This past week two very opposite points of view about baseball appeared in The New York Times: Tyler Kepner's "A Season That Seemed Out of Reach Lands Safely in Our Gloves" and Matthew Walther's "Save Baseball by Nationalizing It;" the latter I think I think may have been intended as some sort of joke or parody, with its condescending conclusion: "Just as tourists who would never think of themselves as interested in art visit the National Gallery or the Metropolitan Museum because doing so seems suitably highbrow, perhaps one day they might go to baseball games out of some inchoate sense that it will be educational and enriching."
Baseball throughout its long history has had its ups and downs and has constantly been criticized as too slow, as Kepner writes, "every generation considers itself faster-paced than the last, so baseball, which makes you wait for the action, is an easy target." Certainly part of the problem is that baseball does not televise well and only being at the game can one see its many beauties (I prefer to listen on the radio, where I can see the game in my mind's eye) but Kepner intelligently points out that one important element of baseball is that it is played every day and that trends come and go -- from the juiced-up ball that came in after the Black Sox scandal in 1919 to the introduction of the designated hitter in the 70's to the dubious use of so-called "analytics" these days -- but the game is fundamentally the same; I even saw a squeeze bunt yesterday in the Mets/Nationals game and the stolen base seems to be returning!
Baseball, like ballet, has a beauty in its slowness as well as its action, its adagios and its allegros, and it is the complex relationship between the two that's a significant element in the beauty of each. As Kepner writes: "Baseball is easy to love, if you let it -- as easy as catching an apple off a branch at the start of a new season."
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