6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: National Pastime, Still

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Friday, February 13, 2004

National Pastime, Still

Let's all get up and dance to a song
That was a hit before your mother was born.
Though she was born a long, long time ago
Your mother should know
Your mother should know
-- Lennon/McCartney

The offseason grows late and weary and dull, big trades and free agency moves finished or nearly so. Columnists snipe and belabor obvious points about football's mindshare and market share. Maybe we don't care so much, true. Who could imagine, now, a program like that old 50s show where they paid players to clout homers and make stupid gabble betwixt jacks? Is television over-fond of football's carnage? Well, let it be. The smack and thump of fibula and rib, the sounds of careers being ended daily -- this is football's toll. Why I love baseball:

Baseball is kind to its practitioners. Great players can have 20-year careers. The merely adequate -- and lucky -- can have 25-year careers. Show me a football player who's been in the game for even five years and I'll show you a grizzled veteran.
Baseball has lots of games. Because many games can be played without annihilating the players, many games are played. And, at the end of 162, we have a good feel for who won and why. We also have a feel for who the best team is. Could the NFL even survive a three-round playoff? Hardly.
Baseball's numbers inform. Baseball gives us things to count, as Bill James observed, and we've been counting them for a long, long time. We know things. We can compare the greats of other eras, and have that comparison mean something.
Baseball's languid pace demands thought. As my correspondant Sarah Bunting over at Tomato Nation once wrote, " if you think baseball is boring, either you don't understand the game, at all, or you need to learn to shut up and sit still for a few hours, or both." Maybe others find this one of baseball's failings, but for me, it's the game's strategy I find alluring.
Baseball's pace lets its fans relax. In a world overcharged with instant and pervasive communications, and the market's hot breath at everyone's back, isn't nine -- or however many -- innings refreshing? To just be at the ballpark, languid and full of beer in late summer's sweaty afternoon, or salt peanutty and bundled in early April's night games, forgetting the abrasive day -- that's baseball. Sure, I've been at extra inning games where I've wished I could ask the ump to throw a couple strikes to our pitcher so's we can get this thing over with -- but it's rare.
Baseball's postseason is played in front of home crowds, not the Superbowl's nosebleed prices in some city far away from the fans who supported the team. I've been to a World Series game. Name me a half-dozen football fans of your acquaintance who attended a Superbowl.