Opening Day

As Opening Day starts tomorrow, my thoughts will naturally shift nearly full-time to baseball.  I think baseball is the best game, and it's unfortunate that expressing this sentiment makes people think you are from that Billy Crystal/Bob Costas generation that grew up in the '50s and the '60s; you know, those men who wax poetic about Mickey Mantle, who would have sold their own mothers into slavery just to get a pat on the back from the Mick.  No, I was born in 1983, and though football has been and continues to be the more popular sport among people of my generation, it has not captured my imagination in quite the same way that baseball has (watch someone criticize baseball for "capturing" something).

I must say that football is an excellent game, and I watch as much of it as I can.  The NFL is clearly much better run than Major League Baseball, but when speaking of sports, a distinction must be made between the sports and the leagues that organize them.  For instance, a common criticism of baseball is that season is too long, whereas that of football is 16 games long.  "Each football game means so much more than a baseball game."  That's true, because the season is so much shorter!  But there's nothing about a game football itself that lends itself to higher drama than a baseball game.  Wouldn't it be silly to say that a football game is "more meaningful" than a baseball game?  People who argue that football games mean more than baseball games REALLY mean that NFL games are meaningful than MLB games.

My argument here is that, in a vacuum with no leagues, baseball is the most interesting sport.  More than any other sport, it allows the audience to play along.  For fans both casual and hardcore, watching a baseball game is an interactive engagement;  keeping a scorecard or running through a manager's options in your head--against a tough lefty reliever, should the team keep its light hitting righty bat (who is a major defensive asset) in the game, or should he insert his powerful lefty hitter, etc, etc--allow the audience to use their heads and really participate during a game.  By contrast, basketball and football are more passive forms of entertainment.  They're often flashier, but the crowd doesn't have to do as much thinking.  Not to take away from the strategic element of those sports, but the rule in baseball that a player is no longer available once removed from the game makes each managerial decision of the utmost importance.  And if you take a look at the modern history of sports in America, most of the great controversies have belonged to baseball.

An acquaintance of mine, who is a big fan of basketball and hockey, once made the following pithy remark to me about baseball: "How can you like a game that stops?"  I didn't realize what my response should have been until some years later.  I should have said, "What is it about perpetual motion that gives a game a higher quality?"  His line of thinking, of course, was that basketball and hockey are superior sports because the players typically move faster and more frequently.  We might as well just televise the inside of pinball machines, if that is the case.  What gives baseball is charm is the space in between pitches, in between the action, to allow the audience time to play along and catch their breath and to think about the last pitch and prepare for the next pitch and all its possible outcomes.  The basis of a Jerry Seinfeld comedy bit is that he prefers the spaces "in-between life" to life itself.  Baseball is a sport in which there is time set aside for that "in-between life."