Dunkirk NY – I came across this article from the website Deadspin the other day, and it got me to thinking about the state of the game. I submitted a comment for the piece, and as I finished writing it, I thought it might work out to be a decent blog post. The articles discusses several theses for why baseball is not as popular today as it was in years past, and it mainly uses data to make its various cases. It’s a good article, but the one aspect of baseball I think it missed is the cultural aspect. Times have changed, and while baseball has made efforts to change with those times, in its essence it’s still a 19th-century pastoral sport that has a 150-year history behind it. To ask the question “What’s the matter with baseball?” may possibly come down to only one answer: nothing. It’s simply dying.
When my father used to take me to Yankee Stadium at a time when Hector Lopez, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were roaming the outfield, it cost $0.25 to get into the bleachers (and he would complain because they were $0.15 when HE was a kid). Advanced sales were unknown. We’d make sandwiches, buy some Dr. Brown sodas,and pack them in a cooler. Me and two of my brothers would haul the cooler up to the long wooden planks that were the bleachers, put the cooler between us, and sit and watch the game from left center field. It was a day at the “park,” where they happened to be playing baseball.
We live in faster times, however, and the obsession with “pace of play” and the length of the games is the largest indicator of baseball’s low standing. Baseball used to be faster; game might take 2.5 hours. Today a three-hour game is pretty standard, with a lot of that time added due to commercial demands of TV and such. One of baseball’s long-standing charms was always that there was no clock; it lasted nine innings regardless of time. In a more leisurely culture this was not so much of a problem; but today, when time is money, baseball is wasting it. It moves like an old man shuffling across a parking lot. The lower attention span of today is not geared for baseball’s leisure pace.
And that’s the thing – baseball is an old person’s game, a mature game. It’s as organic as anything else, and it’s dying as the culture accelerates. That’s sort of natural in many ways. Another recent article at FiveThirtyEight posits the notion that perhaps minor league ball is not necessary anymore. During the play-by-play commentary on a recent Yankees game, John Flaherty pointed out that, even though Ken Singleton may never have faced Randy Johnson, one could make a statistical comparison among pitchers like Johnson that Singleton did face, and predict how Singleton would have done against Johnson. Perhaps we don’t even need players anymore – just their statistics.
Baseball’s particular joy has always come from its slower, more leisurely, pastoral nature. When a culture, however, no longer really values that aesthetic, perhaps baseball’s time has come. One gleaming ray of hope, though, is the movement towards becoming more unplugged. If you want to truly unplug, I recommend you attend a baseball game without your phone. Go to a day game. Get a scorecard, a hot dog, a bag of peanuts, and a beer. Sit where the sun is shining. Watch the boys play. Mind the innings, not the clock. Perhaps in the “mindfulness” era, baseball will enjoy a renaissance. It’s one of the best ways I know to unplug. -twl