Philip Martin is on assignment. The original version of this column ran March 29, 2009.
I confess I do not follow baseball like I used to; there are too many games and not enough time, and I can hardly ever spare a whole Saturday afternoon or Wednesday night. I feel bad about this, but following sports intensely is really a boy's pastime, at least it was before we started over-scheduling children and hyper-parenting. In the old days some of us were happy waiting a week for The Sporting News to arrive in the mail (usually on a Monday afternoon), with all the box scores and compiled statistics--not just the leaders--from two weeks before.
In an age of Google and Twitter, when you can call up the career of a DiMaggio or a Big Ed Delahanty with a few keystrokes, it seems impossible we could have been genuinely appreciative of TSN, with its smell of ink and newsprint and grainy black and white photos, but we pored over it for hours with the intensity of Talmudic scholars, until the names and numbers were branded deep in our brain. In odd moments I remember Ron Hunt and Matty Alou and Max Alvis, Jim Ray Hart and Felix Millan. I can name the starting lineups of most Major League teams in 1969--fluff that no doubt crowds out more important information.
But most of the baseball I consume is concentrated in highlights shows, wherein the languid rhythms of the game are collapsed and jiggered, remixed into something flashy and made-for-TV.
You get the scores, along with diving catches and skyrocketing home runs, but not the antique pitch-by-pitch cadence of an at bat. Baseball rewards patience in the way more kinetic, continuous sports do not--the initiated can parse the accreting drama of a pitch count; there is a richness in the artfully fouled ball.
There is a bait-and-switch aspect to the way the game is marketed; the genius of baseball has less to do with occasional extraordinary athletic feats than the precision of the game's design. Were the pitcher's mound a few inches further away or closer, the very DNA of the game would be altered. A curve might not have time to break if not for the last two feet; thrown from 62 feet, a 90-mile-an-hour fastball would serve as batting practice.
The same applies with the distance between bases and even the outfield dimensions of the park. Shave a couple of inches off the mound and the pitcher's advantage is reduced; allow white-shirted fans to fill the centerfield bleachers and batting averages will go down. Baseball is like one of those Japanese Pachinko machines, highly customizable, subject to adjustment in dozens of nearly invisible ways.
And so statistics are not the objective indicators we sometimes pretend they are--Rogers Hornsby would not have hit .358 for his career had he played in the 1960s. For most of baseball history, hitting 50 home runs was a rare achievement, but home runs became cheaper in the 1990s and early 2000s, and while we know some of the reasons why that's so, we cannot begin to imagine all the factors.
Like all sports, baseball has evolved in response to the market--the so-called steroid era is best understood as a reaction to the decline in fan interest through the 1980s. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa brought baseball back after the crippling strike year of 1994, and most of us didn't much care about their workout regimes.
(Steve Wilstein, the reporter who wrote about the bottle of dietary supplement androstenedione--a testosterone-producing steroid that was banned by virtually every other sport except Major League Baseball--he saw in McGwire's locker during his 70 home-run season in 1998, was widely criticized as an "unprofessional" writer looking to stir up controversy by his fellow sportswriters. McGwire accused him of "snooping," and St. Louis Cardinal manager Tony LaRussa attempted to have him banned from the clubhouse. The story blew over in a few days.)
We get the sort of baseball we deserve--or the sort of baseball that puts people in the bleachers. So even as baseball crowds--at least major-league baseball crowds--have grown healthily in the past few years, fewer people seem to understand the nuances of the game, in part because those nuances have disappeared.
Sacrifice bunts aren't as helpful as Leo Durocher thought and, as Earl Weaver knew, the odds favor playing for three-run home runs. Batting average is an overrated statistic in that, absent any other information, it tells us nothing about a player's worth. Not all the new ways are vulgar, some are just correctives to bad assumptions, antidotes to superstition.
Baseball is no longer the most popular sport in America, but it is still this nation's First Sport, the one that college professors and newspaper columnists want to make into a metaphor for the times. Baseball is important in a way that other sports are not.
The highlight shows don't do it justice--baseball requires quiet stretches, moments when the pitcher simply stares in to the plate, aimless throws to hold the runner at first base, called third strikes and generous expanses of grass. It is even important that baseball have its non-fans, people who profess to being left cold by the ritual of the game. It needs people who prefer the clash and clamor of football or the naked athleticism of basketball's elongated specimens to its less sensational charms. Baseball needs its nonbelievers, for without them its believers would not feel as blessed.
And "blessed" is the word for it. Despite the abundance of Christian athletes willing to publicly acknowledge their faith, all sport is subversive of organized religion to the extent that it usurps the role of religion in the individual's life. Sport burlesques the rituals of religion and induces in its fans the same kind of ecclesiastic sensation.
The difference is each generation gets its own set of saints.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 04/24/2016