Baseball, our most popular and distinctively national game, constitutes a fair field for this inquiry.  In order to evaluate this form of play as an agency in moral training it is necessary to presume that one has a company of nine or more boys grouped together on the basis of loyalty to a common neighborhood, school, club, church, or the like.  They elect a manager who acts for the team in arranging a schedule of games with their various rivals and who serves in general as their business agent; also a captain, usually chosen because of his ability to play the game and his quality of natural leadership.  He directs his players in their contests and in case of dispute speaks for his team.

The boys should also have in every case a trainer older than themselves, a player of well-known ability and exemplary character.  It is usually through neglect of supervision of this sort that the ethical value of baseball for boys of from twelve to fifteen years of age is forfeited.  Without the trainer to direct their practice games, and as a recognized expert to try out the players for the various positions, the possibilities of forming a team are few and those of unjust and harmful conduct many.

If at the outset, the group, coming together in park or vacant lot, cannot speedily agree upon a modus operandi, their energy is turned into profane disputing about the chief positions, and usually a game cannot be organized, or, if it is, lack of agreement as to put-outs, runs, fouls, and debatable points soon ruins the attempt, with little left to most of the boys except resentment of the might-makes-right policy.  On the other hand, whether one has in mind a team or a chance group of players, the presence of a capable adult as an immediate and final court of appeal guarantees fair play for all, prevents personal animosities, and inspires each one to do his best in the presence of a competent judge.

Wherever the team with proper supervision is a possibility the moral value of the game will be at its maximum.  Uniforms are not to be despised.  Loyalty to the school represented is but boyhood’s form of what in later life becomes ability to espouse a cause and to assume a degree of social responsibility in keeping with that attitude.

Because of this loyalty the boy who expected to play in the prominent position of pitcher takes his less conspicuous place in right field, if by fair trials under the trainer another boy has demonstrated his superior fitness to fill the much-coveted position.  For the credit of the community or school which he has the honor to represent, the match game must be won; hence he surrenders his personal glory to the common good.  He does more.  Under the excitement of the contest and with the consequent strengthening of the team spirit, he encourages the very boy, who would otherwise have been only his personal rival, to do his level best, forgetting utterly any mean individual comparisons and all anti-social self-consciousness, in what he has enthusiastically accepted as the greater common good.