by Ken Feltman

Does anybody in the U.S. know how to play?

Legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel led the New York Yankees to several championships before taking over the expansion New York Mets in 1962. Mostly castoffs and misfits, the Mets were terrible. Casey put up with them as long as he could.

Then, one day, a lazy fly ball drifted toward his centerfielder. The centerfielder put up his glove – but the ball missed the glove and smacked him right in the face, bouncing away. The centerfielder held his head in his hands. The hitter circled the bases. Casey looked at each of his players. They avoided eye contact. Finally, Casey shouted, "Can’t anybody here play this game?"

Recently, a Japanese friend suggested to me that because few Europeans understand baseball, few Europeans really understand Americans. Japanese and Americans, he suggested, share a love of baseball and, therefore, have a deeper understanding of each other. He said that baseball defines those who understand it. To the uninitiated, baseball is slow and boring. To the fan, baseball is intricate and endlessly intriguing.

Baseball is not a game for the timid, he said. Aggressive teams tend to win. Taking chances is rewarded. Cunning and stealth are as much part of the game as is athletic skill. Even the best teams lose often. The teams that win in the end are those that endure injuries and prevail over a long, debilitating season. The best players forget defeat and try to play the next game even when hurt.

Perhaps because President Bush owned a professional baseball team, my Japanese friend said, he has been a more aggressive political leader. Usually, political leaders find that aggressiveness is not rewarded. The danger is not in being too timid but in being too bold.

For Europeans, the current anti-Americanism comes at a high price. Today, the U.S. has a demographic and productivity advantage over Europe. Forget about military preparedness, he said, the Europeans are not ready to challenge American economic might. If the United States presses that advantage now – as we may be doing with the dollar - it could stress Europe’s economies too much. Surely, it would at least cause more European discontent and anti-Americanism.

The Europeans, he said, are so self-absorbed that they have missed the American equivalent to Europe’s anti-Americanism. Worse than being anti-European, Americans ignore Europe’s point of view. "How humiliating," my Japanese friend thundered.

He continued: "Baseball is closest to diplomacy. How, then, can an America that is so good at baseball not perceive and accommodate the diplomatic weaknesses of your friends?"

"You must do it," he said. "They cannot - and we need both Europe and the U.S. to be strong."

So, like it or not, if we want to lead, we must go from being the big kid on the block to being the grown-up on the block. That could be very difficult for a people who resist national maturity so insistently as we do. Somewhere within, we need to find our national maturity.

Casey Stengel once observed: "Most ball games are lost, not won. All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy."

Ah, the Japanese are very good at baseball.  

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