Every year I look forward to the return of baseball, the one spectator sport I care about, and every year I feel both positive anticipation and dread. This year the dread is not that the Yankees have done too much to win and the Mets have done too little --that's common enough -- but the institution of replays to resolve disputes on safe and out calls. From the little I watch baseball on TV these days (see my posts from last year on why that is) I know that, though announcers love to contradict umpires and say "he was clearly out (or safe)" the replays are seldom, if ever, clear enough to make the call better than the well-trained umpire who is on top of the play; to use replays is just adding more, not less, subjectivity. Why don't we just eliminate umpires completely and have balls and strikes, as well as force-outs and tag-outs, totally determined by mechanical replays? I see the Staten Island Yankees and the Brooklyn Cyclones play more often than the Mets or the Yankees and I am always impressed by how effectively the two umpires cover the games.
I will miss Ralph Kiner, who always had a good story to tell. One of my favorites involves Yogi Berra getting a single and then being given the sign from the first-base coach that the next pitch to the following batter will be a hit-and-run. But Yogi doesn't run and fortunately the batter swings and misses. So the coach gives him the same sign for the next pitch and gets the return sign from Yogi that he knows what to do. On the next pitch Yogi again does not run and the batter hits into a double play. The coach is furious and calls Yogi over: "did you see me give you the hit-and-run sign on that pitch?" "yeah," says Yogi. "Did you see me give you the same sign on the previous pitch?" "yeah," says Yogi. "Then why in hell didn't you run?" says the coach and Yogi replies "because I forgot."
The problem I have telling this story is that most people, including ardent baseball fans, these days do not know what a hit-and-run play is (for those who don't: the runner on first runs on the pitch and the fielding team, thinking steal, moves to cover second and the batter hits it into the area vacated by the fielder moving to cover second base; at worst the double play is avoided). I feel condescending but in order for people to understand this story I have to ask them first if they know what the hit-and-run play is. The most common answer is "sure, you hit the ball and then you run." I also like to quote Casey Stengel on Choo Choo Coleman: "the fastest catcher I ever saw going after passed balls", though fewer and fewer people seem to know what a passed ball is (as Casey often said, you can look it up).
As sabermetrics (I term I don't care for) comes up with more and more obscure statistics (WHIP and WARP, for instance) I find that there are still many people who consider themselves fans who have no idea what slugging percentage or earned-run-average is (or even what the difference between an earned run and an unearned run is). To some extent I blame the fans themselves -- if one does not understand the subtleties of the game one is more likely to just root for home runs, which everyone seems to understand -- but also the announcers, who seldom make any effort to explain earned runs or the infield fly rule, probably because they don't understand the rules themselves (I have heard more than one announcer call a run unearned long before the inning is over and the determination can be accurately made). Things in baseball do change, though, which is one reason I continue to follow it. When I was a kid they said Ty Cobb's stolen base records would never be broken and then along came Maury Wills, Lou Brock and Ricky Henderson. Now Joe Morgan says base-stealing is again a lost art.
Phillip Lopate wrote an essay: Why I Remain a Baseball Fan (collected in Portrait Inside My Head, Free Press,2013) in which he wrote that he clings to baseball because of "its ability to generate narrative" and that "without knowing the individual players as a cast of characters, it is a pretty dull, abstract ballet." That's a valid point of view and I looked at baseball that way once. But now I find it a beautiful ballet, sometimes the most beautiful when nothing seems to be happening. I had a friend from England who went to his first baseball game at Shea Stadium in the 80's and knew nothing about the game. He saw somebody walk up to the plate and then sit down and then two more people did the same thing quickly. As far as he could tell nothing had happened but the crowd was going wild and he couldn't understand why. "Are you crazy?," the friend who took him to the game said, "Dwight Gooden just struck out the side on nine pitches!" Of course to appreciate the balletic beauty of the game one has to be there in person, to see everything from the coordinated movements of all the players to the gorgeous arc of the white ball against the blue sky. Fortunately one can see that in Staten Island and Brooklyn, maybe even in better (and certainly cheaper) seats than in the Bronx or Queens.
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