In an uncustomary relaxation of the stern and rigid discipline that defined it, the parochial school I attended from seventh to twelfth grades permitted students whose parents obtained tickets for opening day to look at live baseball instead of dull blackboards. I can’t recall if this happened every year. Maybe the Detroit club’s World Series victory in 1984 spurred a single spell of civic enthusiasm the following season. I do know that at least one afternoon toward the end of a school year I took advantage of this free pass from class and went with my father to the since-razed ballpark at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues.

Now before anyone starts to expect a moist-eyed, sentimental look back at a long-distant day when skies were bluer and grass was greener and fathers and sons bonded over the all-American game of baseball in that innocent era before players’ performances were artificially enhanced, I want to make something absolutely clear: that opening day wasn’t the start of a lifelong love of baseball. That’s just not my story. I don’t like that damn game and never have. I can’t say I hate baseball because I’ve never felt so strongly about it. I did play little league ball for a few seasons before I found better things to do, but even then I didn’t want to watch the game. The standing around with nothing to do that tried the patience of many a ten-year-old outfielder was at least punctuated by the occasional need to chase a ball. Players do get to bat periodically. The long stretches of inactivity that inhibited enjoyment of playing ruled out becoming a spectator. At least in sports like basketball and football all the participants are usually active at the same time. Watching someone swing a stick while others loiter on manicured lawns is not my idea of a good time. I have no use for golf either. A television sports commentator once told me that in all sports players’ try to impose their wills via intermediaries like balls and pucks. The more direct the imposition, the more viscerally exciting the sport will be. The convolutions involved in baseball players’ rather indirect self assertions might make their endeavor complex, and perhaps this theory explains the game’s appeal to intellectual types, but I don’t think it really accounts for eagerness to watch baseball as opposed to, say, chess or croquet.

Here I should make one more thing perfectly plain: I don’t categorically dismiss sports or those who follow them. Indifference to baseball may indelibly mark an American male as a misfit, but this one is not insensible to the various reasons for fascination with athletics. I’m not one of those people who thinks aggressive competitiveness ought to be discouraged or that watching others engaged in it is necessarily a waste of time. I know that great athletes excel not only because of luck in the genetic lottery but also because of countless hours of training. The discipline, tenacity, focus, hard work and commitment required to succeed deserve widespread admiration. Athletes can display grace, poise and mental as well as physical strength – a potent combination of valuable qualities. Seeing fit people performing difficult maneuvers well can be an aesthetic experience. I can entertain the notion that to examine the propensity to play and watch games is to explore what it means to be human. In the abstract, I see how all of this applies to baseball, but since it applies equally to other sports, none of it explains the pervasive appeal of that game in particular.

Because baseball matters so much to so many people in the United States, I’ve wondered if it didn’t offer a route to comprehending the national character. Film director Ken Burns took that idea as the premise for his eighteen-and-half-hour 1994 documentary Baseball and its four-hour 2010 follow-up Baseball: The Tenth Inning. He told The New York Times that “baseball is a way to understand American history” and I suspect that there’s enough sense in that idea to take it seriously. For some groups, embracing baseball meant assimilating into American society. Jackie Robinson’s breaking through the wall that barred black players from Major League Baseball, to cite but one example, is no simple sports story. Burns revisited the sport he’d already scrutinized at length because of developments like the 1994 players’ strike and the scandal of rampant steroid use.

Yet almost any sport can reveal something about a society. Take one I do understand. “The history of boxing is the mirror image of America’s immigrant experience,” journalist Jack Newfield contends. “Every immigrant group, living in slums, seeking an American identity, had fighters as their first heroes.” Newfield’s friend Budd Schulberg, who authored stories such as “Meal Ticket” illustrating precisely this point, also developed a theory about the heavyweight championship, namely “that somehow each of the great figures to hold the title manages to sum up the spirit of his time.” Thirty-nine years before Robinson donned a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947, Jack Johnson defiantly broke down a barrier by becoming the first black heavyweight champion. Robinson was named the National League’s most valuable player in 1949, the same year Joe Louis’s twelve-year reign as champion ended, and the baseball player credited the widely esteemed boxer’s accomplishments for making his possible. Certainly, the transformation of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali, who espoused a separatist ideology even while working with white associates and belittling black opponents, is an odyssey that illustrates something crucial about race in America, even if the meaning remains ambiguous. Although unorganized fighters couldn’t bring about the work-stoppage equivalent of the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, the exploitation of most boxers, the massive purses won by a few and the enrichment of controversial characters like ex-convict and promoter Don King surely exposes much about the U.S. economic system. And juiced batters are hardly the only people seeking unfair advantages. In his effort to understand his country, Burns could have looked at a sport other than baseball (and he did when he made Unforgivable Blackness, a rather lengthy documentary about Johnson).

Still, something about baseball sets it apart. I’ve read of an effort to make opening day a national holiday. Even if this drive were only partially in earnest, enough adults do take time away from work to fill stadiums on the first day game of a season. That a school more eager to recognize religious than secular holidays and not usually lax about attendance would conclude that going to a game could take precedence over studying also suggests that people really do think baseball fundamentally matters.

Left indifferent (bored, actually) by that long ago home opener and a few other trips to ballparks over the years, and unable to imagine sacrificing a day of my life to sitting through Burns’s baseball movies (fine films though they may be), I had to look elsewhere in my attempt to solve the mystery of the sport. Where better to turn than literature in a quest to understand human endeavors? Schulberg, author of several fictional and nonfictional books concerning boxing, allows that only baseball rivals his and my preferred sport in the quantity and quality of literature it has inspired. Certainly I’ve read some incisive stories in which baseball plays a big part, but with the best of these (like David James Duncan’s The Brothers K), I’ve enjoyed them despite the sport’s presence. This might not seem like praise, but it is. By force of individual voice and style, the most able writers can hold the attention even of readers usually uninterested in their subject matter, or so I believe. Besides, contests inherently involve drama – the ecstasy of winning and the agony of losing, the David-and-Goliath scenario, the conflict between cowboys in black hats and white hats, and so on – and sports offer settings where intense emotions can play themselves out in all their glory and shame. The specific organized conflict matters less than the desire and disappointment generated. If these are realized fully and depicted vividly, then it doesn’t matter if the tale revolves around baseball, beach volleyball or a spelling bee. But writers’ enthrallment with certain games may not be contagious, especially when they concentrate intently on the particulars and minutia of a sport (especially when it’s baseball). I’ve read stories that might please fans but moved me to look elsewhere for amusement (much as baseball games on television do). No matter how I try to enter these stories, baseball bars the door.

Don DeLillo received much acclaim for the opening portion of Underworld, which involves the homerun that dramatically ended a storied 1951 game sequence, but I think he might have gotten close to something essential and unsettling about the sport and its adherents at the start of another novel. DeLillo begins Mao II with a huge Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium, where one of the thirteen thousand participants simultaneously marrying strangers designated by their Master thinks about two words. Of “baseball,” Karen Janney muses: “The word has resonance if you’re American, a sense of shared heart and untranslatable lore.” The other word she contemplates, as her father worries that she’s surrendering her “singularities” as she merges with the “undifferentiated mass” on the field, is “cult.” Perhaps fandom too involves true believer’s abandonment of individuality, submission to an external power and obligatory performance of rituals. “They stand and chant,” DeLillo writes, “fortified by the blood of numbers.” He could be referring to the Moonies, but he could be commenting on those cheering followers of that field’s usual occupants. Like the couples in Mao II who wed partners chosen by their charismatic leader, baseball fans swear allegiance to players selected by teams’ calculating owners. Those performing the rites of fanaticism through one endless baseball season after another certainly display comparable devotion to organizations they don’t control and commitment to lore that cannot be translated to outsiders.

If imputing a religious air to baseball dedication overstates its depth, doing so at least imputes a degree of seriousness to what otherwise looks like an astonishing amount of time spent serially watching inconsequential diversions. DeLillo, I know, didn’t mean to disparage baseball in Mao II. He’s another novelist enamored by the game. Baseball, he told The Observer, “was just so natural, because we all grew up with it. We played it; we listened to it on the radio, and then we went to Yankee stadium. It was a taken-for-granted pleasure.” Far from vaguely sinister worshipfulness, it’s just something fun. This, of course, assumes one does take pleasure in the game – in listening to it, in watching it, in talking about it.

Several other writers I enviously admire share my lack of enthusiasm for baseball. They have nothing to do with my attitude, since it formed before I ever read them. I admit, however, that knowing they viewed this topic as I do gave me an extra reason to like them. (Similarly, learning that John Coltrane had to ask, “Who’s Willie Mays, Jim?” when a fellow musician began talking about a recent game boosted my fondness for him even though his ingenuous baseball obliviousness in no way affects the sound of his saxophone.) In The Sweet Science, essayist A.J. Liebling remarks that he “never cared much about baseball,” even though he did attend some Yankee games when he was young. (Along the same lines, Schulberg recalls a youthful fascination with lightweight Benny Leonard so complete it left him unable to care about legends like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb breaking silly batting records.) In A Neutral Corner, Liebling says that when Yankee Stadium was made the staging area for a 1959 fight it was “converted … to a noble purpose” – as distinct from its usual, something-other-than-noble one. Twenty years earlier, in 1939, Louis had fought the first heavyweight championship bout ever held in Detroit when he defended his title against Bob Pastor at what was then known as Briggs Stadium. I might have thought of that piece of trivia in conjunction with Liebling’s line had I known either when I was sitting four and half decades later in what by then had been renamed Tiger Stadium. I certainly wanted something to ponder other than what I saw before me.

George Orwell objected to sports because of the ugliness they brought out in people when games cease to be about fun and fitness and start to shoulder symbolism: “as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused.” Orwell worries especially about athletes becoming national representatives. “At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare,” Orwell writes in “The Sporting Spirit,” a 1945 Tribune column. “But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe – at any rate for short periods – that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.” Orwell frets about football (i.e. soccer), cricket and the Olympics enflaming vicious patriotic passions; he dislikes boxing because “a fight between white and coloured boxers before a mixed audience” can fuel racial hatred. Since he was writing during Louis’s era, Orwell might have been thinking of the two fights with Max Schmeling, a boxer regarded both inside and outside his native Germany as the poster boy of the Nazi’s racist fantasies.

Orwell misses something crucial here. I’ve been at fights where it was immediately evident that the loudest spectators didn’t know what they were shouting about when it came to boxing itself and based their preferences on criteria other than athletic ability. But even if countless idiots root for whom they root because of racism or nationalism, this doesn’t mean the game is to blame. Besides, even if mixed race contests antagonized imbeciles, by taking part in such events athletes like Jack Johnson, Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson became heroes, at least to some, and contributed, at least to some degree, to positive change in racial attitudes. Orwell is right that athletes have at times been burdened with out-of-proportion symbolism and that the worst of kinds of bloody-minded ignorance can be heard in sporting arenas, but his dislike for the ugliness blinds him to the glimpses of beauty sports can offer.

Gay Talese looked like a better candidate for cracking the enigma of baseball. After all, he has none of the usually dependable Orwell’s reflexive aversion to sports. Talese wrote numerous essays on boxing as well as baseball. Someone who finds fighters intriguing and can convey something meaningful about them should be able to articulate the grounds for baseball adoration. Or so I reasoned when I picked up The Silent Season of a Hero: The Sports Writing of Gay Talese.

As it turns out, the collection leaves the impression that Talese doesn’t care much for sports at all. The sports matter only insofar as his subjects’ reactions to contests reveal something about their characters. He writes about individuals, really. Sports figures, especially those whose best days are behind them, often have compelling stories, and these interest Talese even if the ones he tells have little or nothing to do with the games that gave his subjects their fame. (Golf comes up with disheartening frequency in his profiles of former fighters and baseball players.) The title essay looks at Joe DiMaggio fifteen years after he retired from baseball and twenty five years after “he hit in fifty six straight games and became the most cherished man in America.” Talese shadows DiMaggio as he avoids talking about former wife Marilyn Monroe, attends to business obligations, chats with fans who recall his glory days and plays golf. His profile of Joe Louis at age forty-eight uses exactly the same formula, describing the former champion’s post-boxing business, his interactions with admirers, his love of golf. The only real difference is that Louis doesn’t mind talking about his ex-wives. Talese penned numerous pieces on boxer Floyd Patterson (thirty seven of them, according to editor Michael Rosenwald). Those reprinted in The Silent Season look at what Patterson did when he wasn’t in the ring, like routinely carry a fake beard so he could sneak away from an arena unrecognized if were to lose a fight.

Talese’s vignettes often have little to do with sports in any essential way. The pieces on DiMaggio and Louis could have been about pop singers, actors, politicians or others whose profession previously, briefly made them renowned. When investigating the exceptional long after their prime, Talese shows more interest in their long treks downward than in their earlier ascents and the peaks they’d reached. No one would care about Louis’s golf obsession if he hadn’t been an astounding fighter, but Talese doesn’t bother recounting his ring exploits. Talese takes it as a given that DiMaggio was once a beloved hero without troubling himself to explain why repeatedly hitting small balls made him one. Talese’s approach might yield better literature than more conventional reportage on a game or a fight ever could. No knowledge or even interest in the sports he purportedly covers is required. But if someone truly does want to learn something about the sports themselves, then he or she must turn elsewhere.

I had hoped Stephen Jay Gould’s The Richness of Life would give me insight into baseball as well as evolution. I knew of Gould’s enthusiasm for the subjects and that the collection addressed both of them; I thought that someone who could clearly explain complicated scientific theories to a non-specialist audience might also articulate the cause of the sport’s appeal. He explains DiMaggio’s famous hitting streak in a way that conveys its significance – its extreme improbability – but hardly made me want to sit through hour after hour of baseball just in case something equally rare might occur.

I wouldn’t have gone on the opening day outing if I’d know that baseball is just math class by other means. (Perhaps my old school knew what they were doing after all.) Gould elucidates the statistical anomalies expressed by accomplishments like DiMaggio’s, but I have no desire to sit in the stands computing. He can also explain plate tectonics. I think continents drift at a faster rate than the average baseball game moves, but this doesn’t make me want to watch shifting land masses either.

Game guides like Gould point out that even the best players fail to hit the ball much more frequently than they connect. And yet I gather that, despite batters strong tendency to miss, a pitcher throwing a no-hitter represents baseball at its best. As far as I can tell, this amounts to a game of catch between the pitcher and the fellow crouching behind home plate, with perhaps, occasionally, a few fouls and other failures.

Failure – now that’s something I can understand. As in failure to figure out what millions of other natural born citizens grasp intuitively and transplants pick up with alacrity. As in failure to feel the resonance of the word baseball. (In that already quoted Observer interview, DeLillo calls baseball his “second language.” It’s one I failed to learn.) As in failure to muster even a modicum of interest in the World Series, if I even notice when it takes place. As in failure, until absurdly late in life, to perceive the wisdom of John Coltrane, who tuned out what didn’t matter to him in order to focus raptly on what did.