an even crueller tradition than the Cubs, which is that they are permitted to reach the World Series from time to time, but then must lose embarrassingly. The last time this occurred was in 1986 when they were just one pitch away from winning the whole thing — one pitch! — and a batted ball rolled through the legs of a Red Sox infielder and they somehow then managed to throw the whole thing away. They haven’t won a World Series since 1918.

This distressing proclivity to collapse is known as the Curse of the Babe, after Babe Ruth, who was a star player for the Red Sox until an avaricious owner named Harry Frazee sold him to the Yankees for $100,000 in 1920, setting off an era of Yankee dominance that has gone on practically without interruption since. The Yankees have qualified for almost half the World Series since 1920, including six of the past eight.

What makes this tedious, unsporting and really quite obscene success all the harder to bear is that a central part of its completion is an annual evisceration of the Red Sox. This year the Sox dutifully presented themselves for their ritual pasting and seemed set to bring even more joy than usual to New York’s flinty hearts by dropping the first three games.

But then they did a most unexpected thing. They fought back, and won the next three encounters, levelling the playoff series at three games apiece.

And then, in the wee hours of Thursday, British time, they made history by clobbering the Yankees 10-3 in the Yankees’ own ballpark, to propel themselves into the World Series. It was the most dramatic comeback in baseball history.

And here’s an even more remarkable fact. It’s got the whole nation talking. Even my Mom knows about it. Already there’s a feeling adrift on the air that this may be the year the Red Sox toss off their 86-year-old curse and win the World Series at last. Baseball hasn’t seen this kind of excitement in years.

This World Series has one other wonderfully unusual feature: I’ll be there.

Nearly half a century after becoming aware of baseball’s stately magic, I will be attending a World Series game — indeed, a whole series of World Series games — in person, beginning tonight at the ancient and glorious Fenway Park in Boston. Words cannot express my joy.

I really have only one other thing to say: Go Red Sox.



Bill Bryson will be reporting from the World Series in The Times next week