Politics & Power Quote by Michael Lewis

Baseball sells itself as a sport, but Michael Lewis is pointing at it as an inheritance. The line isn’t really about doubles and dugouts; it’s about why baseball can survive on less speed, less violence, and fewer continuous thrills than its rivals. “Sentimentality” is doing the heavy lifting: a word that sounds faintly dismissive, yet also accurate about how the game is consumed. For many fans, baseball isn’t just entertainment you choose; it’s an identity you receive, preloaded with memories you didn’t earn but still feel responsible for.

Lewis’s specific intent is to explain baseball’s cultural staying power through a transmission mechanism, not through athletic superiority. By framing fandom as something passed “from fathers to sons,” he highlights a ritual of American masculinity: time together, instruction without confession, affection expressed sideways through stats, heroes, and the daily rhythm of a season. The subtext is that baseball’s “tradition” is less natural than it’s marketed to be; it’s maintained through family scripts, nostalgia, and repetition.

Context matters: Lewis writes as a chronicler of American systems (markets, sports, institutions) and their hidden incentives. Here, the incentive is emotional. Baseball’s business model, its mythology, even its pace depend on an audience trained to treat the game like family history. The father-son framing also exposes what gets left out: mothers, daughters, newcomers, immigrants. It’s an affectionate portrait, but also a quiet critique of a sport that has long confused belonging with bloodline.