The Heart and Mind of America

From Coach Gallo comes this great quotation:

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game, and do it first by watching some high school or small town teams. The big league games are too fast for the beginner and the newspapers don't help. To read them with profit you have to know a language that comes easy only after philosophy has taught you to judge practice. Here is scholarship that takes effort on the part of the outsider, but it is so bred into the native that it never becomes a dreary round of technicalities.

--Jacques Barzun, Professor of History, Columbia University

Tim Wiles, Director of Research at the Baseball Hall of Fame, used to write an on-line column called "Letters in the Dirt" that examined various topics related to baseball and culture. Sadly, the column appears to have been discontinued after March 2000, but archived columns are still available. In the "Letters in the Dirt" archive there are two brief essays about Barzun's love of his adopted game and his adopted country that take as their starting point this quotation. You can find them here and here. (Wiles goes on in a third essay to convey Barzun's view of the comparison between baseball and cricket.)

Speaking of the Baseball Hall of Fame, you can get the quotation (or part of it, anyway) on a T-shirt through the Hall of Fame Museum Shop.