Baseball and politics in 1988 - 21 October 1988

There’s an old American saying that nobody pays attention to politics until the World Series, the baseball championship, is over.

And just before the first game of this series, a famous player was interviewed in the dugout, and asked how he felt about the presidential race. And he said, "What race?" Then, I am sorry to say, caught himself and grinned, "Oh that race".

Still, it's true that if there is one American institution that unites Americans more honestly than the presidency, it's baseball, and most of all during the ten days or so it can take to separate and crown, in the best of seven games, the champions from all the rest.

It used to be not too many years ago that the world series always took place in the first week of October but that was before they divided off the two leagues, the national league and the American, into two divisions, each league having an eastern and a western division.

Now the teams that come out at the top of each division in the two leagues have a preliminary series. They too play, if need be, seven games so as to establish the champion of each league, and then the World Series, begins. So now it’s all this in the latter half of October, which can produce shivery nights, sometimes in the east, but this year, the two emerging champs were both western teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Athletics from Oakland, which lies just across the bay from San Francisco.

So, the windbreakers came off, and the smudge smears below the eyes, against the sun, came on. This splitting of the two leagues was rationalised in various dubious ways by the owners of the baseball teams, it was, however, like many another drastic reform in other sports, engineered by the television networks, and their clients, the advertisers.

Once they realised, that two World Series, so to speak, a preliminary play-off series and then the thing itself would draw the same huge television audiences, a lovely feeling came over them – the recognition that they could double their advertising revenue. And sure, the players in both series would double their take.

The cost of a 30-second commercial between innings of World Series, is about $340,000. Somebody should do a study, it would make an absorbing magazine piece or even a TV documentary, about the way various businesses have had to adjust their plans to the fact that a whopping nationwide audience, something like 50 million Americans, would be hooked on the televised games, throughout most of October.

The most obvious cases of enforced adjustment are normal television producers and their sponsors, who had thought to launch a new sitcom, a new drama, a new history of the Second World War. The problem is that until four games have been played, you never know when the series will be over. It can run to only four games, or five or six or seven. And, accordingly, you never know which nights the games will go on after the opening.

Among the concerned outsiders few have been so nagged by anxiety as Mr Bush and Mr Dukakis. A month or two ago, they and their campaign managers, got together with the commissioner of baseball – a figure rather more revered in American society than the chief justice of the United States.

They had several meetings and, what with having to check back with network presidents and advertising executives and the presidents of both baseball leagues, the meetings took on the complexity and the weariness of an American-Soviet summit. The question at issue was simply when to hold the Bush-Dukakis debates, and the Benson-Quayle debate. Each candidate has his own reasons for wanting four debates, or three, or none.

When they agreed on three, and the interval between them, they saw that two at least would fall during the league play-offs. After a dizzy joust with calendars and figures and the comparative advertising revenue likely to be reaped at different times of the day in the four different time zones, they worked it out and one game was put back to noon, in the east, 9am in the west, so that all the citizens could give their full attention in the evening to Bush versus Dukakis.

Of course the campaign has gone on – it's supposed to be at full canter – while this past week the country has been preoccupied with the Los Angeles Dodgers versus the Oakland A’s, no way out of that.

But both candidates are sufficiently aware of the whole of the World Series on American voters of all social intercut and ethnic species, that they have gamely but rather pathetically introduced baseball metaphors into their pep talks.

In the first game of the series, when the Oakland A's, the greatly favoured team, had the game in the bag 4-3, who should emerge as an overnight hero but one Kirk Gibson, who, two men out, slammed a two-run homer in the ninth inning, the neck of doom, and put the Dodgers up one game.

Sure enough, next day Governor Dukakis, refusing to believe the polls and admit that he was anywhere near down and out, made the psychological error of admitting it by an analogy. He would, he said, amaze us all by pulling a Kirk Gibson in the last inning.

Next day, good old George Bush, his wimpy image long gone and determined now to reinforce his new image, as an all-American locker-room buddy, started chanting at his rallies, "Our slogan from now on, is RBI". In baseball RBI signifies Runs Batted In. But clever George had learned to pause after pronouncing those electrifying initials, "Our slogan is RBI... Republicans Back In." Big cheers and the waving of many little flags and big banners.

Do they need to do this? Well, that question in the minds of people who would ask it implies that the candidates are stooping to show that they, too, share the joys of the common people.

There is something in that, but their baseball quips also recognise that there is probably no other interest outside bed, earning money and buying a house, that so unites, every time, Americans of both sexes. I suppose that, between the wars, cricket had something of the same hold in Britain.

Well, I remember one year "England facing defeat", was a London evening paper headline, while tucked away in the bottom corner, was the movement of 100,000 of Hitler’s men, towards a neighbour's border. But, I don’t think, I may be wrong, I don’t seem to remember that millions of British women cancel everything, and lose themselves to the wireless and the Test match.

I had better say why I think baseball is the hypnotic game that it is. To the stranger, and to many Americans who don’t really know the game, it's considered slow and tedious. That delusion was shattered once for all with the coming of television and the invention first of the zoom lens, and then the instant replay.

Now, we can watch in close-up the signals before every pitch – the fielding team's manager rubs his nose or tweaks his cap, or flexes an elbow, something to tell the pitcher to spread the infield, say, and also advise what pitch to use, the curve ball, the slider, the split knuckle, fast ball, the sinker. All these through the air, that such patterns can be woven with a full toss. It's not to be believed by an old cricketer until you have seen them replayed in slow motion.

And then the pitcher's signal to the catcher and various yawns, foot tapping, shrugs and whatnot, to indicate which fielder had better be on his toes. Then, of course the players themselves, the incredible speed of the fielding and accuracy of the throws to the bases, and the calculated but the marvellous double player and much more, producing a game of long-drawn continuous suspense, a game a subtle as chess, as droll and scoundrelly as poker, as cunning as politics as physically aesthetic as an entirely new kind of ballet.

It is for this that during the past ten days the bars and lunch counters across the nation have been packed in the evenings, and doormen in office and apartment buildings sprout radios, farmers on their tractors in the mountains and the desert, couch an ear to a transistor.

The most intellectual and the raciest of our conservative columnists, George Will, had a piece the other day bemoaning the general attention given to drugs and the Olympics as also to our daily concern with the presidential debates, when all the while, a new national hero had flashed into the limelight with a record unique in the history of baseball.

Orel Leonard Hershiser IV doesn’t quite have the ring of Babe Ruth, nevertheless Orel Hershiser, a 30-year-old, had pitched 59 consecutive innings, with never a run scored against him. Translate that to a bowler who should never allow a run in, say, 20 consecutive innings. And in the present world series, even at the end of only the second game, Hershiser became the first pitcher in 64 years, to get three hits at bat, he is, an old man said to me who has been writing about sports for 50 years, he is probably the best pitcher that ever was, to the gasping joy of millions of every age and colour from Maine to California, and Hawaii beyond the seas.

Not least to the delight of a very distinguished scholar, who from boyhood on, has nurtured a holy ambition. Along the way he reached the foot of the mountain, he became the president of Yale University, but next January he will ascend to the peak – Mr A Bartlett Giamatti, will become the commissioner of baseball.

Sixty years ago, an English author wrote a sentence which I think was shrewd and true at the time, "America is bound or unified by baseball as England is bound by the class system". Who wrote that? None other than the very unathletic, the very ethereal, flower of Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf.

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