Just after college, I went to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village school in West Africa. To help relieve the loneliness, I packed a shortwave radio, a Sony Walkman, and, among other books, a paperback copy of Thomas Mann’s very long novel The Magic Mountain. As soon as I set foot in Togo, something began to change. My pulse kept racing; my mouth went dry and prickly; dizzy spells came on. I developed a dread of the hot silence of the midday hours, and an awareness of each moment of time as a vehicle for mental pain. It might have helped if I’d known that my weekly antimalarial medicine could have disturbing effects, especially on dreams (mine were frighteningly vivid), or if someone had mentioned the words anxiety and depression to me. At 22, I was a psychological innocent. Without the comfort of a diagnosis, I experienced these changes as a terrifying void of meaning in the universe. I had never noticed the void before, because I had never been moved to ask the questions Who am I? What is life for? Now I couldn’t seem to escape them, and I received no answers from an empty sky.

I might have lost my mind if not for The Magic Mountain. By luck or fate, the novel—which was published 100 years ago, in November 1924—seemed to tell a story a little like mine, set not in the West African rainforest but in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, a 23-year-old German engineer, leaves the “flatlands” for a three-week visit to his cousin Joachim, a tuberculosis patient who is taking the cure in one of the high-altitude sanatoriums that flourished in Europe before the First World War. Hans Castorp (Mann’s detached and amused, yet sympathetic, narrator always refers to the protagonist by his full name) is “a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man,” a slightly comical young bourgeois.

Arriving on the mountain, he immediately loses his bearings. In the thin air, his face goes hot and his body cold; his heart pounds, and his favorite cigar tastes like cardboard. His sense of time becomes warped. Many of the patients spend years “up here.” No one speaks or thinks in terms of days. “ ‘Home in three weeks,’ that’s a notion from down below,” his ailing cousin warns. Hans Castorp’s companions at the sanatorium’s five lavish daily meals are a cosmopolitan and macabre gallery of mostly young people who fill the endless hours gossiping, flirting, quarreling, philosophizing, and waiting to recover or die. The proximity of death is unsettling; it’s also funny (when the roads are blocked by snow, corpses are sent flying down the mountain on bobsleds) and strangely alluring.

[From the January 1953 issue: Thomas Mann on the Making of The Magic Mountain]

When Hans Castorp catches a cold, the sanatorium’s director examines him and finds a “moist spot” on one of his lungs. That and a slight fever suggest tuberculosis, requiring him to remain for an indeterminate time. Both diagnosis and treatment are dubious, but they thrill Hans Castorp: This hermetic world has begun to cast a spell on him and provoke questions “about the meaning and purpose of life” that he’d never asked down in the flatlands. Answered at first with “hollow silence,” they demand extended contemplation that’s possible only on the magic mountain.

The director’s assistant, trained in psychoanalysis, explains in one of his biweekly lectures that sickness is “merely transformed love,” the body’s response to repressed desire. Fever is the mark of eros; the decay of a diseased body signifies life itself. Mann had ventured onto this terrain before. In his novella Death in Venice (1912), the famous writer Gustav von Aschenbach, infatuated with a Polish boy at his hotel, stays in the plague-ridden city while other visitors flee. Hans Castorp stays too, obsessed with his own temperature chart, and with the entrancing Clavdia Chauchat, a young tubercular Russian with “Kirghiz eyes,” bad posture, and a habit of letting the dining-room door slam behind her. Almost half the novel goes by before Hans Castorp—who has by now been on the mountain for seven months—talks with Clavdia, just as she’s about to depart. On the night before she leaves, he makes one of the most bizarre declarations of love in literature: “Let me take in the exhalation of your pores and brush the down—oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours!” Clavdia leaves Hans Castorp with a framed X-ray of her tubercular lung.

I fell under the spell of Hans Castorp’s quest story, as the Everyman hero is transformed by his explorations of time, illness, sciences and séances, politics and religion and music. The climactic chapter, “Snow,” felt as though it were addressed to me. Hans Castorp, lost in a snowstorm, falls asleep and then awakens from a mesmerizing and monstrous dream with an insight toward which the entire story has led him: “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.”

Hans Castorp remains on the mountain for seven years—a mystical number. The Magic Mountain is an odyssey confined to one place, a novel of ideas like no other, and a masterpiece of literary modernism. Mann analyzes the nature of time philosophically and also conveys the feeling of its passage, slowing down his narrative in some spots to take in “the entire world of ideas”—a day can fill 100 pages—and elsewhere omitting years. Reading this dense yet miraculously seductive book becomes an experience like Hans Castorp’s interlude on the mountain. As I made my way through the novel by kerosene lamplight, I took Mann’s bildungsroman as a guide to my own education among the farmers, teachers, children, and market women who became my closest companions, hoping to find myself on a journey toward enlightenment as rich and meaningful as its hero’s. That was asking too much of even great literature; afraid of my own suicidal thoughts, I went home before the end of my two years. But on a few particularly dark nights, The Magic Mountain probably saved my life.

I recently returned to The Magic Mountain, without the intense identification of the first time (you have to be young for a book to inspire that), but with a larger sense that, a century later, Mann has something important to tell us as a civilization. The Mann who began writing the novel was an aristocrat of art, hostile to democracy—a reactionary aesthete. Working on The Magic Mountain was a transformative experience, turning him—as it turned his protagonist—into a humanist. What Hans Castorp arrives at, lost and asleep in the snow, “is the idea of the human being,” Mann later wrote, “the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.” In our age of brutal wars, authoritarian politics, cultures of contempt, and technology that promises to replace us with machines, what is left of the idea of the human being? What can it mean to be a humanist?

Mann conceived of The Magic Mountain in 1912, when he was 37, after a three-week visit to a sanatorium in Davos where his wife, Katia, was a patient. “It was meant as a humorous companion-piece to Death in Venice and was to be about the same length: a sort of satire on the tragedy just finished,” he later wrote. He soon discovered that his story resisted the confines of a comic novella. But before he could realize its possibilities, World War I broke out, in August 1914. With Hans Castorp still in his first week at the sanatorium, Mann abandoned the manuscript as Europe plunged into unprecedented destruction. In a letter to a friend in the summer of 1915, he left a clue as to where things stood with his unfinished novel: “On the whole the story inclines towards sympathy with death.” And he now saw an ending—the war itself.

Mann published no fiction for the duration of the war. Instead, he became a very public defender of imperial Germany against its adversaries. For Mann, the Great War was more than a contest among rival European powers or a patriotic cause. It was a struggle between “civilization” and “culture”—between the rational, politicized civilization of the West and Germany’s deeper culture of art, soul, and “genius,” which Mann associated with the irrational in human nature: sex, aggression, mythical belief. The kaiser’s Germany—strong in arms, rich in music and philosophy, politically authoritarian—embodied Mann’s ideal. The Western powers “want to make us happy,” he wrote in the fall of 1914—that is, to turn Germany into a liberal democracy. Mann was more drawn to death’s mystery and profundity than to reason and progress, which he considered facile values. This sympathy wasn’t simply a fascination with human evil—with a death instinct—but an attraction to a deeper freedom, a more intense form of life than parliaments and pamphleteering offered.

Mann scorned the notion of the writer as political activist. The artist should remain apart from politics and society, he believed, free to represent the deep and contradictory truths of reality rather than using art as a means to advance a particular view. In his wartime nonfiction writing, he mocked “civilization’s literary man,” a self-important poseur who takes sides on public issues and signs petitions. Mann was aiming at his brother Heinrich, a novelist and an essayist of nearly equal renown, whose liberal politics led him to support Germany’s enemies, France and Britain. The brothers exchanged indirect but caustic volleys in print, and their fraternal dispute became so bitter that they didn’t speak for seven years.

Before setting aside The Magic Mountain, Mann had created a version of this writer figure in a character named Lodovico Settembrini, another patient at the sanatorium, who is an irascible and hyper-articulate advocate for all things progressive: reason, liberty, virtue, health, the active life, social improvement. He declares music, the most emotionally overpowering of the arts, “politically suspect.” Mann at his most satiric has Settembrini contributing an essay to a multivolume project whose purpose is to end suffering. In short, Settembrini, like Heinrich, is a “humanist”—but in Mann’s usage, the term has an ironic sound. As he wrote elsewhere, it implies “a repugnant shallowness and castration of the concept of humanity,” pushed by “the politician, the humanitarian revolutionary and radical literary man, who is a demagogue in the grand style, namely a flatterer of mankind.”

Settembrini becomes a philosophical tutor to Hans Castorp, who listens with respectful interest but resists the liberal catechism. He responds more powerfully to the erotic allure of Clavdia Chauchat, the careless door slammer, who believes in “abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us.” Yet Settembrini also has the wisdom to warn our hero against the seductions of the sanatorium, which separates young people from the society “down there,” infecting them with lassitude and rendering them incapable of ordinary life. As an artist above politics, Mann didn’t want simply to criticize “civilization’s literary man,” but to show him as “equally right and wrong.” He intended to create an intellectual opponent to Settembrini in a conservative Protestant character named Pastor Bunge—but the war intruded.

Mann spent the war years making his case for the German soul, steeped in the “passion” of Wagner and “manliness” of Nietzsche, amid a global catastrophe that remained bloodlessly abstract to him at his desk in Munich. He published his wartime writings in the genre-defying Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in October 1918, one month before the armistice. Katia Mann later wrote, “In the course of writing the book, Thomas Mann gradually freed himself from the ideas which had held sway over him … He wrote Reflections in all sincerity and, in doing so, ended by getting over what he had advocated in the book.”

When Mann unpacked the four-year-old manuscript of The Magic Mountain in the spring of 1919, the novel and its creator were poised to undergo a metamorphosis. The war that had just ended enlarged the novel’s theme into “a worldwide festival of death”; the devastation, he would go on to write in the book’s last pages, was “the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates,” soon to become a German soldier. It also confronted Mann himself with a new world to which he had to respond.

[From the January 1953 issue: Thomas Mann on the making of The Magic Mountain]

Defeated Germany was in a state of revolution. In Munich, demobilized soldiers, right-wing paramilitaries, and Communist militants fought in the streets, while leaders of the new Weimar Republic were routinely assassinated. A local war veteran named Adolf Hitler began to electrify crowds in cramped halls with speeches denouncing the “traitors”—republican politicians, leftists, Jews—who had stabbed Germany in the back. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was born in Munich; Hitler’s attempted coup in November 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, took place less than two miles from the Mann house.

Some German conservatives, in their hatred of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles, embraced right-wing mass politics. Mann, nearing 50, vacillated, hoping to salvage the old conservatism from the new extremism. In early 1922, he and Heinrich reconciled, and, as Mann later wrote, he began “to accept the European-democratic religion of humanity within my moral horizon, which so far had been bounded solely by late German romanticism, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wagner.” In April of that year, in a review of a German translation of Walt Whitman’s selected poetry and prose, he associated the American poet’s mystical notion of democracy with “the same thing that we in our old-fashioned way call ‘humanity’ … I am convinced there is no more urgent task for Germany today than to fill out this word, which has been debased into a hollow shell.”

The key event of Mann’s conversion came in June, when ultranationalists in Berlin murdered his friend Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Jewish foreign minister. Shocked into taking a political stand, Mann turned a birthday speech in honor of the Nobel Prize–winning author Gerhart Hauptmann into a stirring call for democracy. To the amazement of his audience and the German press, Mann ended with the cry “Long live the republic!”

Mann the novelist had meanwhile returned to The Magic Mountain, and his work on it took a swerve in the same crucial year of 1922. His hero would have to struggle with the political battle that had beset Mann during the war. Abandoning Pastor Bunge as outmoded, he created a new counterpart to Settembrini who casts a sinister shadow over the second half of the novel: an ugly, charismatic, and (of course) tubercular Jesuit of Jewish origin named Leo Naphta. The intellectual combat between him and Settembrini—which ends physically, in a duel—provides some of the most dazzling passages in The Magic Mountain.

Just when you want to give up on their high-level dialectics, one of them, usually Naphta, says something that shocks you into a new way of thinking. Naphta is neither conservative nor liberal. Against capitalist modernity, whose godless greed and moral vacuity he hates with a sulfurous rage, Naphta offers a synthesis of medieval Catholicism and the new ideology of communism. Both place “anonymous and communal” authority over the individual, and both are intent on saving humanity from Settembrini’s soft, rational humanism. Hans Castorp calls Naphta “a revolutionary of reaction.” At times sounding like a fanatical parody of the Mann of Reflections, Naphta argues that love of freedom and pleasure is weaker than the desire to obey. “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego,” he says. “What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.” Mann understood the appeal of totalitarianism early on.

It’s Naphta, a truly demonic figure—not Settembrini, the voice of reason—who precipitates the end of the hero’s romance with death. His jarring arrival allows Hans Castorp to loosen himself from its grip and begin a journey toward—what? Not toward Settembrini’s international republic of letters, and not back toward his simple bourgeois life down in the flatlands. The answer comes 300 pages before the novel’s end, when Hans Castorp puts on a new pair of skis and sets out for a few hours of exercise that lead him into the fateful blizzard and “a very enchanting, very dreadful dream.”

In it, he encounters a landscape of human beings in all their kindness and beauty, and all their hideous evil. “I know everything about humankind,” he thinks, still dreaming, and he resolves to reject both Settembrini and Naphta—or rather, to reject the stark choice between life and death, illness and health, recognizing that “man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they.” During his years on the mountain, he’s become one of death’s intimates, and his initiation into its mysteries has immeasurably deepened his understanding of life—but he won’t let death rule his thoughts. He won’t let reason either, which seems weak and paltry before the power of destruction. “Love stands opposed to death,” he dreams; “it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death.”

The Magic Mountain makes no clear political statement. The novel remains true to Mann’s belief that art must include everything, allowing life its complexity and ambiguity. But the vision of “love” that Hans Castorp embraces just before waking up is “brotherly love”—the bond that unites all human beings. The creation of this novel, which won Mann international fame, is “a tale of two Thomas Manns,” in the words of Morten Høi Jensen, a Danish critic whose The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain” is due to be published next year. The Mann of wartime could not have written the sentence that awakens Hans Castorp from his dream.

[From the October 1944 issue: Thomas Mann’s “In My Defense”]

Mann now recognized political freedom as necessary to ensure the freedom of art, and he became a sworn enemy of the Nazis. A Nobel Prize winner in exile, he emerged as the preeminent German spokesman against Hitler who, in lectures across the United States in 1938, warned Americans of the rising threat to democracy, which for him was inseparable from humanism: “We must define democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.”

He was speaking at a moment when the dignity of man was locked up in Nazi concentration camps, liquidated in Soviet show trials, buried under piles of corpses. Yet Mann urged his audiences to resist the temptation to deride humanity. “Despite so much ridiculous depravity, we cannot forget the great and the honorable in man,” he said, “which manifest themselves as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice.”

Could anyone utter these lofty words today without courting a chorus of snickers, a social-media immolation? We live in an age of human self-contempt. We’re hardly surprised when our leaders debase themselves with vile behavior and lies, when combatants desecrate the bodies of their enemies, when free people humiliate themselves under the spell of a megalomaniacal fraud. It takes a constant effort not to accept this as normal. We might even feel, without acknowledging it to ourselves, that we deserve it: After all, we’re human, the lowest of the low.

In driving our democracy into hatred, chaos, and violence we, too, grant death dominion over our thoughts. We succumb to the impulse to escape our humanness. That urge, ubiquitous today, thrives in the utopian schemes of technologists who want to upload our minds into computers; in the pessimism of radical environmentalists who want us to disappear from the Earth in order to save it; in the longing of apocalyptic believers for godly retribution and cleansing; in the daily sense of inadequacy, of shame and sin, that makes us disappear into our devices.

The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time. But Mann also knew that, to withstand our attraction to death, a decent society has to be built on a foundation deeper than politics: the belief that, somewhere between matter and divinity, we human beings, made of water, protein, and love, share a common destiny.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Magic Mountain Saved My Life.”

It happened fast. Almost as soon as Hurricane Milton bore down on South Florida last month, high winds began shredding the roof of Tropicana Field, home for 26 years to the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team. Gigantic segments of Teflon-coated fiberglass flapped in the wind, then sheared off entirely. In the end, it took only a few hours for the Trop to lose most of its roof—a roof that was built to withstand high winds; a roof that was necessary because it exists in a place where people can no longer sit outside in the summer; a roof that was supposed to be the solution.

The problem, of course, is the weather. Of America’s four major professional sports, baseball is uniquely vulnerable to climate change in that it is typically played outside, often during the day, for a long, unrelenting season: six games a week per team, from March to October, which incidentally is when the Northern Hemisphere gets steamy and unpredictable, more so every year. In 1869, when the first professional baseball club was formed, the average July temperature in New York City’s Central Park was 72.8 degrees. In 2023, it was 79. By 2100, it could be as much as 13.5 degrees hotter, according to recent projections, hot enough to make sitting in the sunshine for a few hours unpleasant at best and hazardous at worst. In June, four Kansas City Royals fans were hospitalized for heat illness during an afternoon home game. On a muggy day four seasons ago, Los Angeles Angels starting pitcher Dylan Bundy began sweating so much, you could see it on TV. He then took a dainty puke behind the mound and exited the game with heat exhaustion.

Games have been moved because of wildfire smoke on the West Coast and delayed because of catastrophic flooding in New York. What we used to call generational storms now come nearly every year. Two weeks before the Trop’s roof came off, a different storm ripped through Atlanta, postponing a highly consequential Mets-Braves matchup and extending the season by a day.  

Climate change is already affecting some basic material realities of the sport. Some ball clubs have added misting fans and massive ice-water containers for temporary relief, making the experience of going to the game feel a little less like relaxing and a little more like surviving. A 2021 study found that umpires are more prone to mistaken calls in extreme heat, and one from last year found that decreased air density—the result of hotter temperatures—is changing the fundamental physics of how balls fly through the air.

Baseball just saw its latest season come and go, with the L.A. Dodgers—who play in a city that already experiences extreme storms, deadly heat, and drought—taking the World Series in five games. As we look forward to the next season, and the one after that, the biggest question isn’t whether Shohei Ohtani’s new elbow can make him the greatest player in history (possibly), or whether sports betting has ruined baseball (quite possibly), or whether the Mets will go the distance in 2025 (definitely)—it’s whether the sport will be able to adapt in time to save itself. “It’s becoming difficult for me, as somebody who enjoys the sport, and as somebody who researches climate change,” Jessica Murfree, an assistant professor of sport administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. “I don’t know that there’s a way to have it all.”

[Read: Climate collapse could happen fast]

In a scene from the movie Interstellar, the film’s protagonist, a pilot named Joseph Cooper, takes his children and father-in-law to a baseball game in the blight-ravaged, storm-battered year 2067. A few dozen people are sitting in the stands of a dinky diamond that looks like it could belong to a high-school team, eating popcorn; Cooper’s father-in-law is grousing about how, in his day, “we had real ballplayers—who are these bums?” And then one such bum turns around to reveal his jersey, and there’s the joke, if you want to call it that: These are the New York Yankees.

Timothy Kellison shows this clip to the students he teaches at Florida State University’s Department of Sport Management. “That’s the future of sport in the long run,” he told me: The most powerful franchise in the history of baseball could become a traveling oddity. “From a Yankees fan’s perspective, from a baseball fan’s perspective, that’s a very troubling future.”

Murfree was even more direct: “I do think sport might be one of the first things to go when we really move past these alarming tipping points about climate.”

Baseball has long been defined, and enriched, by its openness to the world. It gets “better air in our lungs” and allows us to “leave our close rooms,” as Walt Whitman wrote in 1846, during the sport’s earliest days. It is the only major sport in which the point is for the ball to leave the field of play; once in a while—on a lucky night, in an open park—a home run lands in the parking lot or a nearby body of water. Wind, temperature, and precipitation are such a part of the game that the website FanGraphs includes weather in its suite of advanced statistics. The season begins in spring and ends in autumn, in a cycle that binds the sport to all living things: renewal and decay, renewal and decay. “Playing baseball in the fall has a certain smell,” Alva Noë, a Mets fan and philosophy professor at UC Berkeley, told me. “Playing baseball in the spring, in the hot summer, has a certain feel.” In his book The Summer Game, the famed baseball chronicler Roger Angell wrote of the “flight of pigeons flashing out of the barn-shadow of the upper stands”; of “the heat of the sun-warmed iron coming through your shirtsleeve under your elbow”; of “the moon rising out of the scoreboard like a spongy, day-old orange balloon.”

Angell was writing in 1964, in the context of the closure of the Polo Grounds, the “bony, misshapen old playground” that was home to both the Mets and the Yankees at various times. He mourned the future of the sport, when “our surroundings become more undistinguished and indistinguishable.” The next year, baseball’s first indoor stadium, the Houston Astrodome, opened, the argument being that a roof was the only viable way to play baseball in the subtropical Texas climate.

Sixty years later, Houston is much hotter, and eight teams (including the Rays, who are still figuring out where to play next season) have roofs; this includes two of the three newest parks in baseball (in Miami and the Dallas metro area). The next new one (in Las Vegas, which is one of the fastest-warming cities in the country) will have one, too. Most of these roofs are retractable, but in practice, many tend to stay closed during summer’s high heat and heavy rains. During any given week of the season, several games are played on plastic grass in a breezeless hangar, under not sky but steel. In the future, “the aesthetics of the game, the feel of the game, will be so different, if you’re sitting in … a sort of neutral, sanitized, protected” space, Noë said. “There won’t be birds, there won’t be clouds, there won’t be glare from the sun, there won’t be wind, there won’t be rain, there won’t be pollution, there won’t be the sound of overflying airplanes. You’ll be playing baseball in a shopping mall.”

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This vision is, to be clear, the best answer we have so far to baseball’s climate problem. If anything, it’s actually too ambitious, too far off. Renovating existing parks to add roofs is impractical and expensive; building new ones costs even more: “We’re not talking about one business and relocating it to a different building higher up on the land,” Kellison said. “These are billion-dollar stadiums. They’re intended to be permanent.” Baseball is also highly invested in its own iconography; in cities such as Boston and Chicago, places with famous, century-old, open parks, domes will be a tough sell.

And, obviously, they’re not a perfect solution to extreme weather. In Phoenix, a city that had 113 straight 100-degree-or-more days this summer, the air-conditioning system at Chase Field has been straining; players have left games due to cramps, blaming the heat. Even if teams find the money and the will to build new parks, and even if those parks do the thing they’re supposed to do, they might not do it fast or well enough to make baseball comfortable or safe enough to keep its fans—fans whom baseball is already anxious to retain, as other entertainment becomes more popular.

Kellison is actually pretty optimistic about some adaptation being possible, precisely because baseball, like all sports, is so dependent on its fans. People pay lots of money to be in baseball stadiums—about $3.3 billion in 2023, according to one analysis. Owners and the league have a major incentive to keep them coming. “These are very wealthy and successful business leaders who aren’t just going to let a product like this go away with such a financial stake in it,” he said. Aileen McManamon, a sports-management consultant and a board member of the trade association Green Sports Alliance, told me that Major League Baseball does recognize that examining its relationship to the environment “is fundamental to [its] continued existence.”

But MLB isn’t a monolith—it’s a multibillion-dollar organization composed of 30 teams with 30 ownership groups, in 27 cities across two countries. (The league did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Kellison doesn’t believe that MLB is thinking as ambitiously or formally as it should be about climate change’s effect on the sport, and neither does Murfree. “There really is no excuse to say this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, a freak accident,” Murfree said. “The league and its organizations do have a responsibility to be forward-thinking and protect their people and their organizations from something that scientists have been waving their hands in the air about for a long time.”

[Read: A touch revolution could transform pitching]

Experts have all kinds of proposals, both radical and subtle, to go along with domes: Brad Wilkins, the director of the University of Oregon’s Performance Research Laboratory, suggested making changes to the uniforms, which are polyester, highly insulative, and “not very good at dissipating heat.” (The league did change the uniforms slightly this year, in part to incorporate more “breathable” fabric, but many players found the quality lacking.) McManamon talked with me about being more strategic regarding where and how we build new stadiums, looking for sites with natural ventilation and better shade, and using novel materials. She also suggested shortening the season, to make it a little gentler on fans and players. Murfree, meanwhile, has argued for shifting the timing of the season, and for opportunistically moving games based on weather, making baseball less tied to place.

Not all of these ideas are immediately feasible, and none will be popular. All sports like to mythologize themselves, but baseball—this young country’s oldest game—might have one of the most powerful and pernicious mythmaking apparatuses of all. It’s the stuff of poetry, of 18-hour documentaries, of love stories. Baseball people are intensely nostalgic. They love to find ways to be cranky about changes much less consequential than these. But Murfree’s a fan, and a pragmatist. “If we dig our heels into the status quo, we will lose out on the things that we enjoy,” she said. “If baseball is to remain America’s favorite pastime, we have no choice but to be flexible.”

Fans, players, and Major League Baseball think of the sport as something static, but in fact it is changing all the time. The earliest baseball games were played by amateurs, on irregularly sized fields, with inconsistent rules and balls that were made of melted shoes wrapped in yarn and pitched underhand. Since then, we have seen, among other things, the introduction of racial integration, night games, free agency, the designated hitter, instant replay, sabermetrics, and the pitch clock, each new development greeted with skepticism and outrage and then, eventually, acceptance. Now we face the most radical changes of all. Eventually, baseball—the sport of sunbaked afternoons, a sport made beautiful and strange by its exposure to the elements—may be unrecognizable. This will be the best-case scenario, because the alternative is that baseball doesn’t exist.  

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