Baseball was a timeless paradise
I haven't yet seen any baseball games this season — I need to spend more time hanging out in saloons with TV screens above the bar — but from what I read in the sports pages it appears the new rules have livened up and speeded up the game. The pitch clock, bigger bases, shift limits and other postmodern innovations have made for more hitting and baserunning and scoring, more offensive resistance to overpowering pitchers. Supposedly this is good for business as the fans in the stands have shrunken attention spans.
But will baseball ever be fast enough to compete with basketball, or brutally violent enough to give football a run for its blood money? Money is of course the operative word as big-league sports are big business, and with all the seasons now overlapping and consumers' choices multiplying — both live competitions and infinite virtual and video options — poor baseball, no longer the national pastime, must adapt to the times or be left behind, leaving its billionaire owners to lose their shirts. It costs a fortune to run a Major League Baseball team, and most executives aren't in it just for the fun.
The millionaire players, too, need butts in the seats and eyes on the screens to pay for the pleasure of watching their skills on the field. So whatever it takes to increase their market share is what must be done to pay their salaries and buy homes for their mothers back wherever they came from. The high-tech stadiums and expensive tickets and advertising deals are all part of the commercial metabolism of the game, and the kinds of sacrifices and compromises one must make in almost any profession.
I guess I was lucky to be introduced to baseball in an earlier, simpler, slower time when nobody was in quite as much of a hurry. Part of baseball's appeal was in its timelessness, its green Edenic pastures in urban settings creating an illusion of bucolic tranquility even as the crowds roared and beers were spilled and hot dogs chomped in the bleachers. For spectators, a ballgame was a break from the daily grind — and the longer the break the better. Home runs were exciting (now the hotter, thinner air of climate change is lifting more of them over the fences) but as a fan I've always found the great defensive plays more thrilling and the extra-base hits inside the park far more engaging to watch than some slugger knocking the ball a mile and trotting around the bases. (Like the three-point shot in basketball, the homer is overrated.)
Something of a banjo hitter myself during my sevenyear career in organized baseball — after PONY League the increasing size and speed and power of my peers forced me into retirement — my understanding of the game and decent defensive skills made me a competitive player despite my physical limitations. So for most of those years baseball was for me my most blissful activity. The slowness of the sport and its demand for quick thinking as well as quick hands and feet were part of its joy. (As Yogi Berra famously said, 90% of the game is mental; the other half is physical.)
Soccer, another game smaller-size people can play competitively, was not yet so popular, so I put my best athletic energies into baseball, and I still feel a deep connection with its essentials and fundamentals, which don't change despite whatever upgrades and updates and accelerants the game must endure to keep up with these busy times.
But its eternal qualities are what keep baseball, no less than poetry, a primal part of my personal mythos. “I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass,” wrote our Homer, the greatsouled Walt Whitman, who I imagine loafing at leisure in some immortal outfield composing an ode to heroic athletes “no less to me than gods of the antique wars.” I will linger with Walt as long as I can in that lost paradise.