"It's been a blah baseball year almost everywhere," says Roger Angell in the Sept. 8 The New Yorker, in a lovely tribute to Derek Jeter. Certainly one of the reasons for that is the absence of Angell's regular essays on baseball, essays that started appearing in The New Yorker in 1962 under editor William Shawn. Fortunately most of those essays have been collected in books; now that Angell is 94 there probably won't be too many more.
One of the reasons for the blah baseball year is what Angell calls "that tacky tacked-on new second wild-card spot in the post-season." This additional play-off spot is another attack on the quotidian pleasures of the beauty of baseball, a game played every day, each game unique, but each game mattering less now in the haste to win a play-off spot. The addition this year of appealing umpire calls and subjecting them to second-guessing via replays is not only an interference with the umpires' authority and a slowing down of the game, it is also just another example of the dominance of television, which is so busy showing ads, replays and shots of the dugouts and the fans that the game and its strategies are neglected.
Fortunately there is still some good baseball writing going on. This is particularly true at The New York Times, where there are more long and thoughtful pieces appearing these days when the scores are available from many sources. Two days ago Tyler Kepner wrote an intelligent piece about pitching coach Dave Wallace and this past Sunday there was a delightful and insightful piece by Barry Bearak about the Ricketts family, the new owners of the Chicago Cubs, and their business and existential troubles:
As Tom Ricketts roams the grandstands, he is often approached by someone elderly who asks a question with genuine urgency: Will the Cubs win the World Series before I die?
He is so accustomed to this query he responds with a comic's sense of timing: "Are you taking good care of yourself? Do you eat right? Are you getting your exercise?"
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