Maybe don’t take my word for it that Craig Robinson’s Flip Flop Flyball is one hell of a book; I’ve got a few too many connections to it, though not to Mr. Robinson himself. What I’ve found most striking about it, though, is pretty well summed up by the jacket copy: “Baseball, almost from the first moment Robinson saw it, was more than a sport. It was a nearly infinite ocean of information to be organized.” This describes an approach to the game that’s at once pragmatic and whimsical, and in Flip Flop Flyball, this conception of baseball allows infographics to be both cells in a narrative and self-contained worlds. If you want, you can get lost in them without ever quite knowing why.

The information is there; Robinson organizes it, and with that, interprets and encodes it all over again. Broadly speaking, he makes sense of baseball. But baseball already makes sense. It has rules, which aren’t so difficult to grasp, as well as customs that even the most half-hearted fan can pick up on. The action on a baseball field, as in any sport, means something only because of rules. Once they’re set into motion, they work as laws that keep players in line. At some primordial moment—maybe at beginning of each game, maybe when the sport was invented—the sport delineates a space where intelligible competition takes place. Otherwise, men and women looking to get exercise or prove their dominance would be reduced to indiscriminately running, jumping, and punching each other.
Sports, then, are a lot like language. Bellowing gives itself over to syntax and vocabulary, and through sublimation, allows for a higher form of communication. A language, once in place, provides the grounds for meaning and enforces it at every turn. It is the birth of sense and the twinge that reminds us to color within lines, to keep making sense. Yet with language, it isn’t enough for it to work. We insist on second-order sense, the act of interpretation that makes “understand” such a sinkhole of a word. If it were enough to simply follow the words in Madame Bovary, there would be no need for AP English, where we first learn the value of going past mere comprehension. I have no idea what the sports equivalent of Ulysses would be, though I trust someone would like to take a crack at that one.

Finding that kind of higher meaning in literature is the first step toward criticism. With sports, it’s the impulse that leads to something like Flip Flop Flyball. But it also has far less glamorous, or refined, applications. Take, for instance, the USWNT’s second-place finish in the Women’s World Cup. Writing for Slate, Brian Phillips observed that this team was enjoyable precisely because they weren’t a symbol of anything. There was nothing here about women’s place in athletics, or soccer’s introduction to unfamiliar eyes. It just sort of happened. Certainly, though, that was more than just a soccer match. “Jingoism” is a dirty word in American sports; it’s an accusation of vulgarity, a nationalism that doesn’t know how to connect the dots across time and space to approximate tradition. Still, there was something about the casual USA pride, the soft jingoism of last weekend, that was particularly heartening at this particularly nasty political juncture. It didn’t mean much, and it may not last, but everybody watching understood that it counted for something.

When Gary DeCoker compares LeBron James to a fallen academic star, anyone who has ever spent a second in grad school should have a good laugh. Here, though, the interpretation of LeBron’s career is almost painfully disconnected from any interest in what happens on the court. It’s ghostly, unreal, symbolism abstracted from basketball’s facts. What’s been lost is that first order of meaning, the tangible stuff of sport that you can only get from watching games, closely observing the motions, and feeling the full range of emotion that comes with nine innings or four quarters. These only take place, and are then available for us to better understand, because of their context: That matrix of sport that churns on, creating history and if we pay close enough attention, inviting us to take that next step without forgetting where we started. Flip Flop Flyball and USWNT fever are proof that learning to love a sport is the also the only way to move beyond it.