When I was young, my dad and I had a routine for every Yankee game we went to: Buy a program in the lobby, a hot dog in the 3rd inning and a bag of peanuts in the bottom of the 7th. We kept score faithfully, so long as the Yanks were winning, that is. There was a religious aspect to this ritual. The program was our prayer book; the hot dog and peanuts were how we took communion. The sharp cracks of lacquered pine, ash and oak, connecting perfectly with a hanging slider were wordless hymns to the baseball gods — and everybody said, “Amen.”
There are many reasons why I love both watching and playing baseball. Yes, one of the reasons is because baseball is a game fat guys can play. Besides football, baseball is the only sport where guys like C.C. Sabathia and Prince Fielder can be called athletes. The rest of the world requires their athletes to be able to run more than five minutes. No wonder we have an epidemic of childhood obesity, our two most beloved sports allow fat guys to play them. I can tell you, when I did play baseball, being hefty was an advantage. I could throw harder and hit farther. But surprisingly this is not the main reason I love baseball. My love of the game comes from a reverence I have for tradition, legends, mysticism and folk-tales. In the world of baseball you have all of these things.
Baseball transcends mere recreation. No other game contains things like the Curse of the Billy Goat or the Curse of the Bambino. We retell stories about Ruth, Buckner and Mantle like they’re prophets. There’s magic found in the walls of America’s ballparks, if you listen closely you can here the echoes of history reverberating from the bleachers to the mezzanine. Places like Fenway and Wrigley are temples where we prostrate to mythic figures like Ted Williams. These yeoman-like figures remind us of a time when players were rugged knights of the common man — they looked like blue-collar steel workers rather than overpaid kids. Reverence for America’s pastime is vanishing. Our generation is cursed with a disillusionment that has made us critical about many things in American culture. Baseball is one of them and I feel the need to defend my beloved sport.
When I hear people criticize baseball, it’s usually the same complaint: “Baseball is boring,” which I think is an unfair assessment. I don’t hear anyone criticizing football for being boring or slow paced, even though an average football game only has about 10 minutes of actual playing time. The rest of the time is taken up by instant replay, huddling and commercial breaks. Football is really an extended promotion for Doritos and Budweiser with occasional physical exertion. But it’s successful, which means that baseball has felt the pressure to change in order to keep our attention.
Baseball has attempted to compete with the NFL on its own terms. The constant instant replays and the strike zone watcher have been instituted on broadcasts as ways to compete with football’s official review and flashy animation. The NFL and the MLB are basically irritating grown ups jingling keys in a baby’s face — “look, look, shiny.” All they’re trying to do is capture our attention in the most patronizing way.
Baseball in its purest form isn’t about pandering to the lowest common denominator. The game is about ritual, tradition, and most of all, patience. There is a zen-like stoicism that comes with properly enjoying and playing the game, but this kind of attitude has been replaced with the need to have constant sensory stimulation. This is the real reason that baseball is beginning to lose favor in America — a perceived lack of stimulation in watching baseball. But this is an incorrect judgment, we’ve just forgotten how to listen and pay attention. If you shut out the roar of the outside world you’ll know what I’m talking about.
At the ballpark there is a plethora of tactile, auditory and visual sensations that call for a sophisticated mind to appreciate the subtle beauty of the game. They can be found in the sound the ball makes as it skids in the dirt and then pops into a first baseman’s glove when he makes a successful scoop, in boiled Sabrett hot dogs, in shivering bodies on October nights. Best of all, is that moment when a batter makes contact with a ball — real solid contact. A silence drowns out the world as fifty thousand people hold their breath; the silence swells and swells as everyone wills the ball to keep traveling. And then when the silence reaches its peak, it erupts, crashing over metal and dirt and grass and human bodies like an electric sea pounding on rocks. Baseball season is here. Get ready to worship.
Sandor Mark is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, and a weekly columnist for the Daily Free Press. He can be reached at smark@bu.edu.
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Thanks for the great article. I will definitely share this article whenever I hear someone say, “Baseball is boring.”