There is something strange and mystic about the spring wind.  No one I know of can really escape from it, the odd fuzzy feeling which seems to creep into our heads as the weather grows warmer, turning our classes into endless whirls of cinder block walls and nonsense.  There is an old saying about spring and a young man’s fancy, but I’m pretty sure that a much more universal statement would be safe. Our minds seem to slow down and dream more when winter becomes spring. In my experience, this is a natural change and what could be better for the dreamy spring mind than the slowest and most spring related of the major professional sports: baseball.

Reader: Oh crud he’s going to talk about baseball…  Who needs Unisom, where are my pillows?

I hear you.  I understand, baseball isn’t for everybody… the same way breathable air isn’t for everyone… no, I really do understand.  Baseball is slow and requires a lot of personal investment, but because of Cairn’s recent home opener I think it’s appropriate to talk about the sport that I love and at least make a case about why you should care about it.

Reader: Okay fine, I just chugged 35 fluid liters of Mountain Dew and I don’t feel like working on the Triune God reading.

Neat.  Let’s talk about baseball.  Whether or not it was invented by General Abner Doubleday, bank teller Alexander Lovejoy Cartwright, or the British Empire, baseball enjoys a long pedigree in America, stretching from the mid 1800s up through the present, its own eras moving in time with the stream of American history, growing up with the nation as it were, following our transformation from a pastoral nation at war with itself, through the turn of two centuries, two world wars, vietnam, 9-11, and forward into the internet age with the growth of advanced statistics analysis.

Reader: Huh, fancy sentence.  I still don’t care.

Baseball is unique.  It’s the only sport besides basketball where every player on the team both plays defense and tries to score on offense.  It’s one of the rare sports where skill matters more than athletic ability. It’s the only sport where failing seven out of ten times makes you one of the greatest players of all time.  If an NFL quarterback misses 70% of their throws, they’re out of the league. If a golfer misses 70% of their putts, they aren’t Arnold Palmer, they’re probably your great uncle Sherman playing Wii golf for the first time. Ted Williams had the greatest season in modern baseball when he had a batting average over .400, which is still failing 60% of the time (not including his walk rate which actually pushed him into the 50% area, but that’s beside the point). Hitting a baseball consistently is considered by many sports people to be the hardest athletic challenge to overcome.

For a game with relatively simple rules, compared to the obscure penalty rulings of football and the laundry list of fouls in hockey, people often complain about baseball’s complex subtlety.

Reader: Wait, you were talking, huh, okay… baseball is hard, but no one does anything.  It’s just rich people standing around!

Funny you should mention that.  This is a complaint I don’t really understand, but hear quite often.  Almost no one is ever doing nothing. The pitcher is always pitching when on the field, the catcher is always catching, the batter is always in the box, even if its a strikeout, the pitcher did something, if a ball is in play, something has happened.  Consider football. The amount of time people spend just standing around between plays and during commercial timeouts in football is absurd. A baseball game is constant, subtle motion interrupted by natural transitions. Football is the real sport rich people standing around interrupted by extreme violence, save for a brawl at the Masters, but that’s a fringe case at best.  Or soccer, I love soccer, I used to play soccer pretty well, but I can’t stand watching it for this same reason. There is a clock, which brings with it plenty of rubbish time when passes are made, balls are dribbled, but nothing actually meaningful to the game happens. This is the world’s most popular sport? I mean it’s simple and tons of fun to play, but it’s hell to watch.  In baseball, there is no clock, but there are only 27 outs for each time, to use video game terms 27 lives, each of those 27 outs only gets three strikes to get on base before wasting an out. This means that there is no rubbish time, you can’t run out the clock, you have to win and every movement, every motion, every pitch, every swing on the field matters.  Every pitch in every context has a deep and ever-changing strategy to it.

Reader: More fancy talk.  Okay, so what you’re saying is that not being bored about baseball means that I need to look at it differently than football, something about subtlety and nuance.

Precisely!  It used to be called “the thinking man’s sport” for a reason, it involves a lot of strategy and has the most in-depth statistical analysis of any sport, perhaps a bit too much for its own good…  I mean I don’t understand how to calculate BABIP or DWAR, and I vaguely get what the represent. Like many older fans, I am mystified by the sport’s new, and absurd, focus on stats that few people understand, but getting a vague idea of these new forms of analysis can actually help get a much better idea of how the game works on a scientific level, though its main appeal is still personal and timeless.  

Reader:  Maybe it’s the Mountain Dew talking but you seem to be making a little bit of sense, stranger… but I’m not really a sports person, what else does baseball have to offer?

Plenty!  Like I said, baseball has the strongest and most intimately American pedigree of the major professional sports, while still maintaining a deep international presence in places like Japan, Cuba, South Korea, Taiwan, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic.  In my opinion it also has the richest literary tradition: The Natural, Field of Dreams, the Boys of Summer, The Glory of Their Times, the Bronx Zoo, basically anything by W.P. Kinsella, the work of Bill James, and countless others.  This adds to the general sense of poetry that surrounds the game.  It is both a game of intense singularity, where one player bats, one player pitches, but also a game of team efforts, in which every member of the team is forced to play both defense and offense as a complete unit which cannot be carried by one great player.  Baseball has no clock, relying on the ability and actions of the players to move the game forward towards its conclusion, rather than the artificial limit of time. This game offers us a social experience, a game meant to be watched in an afternoon, a game which slows you down to its pace.  In a world that is growing faster and faster with the fabulous scourge of digital technology, we all seem to be looking for ways to slow down and relax. Why not take advantage of an easily accessible multi-billion dollar, multi-national industry which can offer this?

Reader:  I like relaxing!  I like pastimes that can help grow my brain!  I like books! How do I get started?

I’m glad you asked.  Since you go to Cairn, why not check out one of their home games, support the team, and try and figure out what’s going on.  I also recommend reading baseball for dummies, seriously. The one with hall of fame second baseman Joe Morgan throwing his weight around has some ridiculous points, but is a great gateway into understanding baseball.  If you already have a cursory knowledge of baseball and want a better understanding of its finer points, I would recommend listening to sports radio or checking MLB.com or its strange offshoot Cut 4 for human interest stories.  If you want to get an idea of advanced statistical analysis, but also gather an idea for the history of the game and get an individual statistical and legacy analysis for almost 1,000 players, Ken Burn’s wonderful documentary Baseball has been known to reduce me to tears and should be watched by everyone who has access to a color television.

Finally, my girlfriend, also a baseball fan summed it up best:  If you could sit through the travesty that was the last Superbowl, interrupted by the greater travesty that was this past year’s halftime show… you can sit through a professional baseball game which will be far more interesting and have way less Adam Levine running around dressed like the carpet of the Tucson Holiday Inn!