According to Thomas Boswell, Washington Post sports columnist emeritus, baseball is just like life, only more so. “The game is so appealing,” he writes, “because it is so profoundly normal and welcoming to us. Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech—a slightly elevated and concentrated form.”
Unless, baseball is instead a thing of great mystery, not like daily life at all, inaccessible to the uninitiated. Just a few pages after musing on the reassuring nature of the relatable, average Joe ballplayer (“these folk are of normal height, speak in a normal tone of voice, and… act like sensible men”), Boswell is peering deep into the inscrutable riddles of the game, delivering a decidedly anti-populist message. In the second piece of his debut collection of baseball writings, How Life Imitates the World Series, he gives an account of one of the most famous ballgames of all time, the 1978 tiebreaker contest between the Red Sox and Yankees, noting an overlooked, but nonetheless pivotal moment, a catch made by Yanks right fielder Lou Piniella, lined up “so far out of normal… position that he ought to have a puff of magical smoke curling up behind him.” To the average observer, it looked like a routine catch, but to the expert who understands the inside game, Boswell explains, Piniella’s bold, atypical positioning in the field reveals just how rare and game-altering the play turned out to be. “It was the hallmark of this game,” Boswell writes, “that its central plays reflected the true daily life of the inner sport. They were not flamboyant and extravagant but exclusive and subtle. Baseball’s well-kept secret is that it has never been solely a democratic national pastime, but an elitist passion as well.”
These frequent vacillations in Boswell’s understanding of baseball—elitist game vs. populist entertainment, sacred mystery vs. quotidian poetry—run throughout, and animate, his ample body of work. Marked by an earthy, conversational fluency, occasional flourishes of literary technique and allusion (putting that Amherst English degree to work!), and, above all, a desire to illuminate and understand a game at once simple and endlessly complex, Boswell’s writings constitute a sort of Guide for the Perplexed to the contemporary sport—though not perhaps A Guide for the Uninitiated. Boswell, hired by the Washington Post in 1969, promoted to reporter in the early ‘70s, and named sports columnist in 1984, a position he held until his 2021 retirement, is, throughout his decades of writing, continually grappling with an ever-changing sport, celebrating its more obvious pleasures, while attempting to bring to light its deeper meaning. If Boswell often insists on the inscrutable nature of the sport, it is not (or not entirely) out of any snobbish impulse, but because the game seems to him to be a beautiful mystery that he is constantly trying to unlock, both for his benefit and that of his reader.
Although Boswell remained at the Post until 2021, his four collections of baseball writing all cover the earlier part of his career, ranging roughly from the mid-1970s until the mid-‘90s. These volumes—How Life Imitates the World Series (1982), Why Time Begins on Opening Day (1984), The Heart of the Order (1989), and Cracking the Show (1994)—collect Boswell’s columns from the Post, along with other pieces he wrote for outlets like Inside Sports and GQ, grouping them together by theme, and often collaging a series of pieces together into new, longer essays. (In addition to his baseball books, Boswell has also published one collection each of his golf pieces and his general sportswriting and a collaborative text with baseball photographer Walter Iooss.) This period covers significant changes in the sport, most notably the advent of free agency and the long aftermath, including management’s attempt to win back power by seeking prohibitive compensation for lost players and by illegally colluding to keep down salaries. It’s also a period when people began to look at the game in new ways, setting aside traditional methods of player evaluation like fielding percentage and pitcher wins in favor of newer, more sophisticated statistics. Boswell’s take on both these sets of changes is equivocal. A baseball traditionalist at heart, as well as an inherently fair, even-minded man, he’s sympathetic to the player’s cause, but only to a degree, frequently deriding them as an overpaid group of whiners. (They still come off better than the owners, however.) Similarly, he showed an early interest in sabermetrics—even contributing his own stat, the forward-thinking Total Average, in 1978—an interest in line with his more general mission of “Cracking the Show,” i.e. uncovering the hidden game of baseball. Later, though, he seemed to regress in this line of thinking, arguing against Nolan Ryan’s Hall of Fame case because of his mediocre won-loss record and even insisting, in a 1990 piece, that “n-o-t-h-i-n-g is more important than RBI.”
*****
What continually fires up Boswell is how a game that seems so natural to him (“a kingdom built to human scale”) can, at the same time, continue to escape his full understanding, an ungraspable phantom forever just out of reach. In the title essay from his second book, “Why Time Begins on Opening Day,” Boswell neatly sums up the conundrum:
Baseball offers us pleasure and insight at so many levels and in so many forms that, when we try to grasp the sport in our two hands, we end up with nothing. The game, because it is no one thing, but rather, dozens of things, has slipped through our fingers again.
Boswell’s mission then—by its very nature doomed to failure—is to grasp the game, to see it whole. He will attempt to do this in many different ways, whether by probing the essential character of players, managers, and umpires in a series of both quick-sketch and in-depth profiles; by collaging a sequence of articles written throughout a season together in a single kaleidoscopic piece; or, in two of his more intriguing articles, by looking for clues in pre-game batting practice or in the specifics of each player’s stance.
In his piece, “Those Who Watch Batting Practice and Those Who Don’t,” from his first book How Life Imitates the World Series, Boswell begins by dividing fans into the two categories indicated in the title, before declaiming, “only those in the first category have much chance of amounting to anything.” For Boswell, this is because batting practice is key to understanding the sport, a “Rosetta Stone that unlocks many of the game’s hieroglyphics.” By not getting to the ballpark early and watching the players take their warmup cuts, the tardy fan misses the chance to evaluate each player’s tendencies and the way that they’ve been swinging the bat. They also miss the opportunity to adapt themselves to the game’s deliberate speed before first pitch. Finally, they forgo a chance to peer into the more intimate and social precincts of the game, as batting practice provides a more relaxed moment that shows ballplayers at their chattiest and most human. For a man who believes, as he writes in another essay, that the game’s “rich verbal tradition… is what marks baseball so distinctively, not only among our games, but among all our endeavors,” to miss this chance is to forfeit an essential part of the game.
But for all the pleasures Boswell takes in the extramural aspects of baseball, it’s the chance to study the batters in concentrated bursts that makes batting practice so revealing. This is because, for Boswell, a player’s style in the batter’s box is synonymous with their style in life—and ultimately reveals their inner personality. In his 1985 essay, “All in the Stance,” collected in his third volume of baseball writings, The Heart of the Order, Boswell spells out his philosophy on batting style: “Like a golfer’s tempo, a hitter’s stance runs so close to the grain of his personality that the two must coincide for him to perform at his best.” A batter can no more refrain from revealing their true self through their in-the-box style than a writer can through the idiosyncrasies of their prose. So Hank Aaron’s “motionless, almost camouflaged stance” reveals his inner calm, while Willie Mays’ inchoate positioning in the box reflects the fact that he’s a “creature of reaction,” and Frank Robinson’s plate crowding is consistent with his general character: “Meet him off the field and he’ll still crowd the plate on you.” Only by getting away from their “true” stance will a player fail to live up to their potential, as, Boswell argues, happened to Dwight Evans during the first half of his career.
This theory of stance-as-inner-man is as delicious as it is ultimately more than a bit far-fetched. (Players change their stances for all sorts of reasons and an “unnatural” stance may work just as well for a player than one that matches up with their personality.) But it shows an attention to the specifics of a batter’s style that serves him well in his player profiles, of which his four collections contain many. Boswell looks at players not merely as athletes but as artists and he takes pleasure in outlining their specific aesthetic and philosophical approach to the game. This tendency begins early in Boswell’s career, as in a piece in his first collection, where he compares the contrasting styles of a-then-in-his-prime George Brett and the long-retired Ted Williams, a pair whose “theories of hitting, their style at the plate, their whole attitude toward the game, as well as their personalities… are nearly total opposites.” Unlike the analytical, perfectionist Williams, Brett gets by on instinct and enthusiasm. An “impurist of the best sort,” Brett blends into the game, his contributions often hidden from the more casual observer. Williams, by contrast, is always the center-of-attention, his hitting a thing apart from his teammates and the surrounding game that, for him, is of considerably less importance than his individual at-bats.
Boswell often sets up a pair of players in opposition, the better to study their unique style, and in this piece, he compares Williams not only to Brett but to Rod Carew. While Williams is the “art-for-art sake’s purist of the well-struck pull hit,” Carew is a different kind of bat-artist, “the purist of the place hit and the bunt.” What both share is the aesthete’s indifference to the more practical matters that surround them. Boswell both admires this stringent dedication to a very specific art and doesn’t. (The players he embraces more fully are the hustlers and team guys like Brett and, pre-scandal, Pete Rose.) In a later piece, a 1983 quick-sketch of Carew, he outlines some of the common complaints about the Angels first baseman, complaints that he doesn’t necessarily disagree with: the charges that he takes too many days off, that he only plays when he feels like it, that he’s more concerned with his batting average than his team. But even then, Boswell can’t help but admire Carew, realizing that the time he takes off is necessary “because he knows he must be in perfect working order to ply his delicate craft.” In this piece, as in many others, Boswell looks close, weighs the player’s artistry against their larger place in the game, and sums it all up in one perfect phrase. “It’s all too easy to see Carew as a sort of baseball lyric poet with extremely clean fingernails,” he writes, while making it clear that he cannot fully embrace his own description. As an aesthete himself, albeit an earthy one, Boswell can’t bring himself to linger too long on Carew’s flaws when there is so much else to admire, even at this late stage of his career, in his game.
*****
Writing about the ways that people’s attitudes towards baseball change when they move from childhood to the adult world, Thomas Boswell notes how youthful enthusiasm often gives way to a more measured, but richer appreciation of the game. “As adults watching other adults,” he writes, “we start to realize the game is not something outside our everyday world, but merely a heightened and focused form of our common experience.” This idea of the sport as an elevated version of daily life is the flipside to Boswell’s baseball-as-unsolvable-riddle probing, but the two concepts are not, in the end, mutually exclusive. Part of Boswell’s vision of adult baseball watching is a new appreciation for the inner workings of the game, the craftsmanship and personalities of the players that allow them to make the routine plays as well as come through with more spectacular achievements. This appreciation for the everyday demands a closer attention, which in turn leads to the discovery of gaps in our understanding, and a desire to fill in those gaps. Quotidian appreciation inevitably gives way to an appetite for deeper mysteries and Boswell is here for all of it.
Boswell’s attention to the dailiness of baseball comes through in the telling detail, the careful breakdown of a pivotal play, the richly turned phrase that captures the essence of a player or manager. He is especially good at describing the physical attributes and moral style of an individual, often drawing on a stock of Americana-laced imagery that imagines these late 20th century players and fans as figures out of an earlier time. Standing in line for bratwurst at Milwaukee’s County Stadium, he finds the “Germanic crowd, in ruddy wool sweaters and hunting jackets” to be “redolent of a nineteenth-century-American health and self-confidence.” In another piece, he imagines the Brewer’s star shortstop, Robin Yount, with his “American frontier look,” as a Pony Express rider about to make his way through hostile land. Later, in a longer profile of manager Whitey Herzog, one of his finest pieces, Boswell begins with a precise physical description of the burly skipper (enormous hands, “comfortable” belly, “thumbs-at-the waist farmer hip cock,” “white burr-cut hair [that] might as well be a rooster’s comb”) before defining his style in larger, archetypal terms that fit the man perfectly. “Back [in the day],” he writes, “Satchel Paige nicknamed Herzog ‘Wild Child.’ Now his style is shameless middle-American gothic.”
This Americana-izing of the game can be a bit much—a bit too mythic in its treatment of both baseball and the 19th century, as well as a tad too, well, Caucasian—but then again Boswell, like many sports writers, is a bit of mythologizer. Not too much, though, because Boswell prefers bearing down on specifics to extended reverie and his trans-century imaginings are more imagistic/descriptive than philosophical/political. His treatment of time is, at any rate, more a question of years than decades. In compiling his collections, particularly the second two, Boswell’s biggest editorial move is to combine a series of columns into one longer essay. These essays may track, for example, the 1990 playoffs over the course of a couple of weeks or the career of Doc Gooden over the arc of several seasons. By checking in periodically on different teams or players, Boswell creates mini-epics, little glimpses adding up to a fragment-built whole. In the case of the Gooden piece, from The Heart of the Order, Boswell collages four different columns, one written in every year from 1985 to 1988. The effect of this temporal compression is devastating, as he traces the Mets ace’s decline from unstoppable phenom at 20 to drug-troubled cautionary tale, attempting a comeback at the tender age of 23.
*****
Because Boswell was based in D.C. for his whole career and because the city had no major league ballclub from 1972 to 2004, the Baltimore Orioles served as the de facto home team for Washington for much of his stint at the Post. Boswell’s frequent dispatches on the club trace a proud franchise that had an unprecedented level of success between the ‘60s and the early ‘80s, marked by fundamentally perfect baseball and the innovative managing of Earl Weaver (himself a bit of a 19th century figure.) But by the mid-1980s, the magic had run out and even a brief return by Weaver for most of the 1985 and all of the 1986 season couldn’t lift the team above mediocrity. But then in 1989, the team, which had lost 107 games the year before, suddenly turned it around. In this magical season, they challenged for a playoff spot until late in the season, ultimately winning 87 games and falling just short of the division title. This season, which Boswell called his favorite, is the subject of a whole section in his fourth collection, Cracking the Show, consisting of four separate pieces that track the team’s progress and then reflect back on the season from the vantage of the following spring.
These four pieces are not collaged together, but allowed to stand as individual pieces. And yet, taken together, they offer the same kaleidoscopic attempt to grasp a chunk of time in baseball history as those sections that join together separate columns as a new whole. The first piece, written in Spring Training, is a snotty and highly pessimistic take on the team’s chances that season. The second piece, also sent in from Spring camp, offers a more hopeful assessment of the Orioles’ odds. The third, appropriately titled “Mea Culpa,” written mid-season when the team’s strong play has become too obvious to ignore, apologizes for the first piece, while the final column offers a lengthy retrospective of the season, highlighting all of the key moments.
That last piece, which finds Boswell waxing philosophical, begins with an ode to the specific. “Major league ballplayers love detail,” he writes, before noting that many fans also bring a heightened level of attention to the game. Like the players, though, these fans “can’t always explain why they know what they know. So many games, so many plays.” Not to worry though, because, as Boswell continues, “What’s a photograph except a sea of dots? Enough of them make a picture. That’s how we see a team’s season: an ocean of details that finally form a portrait.” In the course of the ’89 Orioles season, these details included rookie Steve Finley’s daring opening day catch which set the tone for the year, the team hitting three homers off Nolan Ryan in a midseason contest, unheralded starter Dave Johnson winning two key games later in the year, and a wild pitch by rookie closer Gregg Olson late in the season that doomed the team’s playoff chances for good. And, finally, they included a rain-soaked parade in Baltimore, celebrating a team that so far exceeded expectations and brought so much pleasure to a fanbase that their ultimate failure was beside the point. In Boswell’s telling, the dots add up to a picture and the picture is one of triumph as measured by something other than final results. A season made of moments to be enjoyed both as they happened and later, taken as a whole, in retrospect. Because as Boswell writes in another essay, about another contest, “The crowd and its team had finally understood that in games, as in many things, the ending, the final score, is only part of what matters. The process, the pleasure, the grain of the game count too.” In the end, it’s this very attention to the grain that most defines Boswell’s lengthy and surpassingly rich body of work.