Politics & Power Quote by George Herman

Baseball gets framed here less as a sport than as a pipeline of American identity: it "comes up from the youth", and that youth is immediately narrowed to "the boys". George Herman isn’t just describing how players develop; he’s building a moral genealogy. The game, in his telling, is wholesome precisely because it is inherited - taught on sandlots, polished into skill, then showcased by the young men who "represent" the pastime back to the nation. It’s a neat rhetorical loop: boys learn baseball, then baseball teaches the country what boys should become.

The subtext is doing the heavier work. By treating boyhood as baseball’s natural source, Herman smuggles in a set of exclusions that read as normal for his era: girls as spectators at best, not makers of the game; adulthood as a kind of afterlife, where you validate the sport by watching the next generation. Even the phrase "national pastime" isn’t neutral. It’s a claim of cultural ownership, positioning baseball as a civic mirror. The players aren’t just athletes; they’re stand-ins for "us", embodiments of continuity and character.

Context matters: Herman, a mid-century journalist with one foot in the pre-television mythos of sportswriting, is tapping nostalgia as authority. The syntax rambles like an oral anecdote, which is part of the strategy: it sounds like common sense, not ideology. That’s why it works - it turns a particular, gendered story about who the game is for into something that feels inevitable.