Why do we love baseball? History, deep family roots and unspeakable highs and lows give fans something NFL and NBA can’t

Baseball gives fans something the NFL and NBA can’t, and that’s why it will always keep its title as ‘America’s pastime’.

While American football and basketball dominate the sports scene in the United States, commanding more national attention, more sold-out games and more media coverage, baseball still holds an important place at the heart of the nation.

David Dahl of the Philadelphia Phillies hits a solo home run during the 2024 London Series game against the New York MetsCredit: GettyThat’s according to award-winning US sports author Joe Posnanski, writer of New York Times bestselling book Why We Love Baseball. It’s his love-letter to the sport he has watched from a boy, experiencing heartbreaking lows and ecstatic highs any English football fan would know all too well.

As the 2024 MLB London Series came to a close, talkSPORT had a chat with Joe to explain why baseball is a sport fans across the pond can get behind, how it’s more similar to football than cricket, and why it’s a game worth following.

People will tell you baseball is too slow, it doesn’t fit the times, and why would you love baseball when you can watch American football or basketball?

Put simply, baseball is different to those sports. There is something more about the personal connection. There’s a depth to a baseball fan’s love for the game, and it’s maybe bigger and greater than it is for other sports in America because of its deep connection to history, it’s deep connection to family and summer.

Read more on baseballTo me, there’s something beautiful about why we love this sport.

A few years ago I went to do a big story on Burnley, right when they first got into the Premier League. I knew very little about Burnley, so I went and I really fell in love with the town and the history and the way that it used to be this big club and fell into disrepair and they were almost nonexistent, but then they win this very famous game to basically stay alive. It struck me that the only real parallel between that kind of thing in America is baseball.

The story-telling, the history, the connection to the past, that’s not really true for American football or basketball or almost anything else sports or non-sports in the United States.

This is a place where things move on very quickly and everybody is looking forward, but baseball is not like that. Baseball is so much about the history, the connections you make. You go to a game and you watch a player, and it reminds you of another player from 25 years ago that you saw when you were a kid, and that is really what the sport is.

Joe Posnanski chatted to talkSPORT about what makes America’s pastime greatCredit: Joe Posnanski

Phillies star Bryce Harper rounds the bases after hitting the first home run of the 2024 London SeriesCredit: GettyThat’s the magic of baseball, the pace, the rhythms and the history of it are what make it special. And it feels to me that that’s very British, that for a nation that so respects and lives its history, baseball feels like that.

Whatever I talk about baseball in the UK people always want to bring up cricket, and there are some obvious bat and ball connections, but I do think that in a lot of ways that baseball is closer to football, because people connect with the history, it’s a sport that moves slowly and then very quickly, and that’s something true about baseball as well.

Watch this incredible time-lapse of West Ham’s London stadium turning into a Baseball venue ahead of the MLB London Series between New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies

In football you have Anfield, Old Trafford, but in baseball there are very few of these old historic stadiums left. There’s Fenway Park in Boston [Red Sox] and Wrigley Field in Chicago [Cubs]. The Dodger Stadium [in Los Angeles] goes back to the 1960s, but if you want to go all the way back to the 20s and 30s you have to go to Wrigley Field and Fenway Park.

That was 100 per cent a connecting point to me. In fact, when I went to the UK for the first time to write about the Premier League, people would always take me to these grand old stadiums and say, ‘This is like our Wrigley Field and Fenway Park’, but of course it’s the opposite! Fenway Park is like our Anfield!

But that history is so important over here, which is why they’ll never tear down those two stadiums. What’s great about baseball is you can go to Fenway Park or Wrigley Field just like your father, grandfather and great-grandfather did.

And, like football, it’s a history of failure for the majority of teams. Certainly for the Chicago Cubs – 100-plus years of not winning the World Series and not even reaching the World Series for 70 years before they eventually did win in 2016. That’s father-to-son, mother-to-daughter talking about, ‘Will they ever win?’, ‘Will this ever happen?’, and every year of just disappointment and heartbreak.

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And then when they finally win, it is a triumph beyond anything you can even put into words – that’s baseball.

And what strikes me about the atmosphere of a baseball game is that it’s really happy. If you go to a baseball game you’re going to see a lot of kids, a lot of grandparents, you see this cross section of ages.

The organ’s playing, popcorn and hotdogs smells are in the air, it’s usually summer, there’s just a very happy feeling when you go to a baseball game, which is not necessarily true when you go to a football or basketball game, or even a football game in the UK.

There’s a sense of the game matters, you desperately want to win, but there’s so many of these games [162 games in a regular season] that if you lose it’s not this grand tragedy, there’s always tomorrow.

Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park is one of American sport’s most historic stadiumsCredit: Getty

Baseball is a happy place for fans of all ages and the love of the sport lives on through the generationsCredit: GettyI think that’s why going to baseball games creates such fond memories for people and when people think about baseball they think about it romantically, because it is the happiest place.

It’s also the only sport, for us, that goes back all the way to the beginnings of the 19th Century. American football is a fairly recent phenomenon, 1958 is when most people think it took off, and basketball wasn’t even invented when baseball was already being called ‘America’s Pastime’, so that is our oldest sport and it’s such a huge part of why we love it.

It’s also a radio sport, it’s a sport we listen to more than we watch – so how do you explain that in a time when things are moving so fast and technology is taking over? How do you compete with an NBA game where it’s up and down for 48 frantic minutes?

Football is also just so dominant here. It’s not only the biggest thing in sports but it’s the biggest thing in anything – it’s the most-watched thing on TV, the top 20 TV shows every year are American football games, both college and pro. It’s bigger than the Oscars and the Grammys, it’s just so enormous here.

American football dwarfs baseball and it dwarfs baseball talk – if you’re watching ESPN, they’re going to be talking about football.

But there is also this ‘American pastime’ connection where baseball speaks to what it is to be American and part of this country. Baseball’s history mirrors American history, and that won’t change. As a mirror of our country I think baseball still stands as the American pastime.

I think baseball fans have to explain their love for the sport, and maybe even defend themselves a little bit about what it is that’s so great about it. The miracle of baseball is that we do still care about it. There’s nothing from the 19th Century in America that is still nearly as popular as baseball is here.

The book is Joe’s love letter to baseballCredit: Joe PosnanskiWhy should people love baseball?Over my career as a writer I’ve had fans who have wanted to tell me why they love baseball. They would tell me these stories, and it was always personal. It was never anything obvious, it was always about the time their mother took them to their first baseball game or they were playing catch in the backyard with friends, it was always very personal, and that’s what gave me the idea to write a book called ‘why we love baseball’.

In the book there are stories and moments about passion, intensity, important moments, touching moments, sad moments but also many funny moments, silly moments – the ball going off Jose Canseco’s head and going over the wall, or somebody hitting the only home run of their career.

People always ask me why I love baseball, and I had to write a whole book to explain it! There are so many things. It’s very much my love letter to the sport.

Read More on talkSPORTI wanted it to be a very unifying book – I hope that somebody who reads the book, whatever the reason for why they love baseball, they find it.

If the London Series between the Mets and Phillies was your first experience of baseball, maybe it’s the start of your very own love affair with America’s most historic game.