The Traditional Game
Curier and Ives painting "The American National Game of Baseball"
As Mandelbaum points out in Chapter 1, baseball is one of the most traditional (perhaps even pre-modern) sports in America. As this Currier and Ives painting illustrates, baseball is played in "parks," follows the rhythms of nature and the seasons, and has roots in rural and agrarian societies. So is baseball a traditional game or a modern sport? Does it have the characteristics of a modern sport that we encountered in Lessons 1 and 2?