Why Baseball Matters

By: Susan Jacoby

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

Baseball, first dubbed the "national pastime" in print in 1856, is the country's most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the 21st century, the game is losing young fans. Furthermore, baseball's greatest charm - a clockless suspension of time - is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction.

These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position - in reality and myth - in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War - when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps - to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online "fantasy baseball" to attending real games.

Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters reminds us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.

©2018 Susan Jacoby (P)2018 Tantor

Author Doesn’t Like Change

While some interesting musings are presented, on the whole the book turns out to be what the author notes her friend warned her about — another book where the author decries the current state of the game and pines for their perception of how it was when they were young.

Jacoby focuses on the lack of youth involvement and interest in baseball, particularly due to the perception of decreased attention spans, but doesn’t present any real solutions. She’s adamantly opposed to arguments for changing the game, but this opposition appears to be as much due to a feeling that “kids these days” just don’t understand the game like they did when she was growing up.

The best parts of the book are memoir-like moments where she reflects on her life as a fan, be it watching baseball with her grandfather, meeting a club of French baseball fans, or being complimented by Ernie Banks.

As a final note, the book appears to have tentatively not aged well — not only do initial numbers from the introduction of the pitch clock show faster games with more fans tuning in, but her assertion that fans could be sure the Astros in 2017 were playing on the level is quite humorous looking back.

great storytelling!

loved the story and insights into my favorite American pastime! excellent reminder of baseball glory.

Worth a listen

As a baseball fan nothing new or groundbreaking. The narrator though is what kept me hooked, I will be looking for other books she has voiced.