There is a legion of people out there who think baseball is boring. I know because every time I run into them and they find out of my obsession with baseball, they never hesitate to tell me and tell me often. This must be what soccer fans feel like. However, like soccer fans, I don’t consider the sport boring. Like most young boys of my generation, my experience with baseball began with time spent with my father. The most beautiful green grass was offset by the brown base path. The warm summer evening was accented with the smell of hot dogs and other baseball culinary accoutrements. My father taught me to score the games, likely to keep me engaged than anything else but it is a tradition I do to this day. Above all, the game allowed for conversation.
As an adult, I appreciate the sport for different reasons, while fondly recalling my times as a young boy. As an historian, there is something about an annual event that, for the most part, has not changed in the near century and a half baseball has been around. Technology has changed the sport and the environs have grown fancier but the product on the field as not changed. My score card and that of one from the 1940s will look roughly the same. To know that I’m connected to generations dating back to the late 1800s holds a continuity over me that, as an historian, gives me a chill. If I could somehow speak with someone from 1910 about baseball and our favorite teams and players, the conversation would flow because the subject is the same. How many things in the modern world can one say that about?
Second, it allows for an escape from modern society. While technology has seeped in and taken over the game production value, one can simply focus on the game and escape the hectic and artificial world that technology can create. The game moves at its own pace and not at the frenetic and bizarre one that inhabits much of our world today. There is no clock and no set time it must end. The game unfolds organically. In a world where we are rushing to get nowhere, here is a slice of what our country and our culture used to value. From this, I began to develop my values accordingly. When one attends a place like Wrigley Field in Chicago or Fenway Park in Boston, it heightens the experience but these ballparks come to us from an earlier age. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit these parks and it is a magical feel. Many who are not as enamored with baseball as I am find the romanticizing of the sport a bit too much. However, I would submit the reason for this approach is a call for, not so much an earlier time but an earlier approach to life.
Third, it is a combination of two sports mindsets – the importance and value of team but also the drama of a one-on-one face off. In baseball, each individual achievement is the product, not so much of the player but of the team. Every baseball player who ever pitched a no-hitter or reached a hitting record, did so because of the efforts of their teammates. A pitcher benefits from the defensive work of his teammates. The hitter benefits from the strategy forced upon the pitcher by the batter before or after in the lineup. Yet, when one pitcher squares off against one batter, it can be a marvelous thing. It is not always dramatic but the finality of the encounter is wonderful. At the end of an at-bat, one will walk off his spot either victorious or a little ashamed. In particular, I love the deadly pitcher refusing to walk or pitch around the great hitter. The pitcher is saying, “Yes, you are good but I’m better and I’m going to show you and the world.” And with the action on the field, come the statistician-fan who, through their scorebook and their knowledge of the game, rise and fall with the ebb and flow and continue to make that connection with an earlier time.
Finally, more so than any sport, baseball represents renewal. No other sport has fans that deal with defeat and loss with the level of optimism for the next year like in baseball. Spring is a rebirth and no matter the product on the field the year before, spring training represents another chance to prosper. Across the spectrum, baseball gives us what we lack in life. Perhaps, baseball does not mean that much to you, if at all. However, I’m often asked to describe why this sport wraps me up and draws me in. This is the best I can do.
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