Play Ball! State folklorist considers why baseball the sport will survive baseball the business By Steve Libowitz As the 1995 baseball season crept perilously close to the brink of what many fans felt was unthinkable--replacement-player ball--lots of pundits and too many fans seemed ready to abandon the game and leave it to fester under the pressure of its two ego-inflated, greedy behemoths: the owners and the players. But then, like lightning, the player strike was over. The games would begin after all. Through drug and sex and gambling scandals, through wars and depressions and political assassinations, even in spite of strikes and work stoppages and lockouts, baseball has endured. But why? Those who love the game, who wait for it each spring and follow it all summer long, who read about it and talk about it know the game endures because of something more than money. Charlie Camp is one of those people. Dr. Camp is a lecturer in the School of Continuing Studies' Odyssey program, offering for the past four years a course called Baseball and American Life: Close Readings and Close Calls. He believes baseball endures because it is the stuff of which myths are made. He should know. Since 1976, Dr. Camp has served as Maryland's folklorist for the Maryland State Arts Council. As folklorist, he is the state's chief proponent for celebrating the myths and folk ways of individuals, families and specific professions--like watermen-- who record their unique histories, traditions and customs through homespun arts, crafts and performances. Dr. Camp calls this "the arts of remembrance." And that is the link that connects, in his mind, baseball and folk art. "As I've gotten older, I have been more self-conscious about trying to connect the worlds of folk art and baseball," said the 44-year-old, who holds a doctorate in folk art from the University of Pennsylvania. It's in this connection that Dr. Camp believes exists the key to why baseball, more than any other sport, elicits such strong emotion among even the most casual fan. "Both folk art and baseball appeal to people who care about tradition," he said. "They both link customs, rituals and superstitions not just over time but through generations." "A child's first big-league ballgame is like a story retold," he wrote for the flier copy announcing his recent lecture at the Library of Congress called "Of Heroes and Ballparks, Real and Imagined: A Folklorist's View of Baseball." "Adults responsible for the experience treat it as something to be reported, commented upon, compared with their own, broadcast to friends and family. "Beneath baseball's surface is a world of belief and custom that connects the people on the fields with the people in the seats. "Baseball weaves together memories and aspirations, thought and action, players and fans, thereby gaining an importance that seems at once absurdly overblown and spiritually essential." But what makes it so? What is it about baseball that helps it withstand internal and external calamities? Why does baseball seem to rise in much of our collective conscience to mythic, romantic proportions? "There's no simple answer, of course," Dr. Camp said. For him the starting point is that baseball is bigger than our field of vision and powers of understanding. "Unlike other pastimes that are played out in front of us, baseball is played by individuals spread out over a large field. It's played in the dugout, in the bullpen, in the front office, in the minor leagues playing hundreds of miles away. All of these affect what's happening on the field as we watch a game. "But baseball is also kind of a microanalytic game," Dr. Camp said. "It all happens due to specific acts: a ball thrown at a bat, a ball speeding to a glove. Then it becomes a game of inches." "I enjoy this paradox of the game, trying to see the whole game while concentrating on individual parts," Dr. Camp said. "But if you just focus on one thing, like some people just watch the pitcher, the game explodes in other places and catches you off guard. And then you turn to the person next to you and ask what happened, and maybe he saw something. Or someone near him saw it, and so it may take everyone in a ballpark to piece together what really happened in a game." This dynamic only occurs, Dr. Camp admits, at the ballpark, another totem of the game. "In baseball having emotional, historical and mythic connectedness to the place where the game is played is a link to the past of a grand sport, and it's OK and even expected." Just recall the emotion surrounding the final game played at Memorial Stadium at the close of the 1992 season. The whole day was played out like a scene from the film "Field of Dreams." Fan favorite Mike Flanagan striking out the last batter. Past and present Orioles, in uniform, taking their old positions on the field creating prolonged and seemingly connected post-game goose-bumps. What was that all about? "It's funny because the stadium is so very plain. Nothing about it says 'love me'; it's not a cozy place," Dr. Camp said. "But it was a crucible for people's feelings and celebrations and pain. When the Orioles lost to the [Pittsburgh] Pirates [in the 1979 World Series], we had to watch them celebrate on our field. "That stadium was such a product of what people brought to it. There was a sense of leaving your childhood home," he said, "but no one was going to ever live there again. It was going to be boarded up or torn down." Perhaps the most important quality about baseball that colors it in mythic tones is that it has been around for so long, Dr. Camp said. "People mark the passage of time in relation to baseball," he said. "And in those 119 years, a wide variety of people have written about the game and its players and its places. The literature has done so much to romanticize it." He uses the example of Cal Ripken's consecutive game streak. "We aren't just connecting Ripken to his current statistics but to [current record holder] Lou Gehrig and his life and the tragedy of his death and the movie about it and Gary Cooper's portrayal of him in that movie. The whole of all of this is significant and imposing." Dr. Camp knows, though, that there is no standard mythology about baseball. "Everybody finds their own enjoyment in the game. Some things connect and resonate immediately, others crop up later. "What has sustained my interest over the years is that baseball has kind of historical and social depth that allows people with very different views on most other subjects to come to some kind of mutual respect for each other," he said. "Not a lot of things cross generations the way baseball does," he said. "I don't need to encourage my 8-year-old son, Nicholas, to argue with me about baseball, he comes to it naturally. And that's important to me. It's better for a father and son to have something they can argue about, rather than to find that the worlds they each inhabit are disconnected, and they have nothing to talk about." Dr. Camp is certainly thrilled that the strike is over. But does he hold a grudge against the sport that would cause him to turn away from the game he has loved since he was a boy growing up in Ohio? "Hell no," he said. "If the recent cold snap had come two weeks earlier and gotten all my daffodils before they bloomed, would I have gone out and pulled up all the bulbs in my garden? "We live in the real world. And whatever our romantic attachments are to it, and no matter how much those attachments are based on mythological readings of past teams and heroes, baseball belongs on the sports page. It happens, and you read about what happens, and you experience it, and then you think about it and chew on it. "For me, the real calamity of the strike was there just was nothing to eat." As of April 26, the main course will once again be served. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Camp will present an illustrated talk titled "Hallowed Grounds: A Tour of Ballparks Real and Imagined," as part of the Wednesday Noon Series, April 12 in the Garrett Room of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library on the Homewood campus. Admission is free. For more information, call the Office of Special Events at 516-7157. -----------------------------------------------------------------