These are highlights from The Nation‘s sports reporting over the past one hundred years with links to the full text of each article.
It Seems to Haywood Broun
Heywood Broun, October 23, 1929
Lefty Grove shattered the cruel slanders which have always followed lefthanders. It has been said since baseball first began that southpaws are unreliable, wild, and not to be trusted in a pinch. Yet when danger beckoned thickest it was always Grove who stood towering on the mound whipping over strikes against luckless batters. He at least did a yeoman service for the philosophy of efficiency, for when he sent the ball across the plate at lightning speed he exemplified the truth of the scientific formula, ‘You cannot hit what you cannot see.’
American Sports and American Life
John R. Tunis, June 25, 1930
Everyone who gets behind the scenes of American sporting life must be struck with the fact that there is amazingly little real sport left in the United States today. Over-organization has throttled the real spirit of sport, the feeling of the game for the game’s sake. It has substituted in place of this spirit not merely a desire for victory, but an alarming insistence on winning. Laugh if you will at the misguided idealism which sent our fathers out to die for dear old Yale; at least it was idealism. There is precious little idealism of any sort at present when a squad is asked to go out and die for a $15,000-a-year head coach.
Sports and Defense
Carl Reiss, March 1, 1941
The German use of sports as a preparation for war was even more thorough than the Russian and on a greater scale. The Nazis admitted it openly. Shortly before the 1936 Olympic Games, Hermann Teske, sports instructor at the Zossen military school near Berlin, published a pamphlet in which he said: ‘All German sport must have a purpose. The goal of physical training is readiness for defense.’….In the United States sports are taken seriously, probably too seriously. We like to think of ourselves as the leading sports nation in the world. But are we? We hold most of the records, but records aren’t everything. What do these victories mean in the light of our defense preparations?
O’Malley’s Double Play
David Cort, June 25, 1957
So baseball is not as important as housing or atomic fallout. Nevertheless, when it was announced that the Brooklyn Dodgers may go to Los Angeles and the New York Giants to San Francisco, several million Americans felt much as if they’d just been evicted or irradiated. To them and millions of others, the chief present passion in living is connected with the winning or losing of today’s ball game. Giants and Dodgers fans almost literally felt like a baby whose father deliberately drops it on its little soft head. The baby tried to understand that Father had his reasons and ended by wondering whether it really liked Daddy very much. The poor thing was in trauma.