State of Baseball

I watched the baseball all-star game last week (ed--now two weeks ago) for the first time since probably the mid-1980s with two of my four sons. One of them, the nine year old, can I think be called at present an obsessive of the sport. The other one, who is 16, had not to my knowledge shown much interest in it until the last year or so, when he began to watch Red Sox games, and during the All-Star game he surprised me with his familiarity with players, statistics, trade rumors and the like, my surprise being both because he rarely gives any hints as to any interests he has in anything, and also because fifteen/sixteen seems to me an unusual age to become interested in baseball; if anything it seems a likely age in most cases for interest to decline, as most boys who are not relatively good at it will stop playing around this time, and things like the collecting of baseball cards, if that is even still something children do, will have tailed off even a few years before that. I would love to know why this is happening and in what his attachment, such as it is, consists, but I cannot make it out at all at this point and no useful hints have been forthcoming, as yet. One of my other sons, who is fourteen, still plays on a team, or at least he did this year, which the older one does not. He does not show much interest in following the professional leagues or watching games on TV however, unless there is an accompanying spread of snacks involved.


I make note of all this because one of the great themes of the week leading up to the game in the media was about how baseball as a sport is in grave decline with regard to its popularity and social relevance, particularly among young people, with many commentators opining on what ought to be done about it, or not done about it, in the case of those who were indifferent to or openly took glee in the prospect of the sport's further descent. Of course relative to the stature it once had, baseball has been dying for my entire life, though as a corporate enterprise it continues to grow ever larger, more complicated and expensive and presumably richer than the version of it that existed in the 1970s, let alone the 1950s or 1920s. But as with so many other things in my lifetime, this comparatively massive growth in revenue, attendance, media coverage (which is exponentially more ubiquitous than anything that existed in 1979) is experienced as not adequate, and certainly not seen as appealing to the right people in the culture, on social media and so forth.

There is a common joke that baseball fans all think the game was most ideal in the state it was when they were 12 and that it can never improve from what it was at that time. There is probably some truth in this, as I cannot think of anything about the experience of a baseball game in 2018 that I like better than that of a game in 1982--even granting that the newer "retro" stadiums that have been built are generally more attractive than the concrete astroturf bowls that predominated in my youth, most of them (the new ones) have an odd sterility of their own and aren't able to move me much. But I was an old fogey even as a kid. My cherished season that I have a memory of was when I was nine, the rather dingy campaign of 1979 (this or 1977 is probably my favorite remembered year for football also), but I regretted having missed the pre-1969 era of the classic (and really old) stadiums, before the leagues broke into divisions and World Series games were played in the afternoon. But at least I got to grow up with a Wrigley Field that still didn't have lights and pitchers who still occasionally (and some who frequently) pitched nine inning games and 250-280 inning seasons. The more obvious changes--more divisions, more playoff teams, interleague play, the micromanaging of games and pitchers, the tyranny of advanced micro-statistics--you can imagine how much I care for all of that. And then because everyone nowadays is trained to be constantly identifying ways to improve/change/disrupt everything that exists everyone has endless ideas about what baseball should do to become more dynamic in a social media/tomorrow world. I assume eventually the game will adopt to this environment in a way more or less organic to what it already is, as it has been adapting to cultural and technological changes (for the most part) since the 1840s, slowly, awkwardly, and never forward-looking or revolutionary enough for the cool people, the one possible exception perhaps being the Babe Ruth-led home run explosion of the 20s when baseball was in step to some degree with the media and cultural developments of the Jazz Age.


As far as I can discern, the main complaint which has the commentariat, or at least the hipper part of it calling for change, is that baseball has no significant following among younger demographics, particularly among minorities, and especially among black Americans, who seem to be regarded by baseball people as the most necessary segment for restoring to the game any cultural dynamism it might hope to have. The sport's being full of Hispanic stars along all points of the racial spectrum and a considerably bigger Asian presence than any of the other major sports evidently doesn't translate into the kind of excitement, buzz, what have you that is sought. Any black American player who projects as a possible star and appears to be "cool" is inevitably described as 'what the sport desperately needs', and while I do agree that modern day baseball would be enhanced by some more good black players, the way that the desire for this is expressed is so unattractive and smacking of, well, desperation, that it is probably only further driving potential black players and fans away from baseball.




I think I have written before that in general I don't like the new generation of sports announcers. There is for me too much emphasis on analysis that is not interesting, or is not presented in an interesting way. I was a fan of Bill James's books back in the 80s and 90s because at the time they were a unique way of looking at statistics but also referred constantly to the traditional lore of baseball history and the common experiences of 1960s-70s fandom. Among today's announcers references to almost anything that happened in baseball before about the mid-60s, besides being rare, are usually treated as something of a joke, with no possible relevance or interest to the present. I don't know, if you watch snippets of games on Youtube from the 60s or 70s the announcers have a conversational style that is suited to the much bemoaned slow pace of the game (which is also not quite as slow as it is now) and that seems to have been lost. This may be a personal preference, but I like the idea of the radio or TV voice as a companion, and I don't desire a continuous barrage of marginally diverting information and minutiae. There are way too many ex-players now calling and commenting on games who are not particularly smart or funny and have not sufficiently weaned themselves from their identity as alpha male professional athletes to be able to cultivate an appealing conversational style the way that some of the announcers of my childhood like Richie Ashburn, Phil Rizzuto, Ralph Kiner, etc, were able to do (and they were Hall of Fame players!).

Perhaps this is true of all sports to some extent though especially in baseball the excitement of any single game, or instance within any single game, is largely dependent on its context related to many, many other games. Most of the celebrated moments in baseball history are related to records and milestones accumulated over the course of a long season, or even a two decade career, rare single game events such as  no-hitters or 4 home run games, playoff and World Series games of course that require some appreciation of the grind of the season and sometimes the course of many seasons to fully grasp the drama of. This is one reason among many that the end of the traditional pennant races with the realignment of the mid-90s and the introduction of 2nd place teams into the playoffs was so lamented by older fans, as great pennant races, which would usually occur only a handful of times in a decade, were one of the few sources of this kind of intense interest that is otherwise not a day in, day out feature of the sport. This is obviously all way too much to ask of the attention span of most modern young people.   


Normally I would worry about my children who do seem to like baseball being outliers in this regard within their own generation, though in New England the Red Sox remain pretty universally popular and my teenage son (I am told) may even have taken up following them as a means of connecting socially with the other boys in high school. The nine year old is actually quite a good player, and, somewhat uncharacteristic of our family, a very confident and unself-conscious one, so I doubt his interest in baseball will make him a social outcast.


The All Star Game itself, as a game, was predictably dull. The only one I can remember being any good was the 1979 game, which was pretty exciting. For one thing I think there were more stars back then. Even late in the game when the starters were out, guys like Pete Rose and Gary Carter were on the field, as well as a number of other players who were long established on good teams and far from anonymous. But I don't remember any other All-Star games that were particularly memorable.


My nine year old, for whom everything is still new, actually was excited about the home run derby and was disappointed when very few big name players took part in it. Perhaps it should not be a yearly event.


I will doubtless return to these themes at some point.