Baseball and the Bhagavad Gita: A Fan’s Meditation on Opening Day

The critics say of Major League Baseball, that along with its contextual ties to corporate culture and military boosterism, it glorifies the egoistic values at the heart of that exploitative system:

1. Baseball overemphasizes competition, the importance of winning over losing.
2. Rivalry between teams fosters division, aggression.
3. Baseball rewards specialization, with narrow skillsets at a premium.
4. Baseball encourages hero worship, dominance of elite performers over their peers.
5. The disparity of income in baseball is as disproportionate as in the pyramid scheme of the wider economy.

I counter that despite the above pitfalls, baseball is still a game, a metaphor akin to the battle of armies in the Bhagavad Gita, which Arjuna seeks so passionately to reject, and which Krishna so eloquently embraces as a test for higher values. Point by point the critics may thus be refuted:

1. The risk of pain for pleasure, of failure for success, is worth the struggle… no matter the outcome: “It’s how you play the game.”
2. The game, like life, is zero-sum, requiring winners and losers, babies and corpses: it celebrates duality, and the lower chakras, as intrinsic and essential.
3. Baseball requires discipline and duty of the highest order, to train, to work hard and hone survival skills, to “be the best you can be.”
4. Baseball is a team game, demanding self-sacrifice, cooperation, humility and equanimity, from scrubs and superstars alike: “You can’t get too high or too low.”
5. If the pyramid of rewards in baseball is like the larger economy, or indeed the Darwinist “survival of the fittest,” so be it: it suggests the realpolitik of the natural world.

The economic issue bears closer scrutiny. If baseball is but a gigantic error of the capitalist system, it is also an error of top-down dominance we see in Third World corruption, in Mafia-style policymaking by bribery and blackmail, in species ruled by alpha males. It is also, more charitably, the law of supply and demand writ clearly, the rational working of a free economy. Those with the rarest skills are the most richly rewarded. Yet, rationality is belied by the quantitative levels of earnings, trending over $30 million annually for the top stars. These figures are as ludicrously inflated as the entire financialized system on which they depend, and as unsustainable, making sense only in the bubble fantasy of ongoing “growth” forever.

Meanwhile, we return — an annual migration, as it were, or pilgrimage — to the game, entranced by its ability to mirror our own struggles to make the best of our abilities, to engage fully yet without undue attachment. Let the games begin!