Baseball’s Best Days Are History

Satchel Paige wasn’t kidding when he laid down his sixth and final rule for staying young: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

It’s a sage piece of advice that baseball loves to celebrate, loves to wink at, loves to bundle up together with the best of Yogi Berra, Casey Stengel and Jerry Coleman for a few laughs around the hot stove. But it’s also a piece of advice baseball, for decades now, has steadfastly and resolutely chosen to ignore.

No sport looks back as frequently and as longingly as baseball does--back to the spindly legged home run shuffles of the Babe, back to the comforting gray flannels of the Brooklyn Dodgers, back to the canonized radio calls of Mel Allen, Red Barber and Russ Hodges.

Why?

Because something is always gaining on it.

If it’s not football, which has already caught and passed the grand old game, it’s basketball. Or auto racing. Or golf. Or skateboarding. Or snowboarding. Or PlayStation 2. Or “Spider-Man.”

Today’s baseball, at least the big league version, is a grotesque mutation of the languid, chin-stroking, chess-on-a-diamond original--juiced-up players swatting juiced-up baseballs long distances, mainly for the benefit of “SportsCenter” highlight editors and rotisserie league obsessives. “Home Run Derby” with infielders.

The Arizona Diamondbacks, not yet five seasons old, are reigning World Series champions, because new money can buy the best pitchers just as easily as old.

Barry Bonds, among the surliest sports personalities of his generation, is the new home run king.

The Minnesota Twins lead the American League Central, but when fans ask, “For how much longer?” they are wondering about the existence of the franchise after 2002.

The Montreal Expos are battling for the lead in the National League East, playing for four-figure home crowds on their way out of town or out of business.

Attendance is down. Ticket prices are up. “Contraction” is the buzz term of the day, with “work stoppage” warming up in the pen.

Who can wax romantically about that?

The NFL has some great old stories to tell, but as it tries to build interest for its 2002 season, it stages a memorable Super Bowl that produces an unlikely champion, doesn’t threaten to shut down four teams the day after, hypes the new talent just drafted to join the league and opens a new franchise, in Houston, the league’s 32nd.

Baseball, meanwhile, prints books.

Paige’s famous advice appears on Page 318 of “Baseball: A Literary Anthology,” sandwiched between John Updike’s fabled essay on Ted Williams’ final game and an excerpt from Bill Veeck’s memoirs. Paige is pictured, warming up before a Kansas City Monarchs’ game, on Page 96 of “Baseball As America: Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game.”

Paige is analyzed and assessed as the greatest pitcher in the history of the Negro leagues on Page 193 of “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.”

“Baseball As America,” commissioned as a companion piece to the current National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum national tour, is an exercise in propaganda--short, lavishly illustrated, easy-to-consume chapters on the game’s icons (Joe DiMaggio, Roberto Clemente) and rituals (card-collecting, the seventh-inning stretch) and baseball bouquets lobbed by the likes of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Tom Brokaw and John Grisham.

“Baseball: A Literary Anthology” comes armed with Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Thomas Wolfe, James Thurber, Red Smith, Robert Frost, Gay Talese, Don DeLillo, Stephen King and a premise that plays to both the game’s strengths and weaknesses: At its best, baseball writing is better entertainment than baseball watching.

Case in point: James’ revised “Historical Baseball Abstract,” updated and expanded from the 1985 original. As cantankerous and idiosyncratic as always, James tries to rank the top 100 players of all time at every position. There’s a sports-bar debate brewing on every page (Jeff Bagwell over Eddie Murray? Ron Santo over Brooks Robinson?), but agree or not, I’d rather read James arguing the merits of old Cubs and Phillies than watch the current ones miss cutoff men, any day on the schedule.

Intentionally or not, each book has a retrospective, wrapping-up-the-millennium feel to it--”Baseball: The Boxed Set.” Future generations, please note: This is what baseball looked like, felt like and sounded like when it held our attention as a nation, through a couple of world wars, for sizable portions of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ken Burns’ documentaries on baseball and jazz left behind a similar residue: Once upon a time, these pastimes said important things about America and its values, but both peaked decades ago, long before they were trampled under by the things that define America at the dawn of a new century--NASCAR and Britney Spears.

So where does baseball--and its books--go from here?

“The Montreal Expos, 1969-2002: A Short History.”

“Ball Four: Why Barry Bonds Will Never Again Hit 73 Home Runs in Our Lifetime.”

“The GameBoys of Summer: How Virtual Baseball Eclipsed the Real Thing.”

“The Sub-4.00 ERA, the Complete Game and Other Baseball Oddities.”

“Fehr Strikes Out: The Great Baseball Work Stoppage of 2002-2004.”

Don’t look back?

From this vantage point, Satch, it’s the only view to consider.