The World Series gets the vote

I'm talking at a time when mysterious rumours are flying around about the hostages. I must leave to the weekend to prove them true or wild or just politically planned.

If you can imagine that the British soccer Cup Final was played not on one Saturday afternoon, but could run through ten days and seven afternoons, the winner being the team that won four games, you'll get some idea what it's like being in America just now.

The baseball championship fought out between the team that came on top of the National League and the one that headed the American League started last Tuesday night. It came down, in the end, to a battle between the Phillies and the Royals which, being interpreted, means Philadelphia and Kansas City. The newspapers and television may go on, as usual, about the Iran/Iraq war and the continuing dogfight between Mr Carter and Mr Reagan, but something like 50 million television sets are tuned at eight o'clock most nights to the so-called World Series. Why so-called?

Well, when the first National Championship was fought out between the two leagues in 1903, baseball was such an exclusively American game that it would have been pedantic to call the champions the American champions. They were, for lack of any international competition, the world champions and so, to this day, that's the name with which the four-game winner glorifies itself and the city it calls home.

I hear voices – still, small but persistent voices – from many Englishmen listening. I recall the late Stephen Potter saying what they are saying but he put it in a typically mock-modest, calculating way, 'It seems absurd to say so but isn't baseball, after all, simply rounders?' The answer is, 'Yes, it is'. Or was. Even though 20 years or more the Russians came out with the blustering assertion that B-E-I-Z-B-O-L – beizbol – was invented by them, there seems, for once, no question that it started in England, probably as far back as the sixteenth century as a children's game. By the eighteenth century – and we're still talking about England – it was actually called 'baseball'. Only later it was re-christened 'rounders'.

How come, then, that the Americans always called it baseball? They didn't. Not the early settlers, the seventeenth-century ones. They modified the English game into something called 'town ball' which was played in various forms throughout the eastern states. Most of today's west, of course, was not, then, American at all. The birth date of the modern game though is 1845. That was the year in which, for the first time, a club wrote and adopted a codified set of rules. The club was the Knickerbocker Club of New York City.

That sentence may produce a puzzled wrinkle on the brow of any Englishman, Australian or whoever who knows his New York clubs. Wasn't, and isn't, the Knickerbocker Club one of the most swagger, socially explosive clubs of this city, something like White's in London? It was and it is, but then an interesting point not even known to many a baseball buff – baseball, like golf, in the nineteenth century, was a game for wealthy amateurs, what they used to call 'a gentlemen's game'. It didn't remain for long an upper-crust amusement. One thing you can always be sure of in New York. If somebody introduces anything as a minority privilege, somebody else will manufacture something very like it on an assembly line.

You may remember how, after the War of Independence, some of the more lofty but defeated loyalists, still clutching their allegiance to England, banded together into an exclusive club called the St George's Club, whereupon the hoi-polloi, about to form a political club which would be one hundred per cent American, decided that they, too, ought to have a patron saint to name their club after. They found an Indian chief in Delaware named Tammany and sanctified him and organised themselves as the Sons of Saint Tammany.

When Mrs Simpson married King Edward VIII in France in 1937, the wholesale dress houses had spies there who drew rapid copies of the bride's wedding dress and, within a month, indistinguishable replicas of the Duchess' wedding gown could be bought in a department store for something like $29.95.

So, baseball attracted humble onlookers of the games being played between the Knickerbocker Club and similar genteel clubs in Boston and Philadelphia and the onlookers liked what they saw. Within ten years of that first Code of Rules, there were 50 clubs, still of amateurs but now all members of something called the National Association of Baseball Players.

The Civil War, at one and the same time, stopped the game and revived it. The clubs, of course, suspended their competition but the game was played behind both the Union and Confederate lines. The demobilised soldiers took it home and, by 1870, the number of clubs in the association had quintupled. By then, too, professional teams had sprouted. One, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, went off on a triumphal tour, hypnotised the cities. The amateurs backed off and the pros formed their own national association.

But the, er... the 1870s was not the most virginal decade in American history. Mark Twain called it 'an era of incredible rottenness'. Corruption raised its prosperous head in Congress, in the Navy Department and among the first, lusty and ruthless generation of robber barons. It almost killed off baseball because, like any other game – especially one whose fortunes can go up and down dramatically – it attracted gamblers and gamblers are great arrangers of fixed games. There were illegal pools, newly famous players were bribed and the newspapers and the public raised a howl of outrage.

The game was saved by disciplining itself by forming a National League of Professional Players and instituting a controlling body. That was just over a hundred years ago. At the turn of the century, another league of teams from other cities was formed, the American League. They both agreed to abide by the same rules and a new controlling body. And in 1903 the first World Series was born.

Any intelligent games watcher who's looked at the game long enough, on television especially, soon realises that there's nothing like it. I mean, literally. The physical movements of the pitcher, the batter, the runners, the motions of the fielders which they've practised thousands of times of scooping their arms into the ball on the bounce and hurling it to a base in one action. All these things look like a new form of ballet or a game invented on another planet by men who have never seen how the rest of the world throws a ball or hits a ball or catches a ball.

Well, now the World Series, played under blinding shafts of light, attracts about 60,000 people a night to the stadiums – the teams switch between playing at home and away – and it's figured about a third of the population of 220 million watches on television or listens in cars or trucks or taxis. And the cities, especially the cities of Philadelphia and Kansas City, Missouri, are strangely silent on these crisp fall nights, except for the babble of the radio and television commentators, a unique language, rattling out of open windows or the lobbies of apartment houses where the doormen are keeping tabs on the game.

So, Philadelphia was much in the news this week. Not only Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There's a small town in Mississippi called Philadelphia and this week a famous black man recalled ugly memories of that Philadelphia and was promptly repudiated by the White House. You will remember Andrew Young as the able, and once cherished by the president, chief American representative to the United Nations. His tongue, his sharp and impromptu remarks, tripped him in his diplomatic career and he resigned last year.

Well, Mr Young is still faithful to President Carter in his fashion and last week he was out campaigning for him in Ohio, a crucial state which, if it's going to go for the president, will need all his most eloquent supporters, Mr Young, for instance, and if the president's prayers are answered, Senator Kennedy. Mr Young, a black man talking to a white audience, unfortunately recalled a remark made by Ronald Reagan in Philadelphia, Mississippi in August. Mr Reagan's remark can certainly, by most people, be regarded as harmless.

'I believe in states' rights,' said Mr Reagan, 'I believe in people doing as much as they can at the private level.'

States' rights, to the vast majority of Americans, means those rights of self-government reserved to the states by the Constitution, as distinct from the rights of the federal, the national, government.

Well, Mr Andrew Young recalled that simple remark and said, 'If he, Reagan, had gone to Biloxi, Mississippi and talked about states' rights, if he'd gone to New Orleans or Birmingham, Alabama, I would not have been upset but when you go to Philadelphia, Mississippi where James Chaney, Andy Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the sheriff and the deputy sheriff and a posse protecting states' rights and you go down there talking about states' rights, that looks like a code word to me, that it's going to be all right to kill niggers when he's president.'

Those three men, by the way, were black civil rights' workers killed in 1964. The killers, all white, were convicted by an all-white jury.

What was doubly unfortunate about Mr Young's last sentence was that it repeated, in a more flagrant form, an aspersion for which President Carter had apologised only two weeks ago, when he, the president, had suggested that, in that Philadelphia, Mississippi speech, Mr Reagan was suggesting a sinister privilege in the phrase 'states' rights'.

Lamentably, Mr Reagan's campaign chief called Mr Young's remark 'part of the continuing Carter hatchet attack' which put the odium of Mr Young's intemperance right back in the White House. The White House gave out a general groan and issued an immediate disclaimer. We don't know whether or not the president has begged Mr Young, please not to help him any more.

The New York Times came out with a hand-wringing editorial entitled 'What's fit to say in a campaign?' First it said Richard Nixon insisted he was not a crook, now Jimmy Carter insists he is not a meany. Whether the candidates are sufficiently decent or fastidious is small beer. What counts is whether they are clear about where they would have the country go.

With less than three weeks left, isn't it time to stop berating each other? The public knows whom each is running against. What it needs to know is what they stand for.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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