On Sports by Jay Caspian Kang

"Was the great Hollywood baseball movie killed by HD broadcasts or by our inability to connect with the players as characters anymore?" asks Kang in the New York Times Magazine today.  There are several things wrong with the question itself:  there are almost no great baseball movies (baseball being too immediate), baseball has never been effectively broadcast on TV (though I agree it is worse than ever, as I documented in my Oct. 9, 2013 post) and one can still connect with at least some of the players as flawed human beings, just like the rest of us.

The only baseball movie I would call even good is Frank Tashlin's (writer) and Lloyd Bacon's (director) 1950 film Kill the Umpire, in which William Bendix gets fired from jobs because he is always sneaking out to baseball games (they were played mostly during the day then!) and his family finally persuades him to go to umpiring school, the film emphasizing the importance of the rules in the game.  I don't miss the clichés of scrappy underdogs that Kang thinks are so important to baseball movies.  Meanwhile he complains about HD today while at the same time complaining about how one can't see Sandy Koufax's face when he pitched! 

The beauty of baseball has not changed.  I have two suggestions for Kang:  stop watching baseball on TV, with its "informational clutter" and its ignorant announcers talking about their dinner plans, and listen on the radio, where there is more "room left for the imagination."  I would also suggest getting out to live games; if a major league game is too expensive there are minor league teams in many areas of the country (especially New York!) where one can enjoy the beauty of the game undisturbed by close-ups and distorting telephoto lenses and where underpaid scrappy players are trying hard to make it to the majors. Informed announcers, such as Vin Scully, with their appreciation of the beauty of the game, will probably not be coming back and there is too much money for the televised game to return to two cameras that show the entire field. Baseball has survived the steroid era with its beauty mostly undisturbed, even if that beauty is mostly absent in televised games.