As I write this, it is the first week of April. Which means only one thing.
Baseball season is finally underway.
I am not, in general, a sports fan. I am disinterested in basketball. I have an absolute contempt for football. If I think about soccer it’s to wonder how it’s the favorite sport in the rest of the world and largely ignored in the States, despite ongoing attempts to introduce it (sort of the metric system of the sports world). I lived a chunk of my childhood in Buffalo NY, so my native hockey team is the Sabers. If I hear them mentioned something inside me pricks up to listen, despite the fact that I have lived most of the rest of my life near “Hockey Town,” and, unlike the Sabers, the Red Wings actually make it to the championships on a regular basis.
I don’t know exactly why I like baseball, but I do. I like the game, even in its current, rather messy, state. I can appreciate the athleticism required to make a diving catch or make it around the bases for an inside-the-park home run.
Baseball is different from other sports. Baseball’s got history. Baseball’s got romance. Baseball’s got curses that have lasted over a century and urban legends about urban goats. Its got stories. Its got songs that are actually good songs and at least one poem that is a lot of fun. It’s inspired good speculative fiction in print and on screen (my favorite is Casey at the Bat by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson), not to mention some of the sweeter episodes of The Twilight Zone. I loved the fact that Commander Sisko on Deep Space 9 was a baseball fan.
Baseball, I will freely admit, is a slow game. The rules, once you really start getting into them, are Byzantine. It gets called “a thinking man’s game,” and that’s true if you like to think about numbers, because the statistical aspect is truly brain curdling and I’m not sure it doesn’t run to imaginary numbers sometimes.
I do not exactly live in a great baseball town. Last season was heartbreaking, and I’m not sure this one will be much better. I don’t have any great personal baseball stories. I did take a friend of mine to a game during the 1984 season, when the Tigers were at the top of the world. We bough souvenir hats and cheered Lou Whittaker and Alan Trammel and chanted with the popcorn/peanut lady who moved ponderously up and down the aisle hawking her wares. We ate cracker jack because it was traditional. It was a good day.
Many years later, I took my son to a Tigers game and we sat in the upper decks and got sunburned, despite our new hats, and ate too much pizza, watched a ninth inning rally and I promised him a chipwich if it went into extra innings, which it didn’t, but we had a good time anyway and he wants to go again.
Although the Tigers are my team, I’m a genetic Chicago Cubs fan. My mother was born in the shadow of Wrigley Field. She was deeply distressed when they finally broke down and put the floodlights in for night games. The last road trip she and I took together was when I took her back to Chicago to go to her first Cubs game in 50 years. It rained, but not hard enough to stop the game, which went 15 innings and which, miraculously, the Cubs won. We bought souvenir hats (something she wasn’t able to afford when she was a kid), and went out for pizza afterwards, all immersed in a happy crowd of loud, sentimental, cheerful Chicagoans. It was a good day.
So, okay, maybe I do have some baseball stories.
Baseball, of course, remains one of the favorite metaphors of American culture. Baseball is used as a focusing lens to talk about moral and cultural values, about family, immigration, and race, about the shifting landscape of the US itself. It is used to discuss childhood and adulthood, and of course, heroism.
I have my own baseball metaphor.
Baseball, I find, is a lot like the literary science fiction community.
No, seriously.
As with baseball, literary SF’s got a strong conservative streak that it wears as a virtue. It prides itself on being more intellectual than other sports/genres. As with baseball, many of the best players came from the negro leagues. Portions of it are really extremely resistant to letting girls into the club, although they sure want girls to be fans. It’s more in love with its past than its future. It’s constantly scrambling to figure out the world around it. Even though it is firmly rooted in that world it worries about being shifted out of it. It can’t figure out why the rest of the world doesn’t play the game, while at the same time doing everything it can to shut the rest of the world out, and then gets bewildered when the rest of the world gets along fine without it, or even reinvents that game and goes it one better. This forces it to change, which it does, because it’s got no choice, but it never stops complaining about how it liked it better the old way. And outsiders shake their head at it, a lot, and wonder why it doesn’t grow up and act normal and stop arguing about all those incomprehensible numbers that don’t mean anything real anyway.
Or it could be I just think too much. Some things in life can be enjoyed just because they are enjoyable without requiring explanation or analysis. You like them because you do.
Kind of like science fiction.
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No basketball, no football…blasphemy. I will say even though baseball may not have a richer history per say, it sure is a history that has been glamourized a bit more. Why that is I dont really know, but if I had to take a nice uneducated guess I would say something about the Yankees and how playing in NY did something. What I do not know, but something.
I am a basketball and football fan myself because as you said, too slow, and too many games each year that are played.
YOur SF/baseball statements is interesting. Football does not have a womans counterpart yet we dont think much about that because of the nature of the sport, but softball is sure not on the minimal level that the WNBA is. I mean they took it out of the Olympics. Baseball used to try to stay that old school style, that is until steroids not only ruined part of the game, but ruined that reputation as well. Now im just rambling
First by far I’m a Football fan first, then basketball and a distant third baseball, but with that in mind I can still talk Baseball (stats etc) with anybody who is a lifelong fan. That said, Baseball’s history is far richer – certainly more than Basketball, perhaps not so much more than Football when considering the heritage of the College Game.
Damon, If you think there are no steroids in Football or Basketball that’s wishful thinking. The baseball steroids issue is not an endorsement on Basketball or Football. Hell there is word coming from the NFL combine now that players have tested positive and several players are always caught, it’s just not made a big deal of (Merriman). I think other sports have dodged a bullet because it happeneed to be baseball that kind of put it into public conscious now, and honestly I don’t think the public cares. I think the media cared. Anybody who plays sports on just about any level from high school and above knows steroids is and has been an issue
Basketball has problem of it’s own for me in that the players simply don’t play until the fourth quarter, and in general, until the playoffs. It’s why the NBA playoffs are great – because in comparison 90% of the teams don’t play but one quarter during each game of the regular season. I like both, but I tend to enjoy the college game more as single games tend to matter and th players are giving it all every game because of it – or they are getting blown out because the other team is.
I will say this. Baseball is much harder to play than either of the other 2 mentioned in that you can either hit a major league ball or you can’t. The other two sport have size ratio that shoe you in if you are athletic enough an anybody can learn how to shoot a basketball or hustle on defense. Sure not everybody can be Lebron, but you can pick-up the game.
If someone is lucky enough to play any of the three at the highest level, smart people choose Baseball. Guaranteed contracts,longevity, and much more loot/no cap.
Forgot. Great SF/ish/Baseball books:
Summerland by Chabon
Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop
Haha, another week, another disagreement. My favorite sports rank:
1. Soccer
2. Hockey
After that it gets murky enough that I can’t really call myself much a fan of any sport. I don’t mind watching the NFL, but I’m the most casual of fans at best in that regard (I live in the heart of Steeler Country, for instance, and while I always check the scores week in and week out, the only game I watched in its entirety this season was, you guessed it, the Super Bowl). Basketball I can’t really get into at all, although I can understand how people get amped up for the college tournament.
Baseball, though, I never understood on any level. To me it certainly ranks the lowest of all the other big team sports, and realistically I’d much prefer to watch golf, cycling, or those lumberjack woodsmen games before I turn on a baseball game.
Zach: One of these days you and I are going to find something we agree on, and the universe will end shortly thereafter (VBG).
I find the whole preferred sports thing interesting on the same level I find choice of artistic medium interesting. I talk to artists in other mediums (graphic artists, musicians, etc.) and when it gets down to what it’s like to be in “the zone,” everybody describes the same feeling (world going away, the idea coming straight out of the hands without the brain interfering), which tends to make me thing that the creativity seems to come from the same place inside, but why this medium over that? Why paint over pen? Same thing with sport; everybody likes the same thing; the suspense, the action, the athleticism, the community, but why this game, not that game?
As to sports controversies, yes, baseball’s all about steroids at the moment, but they are _finally_ starting to talk about the effects of repeated head injuries on football players.
And just as a BTW, Jay’s right, it is commonly agreed that hitting a major league fast ball is the hardest feat in pro sports (small round bat, small round ball going 90 to 100 miles an hour, very, very small point of contact).
Hitting a major league pitch even looks impossible. It’s fairly easy for an athletic person (or not) with good hand-eye-coordination to go to a batting cage and have a field day even in batting cage marked 90 mph.
When you see a 90+ mph live though, it’s absolutely a different situation. And you can forget about hitting a curve, splitter, or effective change-up from a guy that has that kind of heat
Exactly! Its tough enough to hit it when it’s coming straight at you. When it’s dipping, or slowing down, or speeding up, or spinning, inside this time, outside next time, or any of the rest of it…fuggeddaboutit.
I’ve been thinking about the reason for the richness, or at least the mythologizing of baseball history. There’s the prosaic reason, which is simple longevity. Baseball was the first pro team sport (this sets aside things like boxing) to take wide-spread hold in the US. The less prosaic reason is the nature of the game lends itself to a myriad of story forms. It’s a team sport in which every single player has an individual chance to shine, whether at bat or on the field no matter what position he plays. And of course, every game is a show down between two teams, but also between two men — the pitcher and the batter — every time. That’s a lot of dramatic material there.
Plus there are the nicknames. How can you not tell stories about guys who have such great nicknames? (VBG)
One thing Baseball could do is enforce the time limit between pitches. It really gets out of hand and too often. If you can cut 10-15 minutes off a game by simply enforcing the rules, you are doing your fans a service (though perhaps not the corporate wallet).
There is also the panziness of rain delays. I’m not saying it’s unnecessary, but something about Football (obviously Basketball is not effected) being played in all but the worst of conditions appeals to me. My inclination is if your making a millions of dollars, weather is part of the game (though it’s not)- MAN UP.
Soccer for me is unwatchable except at its highest level and only World Cup. It goes to my inclinations. Nobody talks about a great move to get the basket if you miss, nobody talks about the perfect pass unless somebody catches it, nobody talks about a great punch unless it lands – and thus nobody is going to try to sell me ‘build up’ as something I should admire. If you don’t score a goal, whatever you did prior was a failure. Period. I do like watching Brazil play, but even with them to many times I’m stuck watching some 1-1 or 2-1 game. I’m one of those stupid Americans who thinks offsides kills the game as everytime it looks like something INTERESTING is going to happen, it’s offsides.
Shootouts/kicks are also the worst thing in pro Sports. So you could play an epic, all time match, and it can be decided by what essentially is a series of extra points for a pro player.
The rules about time between pitches are apparently complicated and differ between the American and National leagues. There was a pitcher for…I think it was Cincinnati?…last season who was taking so long, the umpires did start carrying stop watches and I saw at least one runner get a base because the pitcher was too slow (somebody correct me if I’m misremembering this)
As to playing in the rain…I see your point, but I’d have to think about that one. I honestly don’t know if it’s practical for baseball. I can just see someone careening toward home and sliding in the mud, unintentionally, and there goes the ankle or the knee. Not to mention the sheer difficulty of catching a fly ball in the rain. Or throwing a wet ball acurately. Or at all.
I DO know that the Tigers excuse for their truly awful start last season of it being too cold was pathetic and I’m very, very glad Jim Leyland isn’t having any of it this season. Talk about the need to man-up. You play for DETROIT people. It is GOING to be cold in April. DEAL!
Oh I certainly don’t think it’s practical, but neither are their salaries. I think what draws people to pro sports, are the impractical elements – from the players to what they can achieve It’s not practical to have wide receivers, Qb’s, or kickers play in the a blizzard either, but it happens – and legends are made (or goof reels). Like I can understand why you can’t play a round of golf in hurricane like winds, but not playing Baseball in the rain seems more rooted in tradition than anything else.
There is no danger in playing Baseball in the rain that isn’t a danger in every play on a football field.
Regarding pitching – it’s just silly. Throw the ball! Batter are guilty of being prissy as well, but many times it’s a reaction a pitchers taking forever. If a batter is a 3-5 pitch out, I don’t want to be sitting their for minutes watching it. Especially short relievers or closer , most of who only pitch one inning and only have two pitches to begin with
Have faith in Leyland, Sarah–this year will be better than last. And you can always hop over to Greenfield Village to catch some vintage baseball in the summer-time as well (says the former Dearborn-ite–I do miss The Henry Ford museum, village, etc.).
I forget the details now, but I recall seeing a fascinating article comparing the three sports baseball, football, and basketball to different fields of work. Baseball is very agrarian, measured not by a clock but by a nebulous inning (season); football very factory-like, with each player in charge of a very specific task and simply responsible for just doing their part and the coaches much like factory-line supervisors and such; and basketball is more corporate, requiring quick-thinking adjustments and creativity and a coach as group therapist.
The article developed it much more, I’m sure (and certainly the metaphor could become strained if you tried to make it define the sports too specifically). But I wonder if the mystique around baseball ties into that, tapping the same nostalgia we might have (even without recognizing it) for some supposedly simpler era of agriculture, etc. At the least, nostalgia seems to play a role in even the most SFnal baseball stories I’ve read.