On Baseball

Last night saw the return of baseball, once America’s unquestioned national game. The contest was unfortunately shortened due to rain, a painful reminder the Zeus cares little for the sport. The cranky cloud wizard is still stuck in the Grecian past, stubbornly clinging to athletic togas and spinning discus as the pinnacle of human achievement. But he’s not really the problem today, now is he? He’s too busy eating grapes by the gross and trying to figure out why Feta isn’t more popular.

But last night, baseball was different.

You weren’t in the stands enjoying a perfect evening at the ballpark with friends, family and local bon vivants. You weren’t wearing a new fitted hat with a brim so crisp that it requires tender and gentle bending. You weren’t daydreaming about how your life would’ve turned out had you quit law school and become a professional mascot, devoting your time on earth to wholesome entertainment and borderline asphyxiation. You weren’t standing in packed bathroom lines while nervously waiting for the one available and questionably clean stall, wondering who invented the urinal trough and if they made enough money to retire in relative luxury. You weren’t brooding silently as “The Wave” took hold of your section, enrapturing willing participants who would’ve felt more than comfortable preparing their closeup for Ms. Riefenstahl. You weren’t spilling a 14-dollar beer, cracking the commemorative souvenir plastic cup it came in, and unwittingly ruining a fine cashmere sweater draped over the seat in front of you, leaving the owner with a most moist discovery in her immediate future.

You weren’t running nude from the waist down onto the diamond during one of those frequent lulls in the game when the eyes of children glaze over and impatient fans howl for some action, and you only receive a tepid smattering of applause just as a throng of security guards tackles you to the ground. You weren’t hauling handwritten cardboard signs with dumb insults and terrible puns like “You certainly suck, sir” and “You’re definitely not safe in our home!” You weren’t out buying a crisp pack of D Batteries on the day of the game with the creative intention of throwing them at players after boneheaded fielding miscues, baserunning blunders and careless bouts of feverish ball-touching. You weren’t researching the backstories of opposing players in order to come up with weirdly personal and wildly cruel chants.

You weren’t scalping an extra ticket for Ted Williams’ frozen head, something along with the certificate of authenticity, you keep around the corner inside your neighborhood pork store’s industrial sized walk-in freezer. You weren’t there to mercilessly boo multi-millionaires in an obvious transference of your own profound and honestly at this point, quite noticeable issues. There was none of that last night. None at all. No spitting, scratching or smooching. None of the staples of a game that lives off of human contact. Baseball had been altered.

There are baseball fans who believe it’s acceptable to sit on the sidelines (not literally, of course) and say nothing. They think staying positive is enough. Promoting the good things about baseball in a time when everyone could use the boost. They’re wrong. There was a time when this sort of discourse worked. In the early years, you could merely talk about the positives – that it’s the only game that understands the power of wood and elaborate facial hair. That it first captured our popular imagination during a period when cow tipping and ominously “going west” were the only means of entertainment. You couldn’t listen to recorded music then. You had to squint at reams of sheet music, hoping a sound would miraculously come out. It never did.

The world is rife with potential distractions and relentless competitors. There are entire TV shows based around the lifecycle of a common choux pastry – following it along from dough to mouth. It’s hard to pry eyes from a world of that much butter and powdered sugar. I can barely pre-heat my oven and now you want to me to calculate VORP?

It’s not enough to love baseball these days. You have to be anti-soccer, too. There are things about the alleged beautiful game that have mostly gone unchecked and uncriticized. The lack of pipe organ. The constant disrobing. The flopping like a halibut gasping on a Mainer’s private pier. Camera angles taken from outer space. Long, idiotic horns that coeds use to funnel booze. Then there are those weird shapes on the ball. What are those, hexagons, octagons? Rhombuses? Rhombusii? And what is extra time anyway? No one gets extra time in this life – and especially not soccer players.    

While I'm glad baseball is back, love alone won't solve our problems. You must call out the carding and the low scoring. Part of loving baseball is hating soccer. It's saying that Eddie Gaedel had a more consequential life than David Beckham. That Zidane's on-field antics are nothing when compared to the exploits of Rube Waddell. What does soccer have, three different statistics? Goals, save and penalties. Where's the OPS+ and the adjusted ERA? There is no Roger Angell of soccer. 

I wish it weren’t like this. But it is. Pick up a bat, grab a glove and commit yourself passionately despising the sport. This is 2020, when simple binaries rule the day. Because that’s our real national pastime.