What happened? Pro football, mostly. Certainly, football more closely matches Mark Twain’s description of thrilling competition.
It’s not easy to reinvent a sport, or a religion (where numbers are also down, except, as you may have read, among Mormons and Muslims). Their value is deeply rooted in belief systems, legacy and traditions. Clearly, building a new church or a new ball field suggests modernism and causes a bump, but neither solves the problem. Digital distribution of Rosh Hashanah services and every local baseball game will get you only so far. Eventually, the “what happened to us?” question must be answered.
Violence is the new American Way (as a rule, prime time dramas feature at least one violent act, a corpse, and a conversation in a morgue).
Football benefits from simulated (and, on occasion, actual) violence. Baseball is thoughtful, careful, complex, complicated, and not often violent game. Individual contributions and team competition elegantly balanced.
Unfortunately (for baseball, fortunately for many of us), baseball contains less action, fewer pile-ons. We like action. Maybe baseball players should run all of the time, and knock one another down? Maybe priests and school teachers should rap their lessons. Maybe every sport has its day.
Seems unlikely. But how do you reinvent a part of America? How do you reinvent schools, or church, or baseball, or cars, or suburbs? The 21st century is such a strange place, particularly in “we used to be king of the world” America.
So where do we start? (How do we get to first base?) Long ago in the America of Mark Twain, we did things bottoms-up: town hall meetings, neighbors helping neighbors. Now, we do things top down (this being the basis of CBS’s “Undercover Boss,” where gap between boss and working stiff is vast). Traveling to and from the U.S. from other countries, it’s striking to see just how big the houses, the corporations, the school systems, the baseball leagues, the salaries have become. Big government, now shut down, in part, because of its own enormity. Big generates its own expectations and ecosystems. Big forces a universal top-down approach to problem-solving.
Small struggles to survive. We underfund small because big is more powerful. We underfund simple because the neighborhood playground lacks a business plan. We fix the interstate (because its traffic numbers are, you know, big), but the local street’s potholes remain, and there aren’t enough cops on the local beats. We ignore our local newspapers, and local news, because we’ve been led to believe that what happens in big Washington is more important than what happens in small Indianapolis. We don’t bother to vote, in part, because elections are, by and large, boring. Small, for the most part, and boring.
So? Baseball? Yeah, it’s a slower game than baseball, and no, it doesn’t attract the big celebrities like basketball or football does. Baseball competitive without the rough contact. It’s a game of numbers where a smart guy like Billy Beane can, in the words of Wikipedia, do well because of “the team’s analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite Oakland’s disadvantaged revenue situation.” The joy of baseball is local, and small, even if the business of baseball is big. Perhaps the same could be said of high school football, where community is illuminated by the Friday night lights.
If the point of baseball is a pleasant sunny afternoon, not too far from home, scheduled so that I can grab a few games a year and, perhaps, revisit one of the 19th century’s better inventions, that’s going to be okay for a while, at least for me. Better, maybe, than calling a championship a “World Series” while failing to invite all but one other country to participate in the big competition.
Still, a pleasant afternoon in Status Quo Stadium won’t sustain baseball, not in the long-term. Maybe we’re willing to watch baseball go the way of Kodachrome, bookstores and schoolteachers (oh, sorry, that one doesn’t happen until 2027), that’s fine, I guess. But I sure want to see the game back up on its feet, not through easy gimmicks, but because it lives up to Yogi’s quote about being ninety percent mental and the other half physical.
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