Volume 37, Number 15 · October 11, 1990
The Virtues of Nakedness
By Stephen Jay Gould
Baseball: The People's Game
by Harold Seymour
Oxford University Press, 639 pp., $24.95
Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball
by George F. Will
Macmillan, 353 pp., $19.95
When the Cheering Stops: Former Major Leaguers Talk about Their Game and Their Lives
by Lee Heiman, by Dave Weiner, by Bill Gutman
Macmillan, 308 pp., $18.95
Consider baseball as Janus, the double-visaged god of our beginnings. One face looks beyond our everyday world into the realm of myth. I went to a game at Fenway Park last month, accompanied by a professional sociologist and budding, but unsophisticated, baseball fan. He delighted in observing the few forms of joint action indulged by fans of this most individualistic sport—the wave and the seventh-inning stretch in particular—referring to these displays, in his jargon, as 'social organization.' But in the ninth inning, with Carlton Fisk at the plate for the visiting White Sox, another apparent ritual puzzled him greatly. Several dozen fans, dispersed throughout our vicinity, stood up, raised their arms above their heads, and gyrated in an odd little motion. What could this mean? My friend was utterly stumped.
Review, 5040 words
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