The US has an unhealthy obsession with baseball, but few manifestations of it as unhealthy as when intellectuals try to wax eloquent about it. See, for example, the Justice Blackmun baseball masturbation opinion for the Supreme Court.

Also, most of the advantages identified in the post aren’t unique to baseball. They also describe chess and a bunch of other things. The uniqueness of baseball comes from the fact that it’s low-intensity and boring and has more in common with golf or croquet than with basketball/football/hockey, yet people insist that it’s a sport.

Also, I’m not sure what this business is about “all sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere…” If your abilities don’t include throwing and catching, you’re pretty much out of luck. Baseball players nowadays are either big and strong like Barry Bonds, fast and agile like Ichiro, some combination of both, or they’re pitchers. Every other “sport” has a roughly equal number of preferred body types. Basketball needs Kobes as much as it needs Shaqs.

For whatever reason, baseball has become part of American culture in a way that no other sport is. Because of that, there will always be a group of people who think that it’s some kind of transcendent embodiment of all that is right and good in the world. Few things trigger the gag reflex more quickly than when these people speak up about it.

Ugh. Let’s tamp down the pretention, shall we? Every kid I grew up playing T-ball with knew this same stuff. Small kids could play, bottom-of-the-ninth comebacks, everyone could be an umpire . . . maybe every kid on the school yard had a “sort of brilliance,” or maybe this is just something that is stunningly obvious to the rest of us and never occured to Rawls. Oy.

Regardless, philosophers, any philosopher, ruminating about baseball: heavenly, although my late teacher and dear friend, Ninian Smart, would probably have made an equally compelling case for the game of cricket (As a reader wrote in comment to the Boston Review piece, ‘From a British point of view, these seem very parochial considerations.’ I suspect the same could be said from an ‘Indian,’ or ‘Pakistani,’ or a number of other points of view as well).