I don’t like baseball, but I kind of wish I did. Having moved near enough to Boston to be in Red Sox territory, baseball is a big deal in my new home town. It would, of course, have been better to hop on that particular bandwagon last year, before rather than after the conclusion of the Babe Ruth curse, but in any event I’ve sworn a friend and Yankees fan that I wouldn’t root for the Red Sox. As I mentioned up front, this is hardly a burdensome promise to keep inasmuch as I’m pretty indifferent about the entire sport.

One of the things I like least about baseball is what I also most admire about it. After investing a few hours is watching or listening to a game, all you’ve witnessed is one win or loss out of 162. In other words, that game in and of itself is meaningless. Those “crucial” wins at the end of the season are only crucial because the team lost an equal number of meaningless game three months earlier.

The season only gains meaning by accretion in a logic that seems democratic enough to put something behind baseball’s role as America’s pastime. Not so much democratic as the dream of universal fairness, but rather the nuts and bolts political imaginary that makes democracy work. It is the logic of the vote – each vote by itself is meaningless, but . . .

And, to get back to my ruminations from last week on the value of paying attention, it’s the logic of the obligations of the press and the people. Criticism of the press as it exists today is warranted for a lot of reasons, but it doesn’t speak directly, I think, to the importance of understanding awareness of the world’s events as every bit the obligation voting is.

It’s true that as the quality of journalism declines there is a danger that the desire of people to be well-informed could be circumvented, as people feel they’ve done all they can but still don’t know anything useful. That would actually be a good problem to have, but it doesn’t seem to be the one we’ve got. As polls like this one from the 2004 election suggest, the problem is rather that a lot of people haven’t mastered the level of information provided by the television news or presidential debates. See in particular the sections titled “But Tennesseans not all that issue savvy” and the should-I-laugh-or-cry gem “Many favor positions inconsistent with their candidate.” To say that the debates are worthless because the candidates simply repeat stock policy statements assumes that the audience couldn’t benefit from hearing some policy statements repeated to the point that they could correctly associate them with the candidate they plan to vote for. (I can imagine reasons why pollsters would be reluctant to do so, but tying opinion to objective tests of knowledge seems like a useful bridge between the providers of news and their audience.)

Moreover, it would be hard to claim that there’s anything more than a niche interest in better journalism until a basic level of news proficiency is more widespread. The difficulty is that the reward for the effort it takes to gain that level of knowledge is the ephemeral collective reward of the ballot cast. It’s a leap of faith that requires a sense of obligation to others or to the basic idea of collectivity, the leap of faith that promises – I’m only guessing, since this one’s a faith I don’t feel – fans that that 1 out of 162 win in April is actually going to mean something in October.