The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

There was a tenacious impression that baseball was somehow more important than other sports. It was taken more seriously, by people alleged to be serious. There was still a generational memory of 1941, when Ted Williams hit .406 and Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak. The prologue of novelist Don DeLillo’s masterwork Underworld, published in 1997, opens at a Giants-Dodgers pennant playoff game from 1951. The peak of baseball had coincided with the peaking of white middle-class society, and baseball’s displacement by football was sometimes viewed as a symptom of national decline. “Football combines two of the worst features of American life,” wrote conservative baseball scholar George Will. “It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” In 1994, PBS debuted the Ken Burns documentary miniseries Baseball, chronicling the history of the sport as a shadow history of the twentieth century. It did not seem coincidental that Burns’s previous nine-episode PBS series had examined the Civil War. Thinking about baseball as only a game was reductionist. It was (supposedly) bigger than that. It was a way to understand the American experience.