"I see great things in baseball. It's our game — the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us." -Walt Whitman
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One great thing about the American experiment in federalism and representative democracy is that the highest expression of its brilliance isn't obvious. It’s not the free market or the social safety nets meant to mitigate its savageries. It’s not working or paying taxes or running for that seat on the school board. It’s not governing or legislating or administering the laws of civil society as they’ve been enumerated. It’s not even when we vote, even if the cloyingly precious stickers — now hallmarks of polling place egress — suggest county election boards are united in thinking otherwise. It’s when we are at leisure, when we are exercising a right that the founding fathers, in a departure from virtually every set of expression of political philosophy to precede it, considered inalienable — the right to pursue happiness, to have some ownership of the most valuable commodity to mortal man: time.
The right to use that time to build not just material wealth but also spiritual wealth, the stuff of life-force nourishment and maintenance that breeds resilience and fortifies against the relentless banality of the restrained, pragmatic lives most of us need to live in order to maintain a functioning civil society. Things like music, art, and sport…that allow temporary, but vitally necessary, reprieve from the rational, the quantifiable, and the provable and make just enough room for a faith in the unknowable, for the belief in magic.
This is not the frivolous stuff.
It’s the thing without which a culture like ours — pluralistic, unprecedentedly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural — couldn’t exist. This “pursuit of happiness” concept, really quite novel when it was introduced, seems to me to be the cornerstone of the whole experiment; without it, I’m not sure how ‘E Pluribus Unum’ — from many, one — is a plausible aspiration.
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In an interview filmed for Ken Burns’s 1994 multi-part documentary on baseball, the essayist Gerald Early memorably says: “There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: the constitution, jazz music and baseball. These are the three of the most beautiful things this culture ever created.”
Since the late 1800s, jazz and baseball have maintained what I would call “a special relationship.” Kind of like the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. Differences to be sure — some fundamental, others idiosyncratic. But broadly comprehensible to one another, in ways that are both easily articulated but often just felt instinctively.
Both jazz and baseball are models of reconciling inherent tensions, of holding two competing priorities simultaneously and somehow, miraculously, servicing them both. Both are adamant about reverence for tradition and deference to customs and unwritten rules of engagement. Both are multifaceted, quintessentially American pastimes because they represent both work and play. Jazz and baseball exist at both the amateur and professional levels. There are learners and there are earners; some practitioners — maybe the best of them — play both roles forever. As both social and commercial institutions, jazz and baseball balance social and commercial responsibilities. Both are incubators of innovation and create economies centered around individual brilliance and achievement. Both, also, have been catalysts for and predictors of some of the most consequential social developments of the last hundred years.
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The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers starting infield: From left: third baseman John “Spider” Jorgensen, shortstop Pee Wee Reese, second baseman Eddie Stanky, and first baseman Jackie Robinson.
Most Americans, even non-baseball fans, know that Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier on Opening Day 1947. That day, 26,623 Brooklynites saw Robinson start at first base (though he played the majority of his games at second base) for the hometown Dodgers. Over half of them — approximately 14,000, according to a Sporting News report at the time — were African American. More Black fans passed through the Ebbets Field gates on that single day than had done so in the entire history of the Dodgers to that point. They began play in Brooklyn in 1883; Ebbets Field opened in 1913.
Robinson’s breakthrough was seismic; the momentum it provided the civil rights movement can’t be overstated. But credit jazz with the hockey assist.
Ten years earlier, the most popular musician in the world, Benny Goodman, broke music’s unofficial color barrier by, first, incorporating pianist Teddy Wilson into his trio with Gene Krupa, and then later by expanding to a quartet to make room for vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Hampton told the Chicago Tribune in 1997, “what [Goodman] did in those days — and those were hard days in 1937 — made it possible for Negroes to have their chance in baseball and in other fields.”
From left: Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman, and Teddy Wilson from a March 1938 performance of the Benny Goodman Quartet at the Earle Theatre in Philadelphia. Not pictured, drummer Gene Krupa. Photo by John U. Mosley. Courtesy of Temple University Digital Collections.
Hampton was right. The risks Wilson and Goodman and Hampton and Krupa took to play together extended not just to music, but to Hollywood, too. When the quartet appeared together, playing on screen in 1937’s Hollywood Hotel (Warner Bros.), “it broke the most basic rule of racial protocol,” remarked NPR’s John McDonough on a 2013 edition of All Things Considered, “[which was] strict separation of the races…. The scene broke from virtually every African-American image Hollywood had ever purveyed.”
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Integration remained a taboo subject through the 1920s and early 1930s. Prejudices and genuine beliefs about the irreconcilability of certain groups of people based on skin color weren’t just commonplace; they were conventional wisdom. What Goodman and his quartet accomplished was remarkable because, as a practical matter, people had become inured to segregation in sports, music, movies, and entertainment broadly. It was just a fact of life to be accepted: like death, taxes, and the Dodgers in the National League cellar. Like so much else, people had to see integration in athletics and the arts — and see it succeed overwhelmingly and spectacularly — before they’d believe it to be something sustainable.
Americans fetishize and, to perhaps a dangerous degree, trust talent. And, downstream of talent is its parasitic subsidiary, show business. This cuts in both positive and negative directions. We’ve elected movie and reality TV stars and a veritable hall-of-fame roster of former football, basketball, and baseball players — Gerald Ford, Jack Kemp, Steve Largent, Jim Bunning, Bill Bradley, Kevin Johnson, and Dave Bing, to name the most athletically accomplished — to the highest political offices in this country, with results most charitably characterized as mixed. Prudence would dictate that neither celebrity nor exceptional athletic achievement, in and of themselves, should satisfy any kind of sensible criteria for public office fitness. Yet, for integration of the broader mid-century American society to really take hold as something plausible and actionable, we needed to harness and exploit our core perversion: it needed to be sellable. Meaning, the American consumer needed to be convinced that the integration of professional sports, film, theater, music, dance — the performing arts (and why shouldn’t sports be considered a performing art, by the way?) — wasn’t just a matter of fairness and shared humanity and goodwill towards men…but that failure to integrate would result in the American consumer being deprived of the best talent, the best show. In other words, without integration, American athletics, arts, music and culture and the commodification thereof would be second-rate.
“Jazz was always an art, but because of the race of its creators, it was always more than music,” Stanley Crouch, the prolific writer, jazz historian, and cultural commentator, wrote in the New York Daily News in 2017. “Once the whites who played it and the listeners who loved it began to balk at the limitations imposed by segregation, jazz became a futuristic social force in which one was finally judged purely on the basis of one’s individual ability. Jazz predicted the civil rights movement more than any other art in America.”
The risk of American music, art, sports — you name it — being second rate, in the era of Cold War-era civics, institutionalized patriotism, and effectively axiomatic American exceptionalism simply wouldn’t fly. The stakes were too high to de-prioritize talent in favor of vague, unscientific prejudices based on superficial, immutable physical characteristics. There had to at least be an idea of an American meritocracy ordinary people could believe in. The American Dream, whether it was or wasn’t, had to actually feel attainable, regardless of what you looked like or what your parents did for a living or whether or not your grandparents were sharecroppers or fled famine and pogroms, or even, maybe especially, if your great-grandparents were slaves.
America and its allies — notwithstanding the profound sacrifice and contributions of the Soviets, always tenuous wartime allies who would very quickly become post-war adversaries — had just defeated the two most formidable evil empires to ever exist, Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.
Black men had fought and died and earned commendations for valor. The continued segregation of America’s pastime became untenable from that standpoint, too.
“I think World War II played a greater role [than even Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton joining Benny Goodman’s band] in the integration of baseball,” Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, told Baseball Prospectus in 2019. “You had young Black soldiers dying, fighting the same racism that they were being asked to accept at home. The mindset became, ‘if they can die fighting for their country, they ought to be able to play baseball.’”
Legendary Negro Leaguers Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. Paige, a pitcher, eventually pitched for the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Brown after Major League Baseball de-segregated in 1947. Gibson, a catcher, was widely referred to as the “Black Babe Ruth.” Photo by Mark Rucher.
However much the integration of jazz influenced professional baseball’s integration roughly a decade later, once the latter occurred, the Negro Leagues, which fostered all-time talent like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Buck O’Neil, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Jackie Robinson himself, were on borrowed time. (See major college football's integration and the attendant decline in HBCU football for a striking analog).
Progress is usually slow, and it always comes with costs. And the precipitous decline and death of the Negro Leagues was one of integration’s highest, especially for jazz musicians, who’d forged strong bonds with their professional baseball playing peers.
Charlie Parker, before becoming a Dodgers fan enamored of Jackie Robinson, is said to have avidly followed his hometown Kansas City Monarchs, far and away the Negro Leagues’ gold standard and most storied franchise. Lionel Hampton, too, was a die-hard Monarchs fan, becoming such close friends with Monarchs’ legendary player/manager Buck O’Neil that O’Neil, according to Kendrick, “...would put him in uniform and Hampton would sit on the bench and serve as an honorary coach.”
Lionel Hampton, second from left, pictured in uniform before a Kansas City Monarchs game in July 1949.
The relationship went beyond ordinary fanship, though. The musicians and the ballplayers — the bands and the ballclubs — shared a symbiotic relationship.
“It was commonplace to see jazz artists at the Negro League games by day and the ballplayers at the club after their games,” Kendrick said.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the cities with thriving Black nightlife and live music ecosystems were most often the cities whose Negro League franchises enjoyed the strongest and most steadfast fan support.
And in those cities, it was the musicians, not the athletes, who were the bigger draws. When the jazz musicians showed up to Negro League games, they didn’t bring just music; they brought star power and big crowds.
Allow the sensational circumstances surrounding Louis Armstrong’s 1931 tour of the South to illustrate. By the early 1930’s, Armstrong had been playing mostly in Chicago and New York City, he’d just appeared in his first film, and he’d become the best selling recording artist in the country. Armstrong’s manager at the time, Johnny Collins, did business with mobsters. Not to say that Griffin was a righteous man, but to book jazz musicians at that time, such associations were an unavoidable cost of doing business; they owned the clubs and the gin joints. Well, according to a 2021 feature published on MLB.com, “Collins went back on a deal with a club in Harlem that was owned by the mob,” which “...led to a gangster going into Armstrong’s dressing room before a show in Chicago and holding him at gunpoint, strongly suggesting that the musician head to New York.”
The MLB.com reporter’s source for the story was none other than Ricky Riccardi, the pre-eminent Armstrong historian and director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, so it’s almost certainly true. Following that incident, Collins reportedly told Armstrong, “We have to stay away from Chicago [and] we have to stay away from New York; it’s too hot. Let’s go on tour.”
So they went on tour.
One of the first things Armstrong did upon triumphantly returning to his hometown of New Orleans for the first time in nine years was sponsor a local, semi-pro Black baseball team. At various times known as the Raggedy Nine, The Smart Nine, and ultimately The Armstrong Secret Nine, they wore brand new, bright white uniforms with “ARMSTRONG” stitched across the chest. Wherever Armstrong played gigs across southern Louisiana, they played games — against college teams, against other Black teams like the Negro League’s New Orleans Black Pelicans, and even against prison teams.
A flyer for Louis Armstrong Day in New Orleans. August 1931. Armstrong’s Secret Nine were to take on the New Orleans Black Pelicans, a minor league club in the Negro Leagues. Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum
To a certain extent, these exhibitions served as a promotional tool for Armstrong’s gigs in the area, but, undoubtedly, it was more the other way round. Armstrong’s mere presence at these games drew unprecedentedly massive crowds, and he was a most willing ambassador — naturally, Armstrong threw out the first pitch before each contest — because, as Riccardi told MLB.com, “He loved playing baseball. I mean, for the world’s greatest trumpet player to name that as his number two hobby, it says a lot.”
And, boy, how the people came. And certainly not because they had any illusions of seeing ball players of big league stature. Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson weren’t walking through that door, so to speak.
If Satch was gonna be there, none of that mattered so much.
“The ‘Cornet Wizard’ will be out there pulling for his clan to come through on the long end of the count and his mysterious order will play like the dickens to lick ‘Cotchie’ Bailey’s club,” announced New Orleans’s historic black newspaper, the Louisiana Weekly, in their August 22, 1931 edition.
Fifteen hundred fans showed up for a triple header between Armstrong’s Secret Nine (hence, the clever reference to Armstrong’s “mysterious order”) and the Melpomene White Sox. A crowd of 1,500 for a baseball game between Armstrong’ semi-pro club (a group of ballplayers so unused to having fresh new uniforms that they were literally afraid to slide, lest they sully their natty new duds) and an amateur sandlot squad — hardly the Kansas City Monarchs. That’s star power.
Armstrong was hardly the only barnstorming jazz musician of the day to incorporate jazz into touring schedules that were at once relentless and monotonous. Trumpeter Harry James’s band (the first to feature a young Frank Sinatra in 1939) played baseball games as they toured. They’d play other bands, prison or college teams, or simply divide the band into two teams. It was rumored that James kept a guy on his payroll who could pitch but couldn’t actually play an instrument. An anecdote shared by James’s biographer, Peter J. Levinson suggests that, whether true or not, the rumor does not appear far-fetched.
“[James] once asked a musician,” Levinson wrote in 1999’s Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James (Oxford University Press), ‘What do you play?’”
The musician answered, “What do I play? I play tenor saxophone and double on clarinet.”
To which James replied, “No, what position in baseball?”
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Duke Ellington, too, loved baseball. As a teen, he worked as a vendor at old Griffith Stadium, then home of the American League’s Washington Senators, hawking peanuts, popcorn, candy and scorecards before being promoted to the big time: cold drinks.
“I was so crazy about baseball, it’s a wonder I ever sold anything,” Ellington recalled in a piece of writing compiled in Mark Tucker’s The Duke Ellington Reader (Oxford University Press, 1993). “The opportunity to walk around there, looking at all those baseball heroes, whose pictures were a premium in the cigarette packages, meant a lot to me.”
A rendering of Washington D.C.’s Griffith Stadium, circa 1961, by digital artist Gary Grigsby. Home of the Washington Senators from 1911 to 1961. Demolished 1965.
The young Ellington, as he describes himself, was much less concerned with his piano lessons than with excelling in sports. “After all,” Ellington writes in that same entry, “baseball, football, track, and athletics were what the real he-men were identified with, and so they were naturally the most important to me.”
Growing up in the nation’s capital, Ellington’s father, for a time, served as a butler in the White House during the Harding administration. Years later, President Nixon referenced this point, when in 1969, on the occasion of Ellington’s 70th birthday, Nixon presented Ellington with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House dinner in his honor.
Ellington looks on as President Richard Nixon plays "Happy Birthday" in honor of Duke's 70th, 1969 at the White House. Reportedly, Ellington was impressed with Nixon’s piano playing.
Incredibly, that was not Ellington’s first brush with sitting presidents.
“We used to play baseball at an old tennis court on 16th Street,” Ellington wrote in his 1976 autobiography, Music is My Mistress (Da Capo Press). “President Teddy Roosevelt would come by on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play. When he got ready to go, he would wave and we would wave at him. That was Teddy Roosevelt — just him and his horse, nobody guarding him.”
Teddy Roosevelt pictured here in 1898, on his most famous horse, Little Texas, upon whom he rode at the head of his storied regiment, the Rough Riders, during the Spanish American War. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
As much as the young Ellington loved baseball, his passion and aptitude for music would, of course, win out in the end…with a maternal thumb on the scale.
In a late childhood incident, Ellington required stitches after another competitor’s bat made solid contact not with a baseball but with Ellington’s head.
“With that…my mother decided I should take piano lessons,” Ellington said, according to biographer A.H. Lawrence in 2001’s Duke Ellington and His World (Routledge).
Still, Ellington’s passion for baseball never waned, even if whatever youthful skills he’d possessed had, by the time he became a famous bandleader, diminished. As a matter of fact, very few members of Ellington’s team were what scouts would call “five tool players.” Though, as the New York Times reported in 2015, “Ellington’s band fielded a competitive baseball team, which played against the teams from other orchestras.”
“Duke Ellington couldn’t hit or throw, but he loved the game,” jazz historian and amateur baseball scout Phil Schaap told the Times for that same piece, leaving room to infer that, perhaps, Ellington retained some skills as a slick glovesman.
Ellington’s clarinetist, Barney Bigard, was also imperfect as a baseball player but, like the soft-spoken Teddy Roosevelt who’d watched Ellington and his childhood buddies all those years earlier in D.C., Bigard carried a big stick. “He couldn’t field, and he couldn’t run,” said Schaap, “but he could hit the ball 600 feet.”
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The parallels between jazz and baseball hardly end with musicians’ love of an eternally youthful game or baseball crowds’ adoration of their musical heroes. The jazz musicians and Black ballplayers of the time also shared a unique kinship. In both the romantic/tragic/fatalist sense and also in the pragmatic sense.
The pursuit of artistic and athletic excellence are inherently similar; it’s that aberrant alchemy of hyperfocus to the exclusion of the Maslowian needs that for virtually all other people are more primary; it’s the compulsive pursuit of perfection because the conventional wisdom that says perfection is unattainable is only good advice for other people; and it’s a constant need to prove your worth.
Artists and athletes share the same hungry and fatally insatiable souls.
Intrinsic self-worth might offer the clearest path to a life of steady contentment, but I’d argue that’s just not how most awe-inspiring athletes and artists are wired. And underlying it all is the ultimate ambition, which interestingly in some circles would be viewed as the most immature one: the quest for immortality…and not just to live forever, but to be eternally young. Take a look at both jazz and baseball: No two pastimes offer more gleefully antagonistic and defiant middle fingers to the remorseless bully that is time.
But the similarities transcend fanciful meditations on metaphysics because, practically and logistically, the lifestyles and everyday physical existences of both groups — were very similar. Barnstorming. Long bus trips. Second-rate, segregated lodging — if and when such lodging could even be found — and dining to match.
Though Ellington, Basie, and Armstrong would later recall these cross-country tours through the rose colored glasses of hindsight, they often glossed over the nastiest bits, the everyday indignities, according to writer Larry Tye, author of celebrated bestsellers on both Satchel Paige and the outsize role of jazz in 20th century American history.
Sure, the regular intra-squad sandlot games and exhibitions against fellow touring bands offered a treasured release valve and were treated with a reverence and seriousness that went far beyond simply “killing time on the road.” But the months on end away from the material and spiritual comforts of home were anything but a “veritable luxury cruise.”
“Those trips, often through hostile territory, were a harsh crucible, keeping Ellington, Basie and Armstrong away from home and family for lonely months at a time,” writes Tye in The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America (Mariner Books, 2024). “They became professional wanderers, driving all day, performing into the early morning, learning to eat from greasy paper sacks. On bad nights for the bandleaders and their players, they caught a little sleep on the bus or in the car, scrunched between sweaty orchestra mates. On good ones, they found a lodging house and raced upstairs, hoping to claim a catnap before that evening’s gig.”
Yet for all those musicians endured, even the superstar bandleaders, the myriad hardships ended up being worth it because, as Tye notes, “Among African Americans, only the Pullman porters saw more of America.” And the more they saw of America — and the more America saw of them — they discovered that music was the ultimate antidote to ingrained prejudice; it humanized black performers to white audiences, and, in doing so, it won hearts and minds. Of course, not everywhere, but enough to plant the seeds of equality, of meritocracy, in places that, to that point, had been hopelessly tethered to segregationist dogma.
“Hundreds of white fans who had never seen a Black person turned out in farming villages and mining towns — and boy, what an encounter it was on both ends,” writes Tye. “The farmers and miners got to hear the most intoxicating music on Earth from brassy cornet players and driving saxophonists, exotic trombone mutes, squealing trumpets and sultry clarinets. The musicians, meanwhile, were doing what they loved, being treated like celebrities in ways that shaped the mold for the likes of [Taylor Swift’s] Eras and Renaissance tours.”
“The three jazzmen from last century,” Tye goes on, “helped set the template for today’s migratory music makers, be they Taylor Swift or Beyoncé.”
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Maybe Tye’s got a point. Then again, maybe not. All the same, it’s hard not to wonder what Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie would think of today’s starship-looking mega venues hosting those pop stars or the ticket prices their performances command. Would they agree with Tye that they played some role in setting the course of a trajectory that’s gotten us to this point, or would they simply shake their heads in disbelief and grumble, in the curmudgeonly manner of Quincy Jones, about “no-playing motherf***ers?
From my vantage point, Tye seems to be giving the 20th’s century’s most intrepid, resilient, pioneering bandleaders credit for developments in the music industry they wouldn’t be at all eager to claim. It’d be more reasonable to think the progenitors of the modern jazz bloodline would shudder at what passes for “brilliance” today; they’d shudder at the effective extinction of critics in favor of cheerleaders, today's “poptimists,” who fall over themselves to praise bubblegum vendors as the voices of our time. They’d shudder at the authority inversion of the social media-dominated ecosystem, where all the adults have left the room and the facsimiles that remain nod their heads vigorously in uncritical agreement with child kings so that they might keep their jobs just a little longer.
Or, maybe they wouldn’t. My preference is to believe they probably would just laugh knowing laughs of wry resignation.
By late 1931 and through 1932, Louis Armstrong was the best-selling recording artist in the country and Duke Ellington’s legendary performances from the Cotton Club were being broadcast weekly to a national audience when radio was king and there wasn’t so much as a sniff of a succession plan in place.
But no external apparatus anointed them or did everything possible to put them in the best position to succeed. Obstacles, double standards, perverse incentives and pervasive hypocrisy…this was the molecular structure of the water in which the forerunners of modern jazz swam.
They weren’t products of the machine. Rather, they gave the men at the levers no choice but to recalibrate. They won the people first, and the suits had no choice but to follow or be sent down to the minors.
They were deeply romantic souls who utilized hyper-rational and pragmatic means and methods to achieve fantastical ends beyond their wildest dreams — and not just for themselves.
It had to have been hurtful for Armstrong when later generations of Black musicians called him a sellout, likening the nonthreatening bonhomie of his stage persona to minstrelsy, but “meeting culture in the middle meant Armstrong could change things from within,” pre-eminent Armstrong expert Ricky Riccardi told the Guardian in Dec. 2020.
Armstrong (center) with Brooklyn Dodgers Junior Gilliam (left) and Don Newcomb (right). Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.
“I wouldn’t judge Armstrong,” added Bob O’Meally, the head of jazz studies at Columbia University, in the same piece for the Guardian. “The delicacy of the balancing act meant that at times he did fall, he did falter…. But when the world is ready to define what we mean by modernism, we will realise [sic] that the shift away from 19th century musical forms of music, vocal and instrumental, was something achieved by African Americans. [And] Armstrong led the band.”
Here, again, we return to the fundamental ways baseball and jazz are so profoundly emblematic of the fundamental internal tensions that are — and I would venture to add supposed to be — at the heart of American culture: high brow versus low; labor and talent versus management; individual achievement versus the team concept; reverence for the past versus the obligation to captivate audiences by doing, saying, and playing (be that musically or athletically) something new. The tension isn’t something to be overcome; the music is in the tension.
Therefore, to love both baseball and jazz, to me, is to practice the foundational American pastime: ambivalence. To hold two seemingly contradictory notions in your head at the same time and be hopelessly unsure about which is right — but also to not care because you need both…that’s the stuff right there. With so much talk lately about “what we want our country to be,” I feel very strongly about this kind of ambivalence being a primary ingredient.
But that sounds way too righteous than I’d care to sound. Because at the end of the day, sure, I care about American culture and hope the experiment starts feeling more sustainable as we approach its 250th anniversary and grows healthier and more stable in the next 250. But, ultimately, I find common cause with baseball fans and jazz fans and, especially, people who really appreciate both because I find these people to be anal-retentive romantics like me. And that makes me feel less alone. Tension-and-release addicts. Fans of songcraft who find the emotional payoff of a well-crafted bridge to be a moment of ecstasy.
These are not garden variety methods of pursuing happiness, but for a particular breed of Freudian romantic, they’re narrowly tailored to address the kind of itch impervious to other methods of scratch. Baseball and jazz make those of us afflicted in this way feel seen, and, more critically, they give us permission to jury-rig the myriad lessons both impart into a set of life and society organizing principles that feel, at the very least, no worse than all of the other ones.
