The World Series

There's a newspaper in Kansas City – Kansas City, Missouri, that is; Kansas City, Kansas is another town – there's a newspaper which I think is the oldest one there.

And if I were to ask you to guess what you would expect its front page to look like, you'd consider that Kansas City is in the very centre of this continent, that it's the gateway to the prairie, that it was founded by dour, pioneering families, that is has more of its fill of bad men and riverboat gamblers and bankrupt farmers (Harry Truman was one) it would be understandable, even imaginative of you to picture the front page of that newspaper as a glorified police bulletin for 'men wanted' and yet, through all the splashy history of yellow journalism, this paper has retained a front page of a conservatism – you might almost say a Victorian primness – not equalled anywhere in the world. 

Seen from across a room, or seen by any oldster beyond arm's length, it looks like a reprint of any reputable English or American paper of the late nineteenth century. There are eight columns, each with one modest headline and a sub head. No matter what's happening, however earthshaking the event – the murder of a dictator, the explosion of an atomic bomb, another marriage for Jacqueline Onassis – they're always respectfully confined inside the width of a single column. 

Now I haven't seen that paper for a long time but I hope, I pray, that this week it has gone on resisting the national trend and, even under great strain, is confining to a single column the daily sensation that rocks this country during the second week in October. I'm talking about the World Series. Now this title is a pardonably grand description of the play-off, the best of seven games, the winner of four, between the champions of the two American national baseball leagues. 

A young English woman was sitting up at a bar with me the other evening – I don't sit up at a bar more than once a year which only goes to show how 'heady' one can get during the baseball championship – she was with her old man, I should explain, but he was about as baffled by the goings-on as a mouse lost in a monkey house. 

This purposeful young lady wanted to know what it was all about. How many batsmen on a side? Who was at mid-on? What the wicket keeper was doing with all that stuffing on his person? Who were the Edwardian gentlemen in blue caps and whiskers who stood so perilously close to the wicket keeper? And so on. All the intelligent, probing questions you'd expect from a girl who hadn't the slightest notion what was going on. 

In this week of frenzy, even the New York Times, which is still known as the 'good, grey Times' abandons all attempts at good grey balance and objectivity. Half the front page shows a runner, a man in white knickerbockers and an engineer's cap, diving into a cloud of dust that hides the great goal of home base. And the Times makes no apology for three columns of ecstatic prose on the front page and then invites you to jump to 16 columns of more ecstasy inside the paper. 'Just like Test-match fever', the young woman said. 

Well, I said, the truth is that though baseball does not, week in week out, attract the fans, in the flesh I mean, that football – American football – and basketball does, in the second week of October it becomes once again THE national game, an obsession hypnotising so many millions in front of their television sets that the networks which didn't buy the rights, which are not showing it, would be sensible to close down for the duration. 

I'm not going to try and describe the fine points, or even the rough points, of the game to a foreign audience, certainly not over the radio – that would be... well, it would be like trying to describe to somebody blind from birth the cut and pattern and colours and materials of a Carnaby Street fashion show. I did my best with this tenacious young English woman, even while she was looking at it. But when she said, 'So if they hit the boards, the fences, at the edge of the field, they score four, right?' I gave up. 

The excitement of the sitters-up at the bar was intense and loud with free advice. There was a... there was a fat man who kept pattering between his drink and a closer view of the television set and he gave out with such arcane comments as, 'Come on Chris! Remember Pittsburgh!' and 'Drop one inside, you moron and he'll be a dead duck!' 

The thing that sent the English woman reeling in disbelief from the bar was the fact flashed on the screen at the top of the ninth inning that night that all the excitement was about a score of three runs to three, with a delirious announcer screaming, 'The ballgame's all tied up.' 'Three to three!' she cried, 'But in cricket, even on a slow day, they score 60 or 70 runs.' 'That's right!' I said and we paid our bill. They went back to their apartment and dashed uptown to catch the breakthrough in the twelfth on a double by Willie Randolph and a single by Paul Blair. 

The one thing the English woman contributed, for which I'm grateful, was a question I ought to have been able to answer and couldn't. The championship was being played for by the New York Yankees and the Dodgers who for years and years lived and fought in Brooklyn and were affectionately known as 'Dem Bums'. But they were bought and sold as a job lot, must be nearly 20 years ago, to Los Angeles. Anyway the English girl said, 'By the way, where does the word "Yankee" come from. I mean what's its origin?' 

This is one of those stark, child-like questions that never gets asked, like, ‘Why is Canada called Canada?’ Or, ‘What is a lead pipe cinch?’ I simply couldn't answer because they didn't have Mencken's 'American Language' propped up against the bottles in the bar, but within the hour I knew and I will tell you. 

It's from the Dutch who, in the 50 years or so of their hassle with the English over who should own New York, contributed some very hardy words to the language which are with us today, like 'cruller' which is a kind of morning breakfast cake, 'coleslaw, cookie, spook, to snoop, pit (meaning a stone or pip in fruit, as in a peach pit), boss (the boss), hook (as a point of land), waffle and dope (for a stupid one). If the Dodgers had been playing 300 more years ago, they would have been known as the 'Breukelen Dodgers' or more probably as 'Dem Dopes.' 

Well the Dutch words that came into the language from the Dutch occupation of New York are classified as 'knickerbocker Dutch' and I'm horrified to learn, for the first time, that – it says here – the most notable of all the contributions of knickerbocker Dutch to American is the word 'Yankee'. Apparently earlier etymologists assumed it was an Indian word and accordingly invented some fancy derivations from various Indian dialects. Then it was discovered that the word was first given not to English settlers here, but to the Dutch and specifically to the Dutch buccaneers who roamed the Spanish Main. It was applied to them because one of the commonest Dutch male names is Jan and the diminutive – like Johnny for John – is Janke. Apparently there is no satisfactory explanation of how in the end it got transferred from the New York Dutch to the Puritans of New England. But there you are. 

It took an English girl possessing an unfathomable ignorance of baseball to say in effect, 'OK! If you're so knowing about the Yankees and the Dodgers, where did the word "Yankee" come from?' Now she knows. And so do I. And so do you. 

I know another English woman by the way – they all seem to be English women who are struck on baseball or know nothing about it – she would go nowhere during the week but the armchair facing her television set for the night games. She's lived here for 20 years or so and is not so much a baseball addict, as a fierce, impossible hater of the Yankees. If you're for the Yankees or if the Yankees are winning, it is not a good idea to call on her. And this is one thing about baseball that I don't think you can say about any other game, it is the last stand of pure, local loyalty and it's the last national game whose appeal has very little to do with money. 

The incredible tennis explosion – there were five million tennis players in the United States in 1960, there are now 29 million, that's one American in seven – which may have much to do with the sudden fad for jogging and health, and the fact that you can pick up a racket, play, shower and change inside a couple of hours. But the mass addiction to it on television, the proliferation of tennis tournaments all over the country, is due, in large part, to the grotesque money that's played for. 

Do you remember, only two years ago, they staged a match in Las Vegas between Jimmy Connors and John Newcombe? The winner – Connors, as it happened – earned in those three hours a quarter of a million dollars and a percentage of the gross receipts. And I hope that no fair spectator, viewer, listener, will dispute the fact that it has turned many of the top players into petted prima donnas and the crowds that watch them into a Roman circus. 

Now baseball being – always having been – much more of the people than tennis until about six or seven years ago, you'd think baseball would be the popular circus and the players would be in there baying for money, but the word never gets mentioned. The prizes, even in the World Series, are comparatively modest and no commentator ever says that if the batter drives in one more run, the team will get a bonus. Not like the wretched golf commentators here who figure the dollar value of every putt. 

Well, the governor of New York was up there at Yankee Stadium not... not making a ceremonial appearance, and the mayor, and in Washington senators who bark at each other on the Senate floor sat in blissful amity, rooting for the Dodgers. And all across 3,000 miles, cabs were drawn up to the sidewalk and knots of people leaning in to catch it on the radio, and possibly millions of fractious families living for several nights in rapt harmony. 

It's not to be sneezed at. Maybe such a total national absorption, for one week only, with 'who is going to beat who' is a touching sign of the general recognition that, in our enormously, complicated and dangerous world, we've got to the point in politics and national enmity and weaponry where nobody wins.

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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