Talkin’ Baseball

I have a friend who hates baseball. He finds it to be slow, tedious, uneventful and interminable. He sees no poetry to the movement, feels no rhythm to the passing of time. Of course, that just makes the rest of us talk about the games in even greater detail. It drives him nuts.

I’ll concede that baseball can be boring, though I will never admit it to my friend. It can also be so intense, so nerve-wracking that if I’m watching on TV I might have to get up and leave the room. That’s part of the beauty of the game.

Unlike my friend, I’m one of those people who finds baseball endlessly fascinating. The distances between everything on the field are somehow perfect, causing plays at the plate, sacrifice bunts, double plays and stolen bases. If you are a nerd, you will never find another sport so drenched in statistics. If you’re more philosophical, you will see metaphors for life wherever you look.

Who created such a magnificent game? When I was young, we were told that it was invented by a Civil War general named Abner Doubleday, who was noted for firing the first shot at Fort Sumpter. Doubleday was from Cooperstown, NY, which is why the Baseball Hall of Fame is located there.

The thing is, that story is completely untrue and was likely made up by promoters in the early days of the professional teams. In fact, not only did Doubleday not invent baseball, there is no evidence he ever even attended a game.

As far as we know, there was no one person who was responsible for inventing baseball; it just evolved over time from several English and American bat and ball games, including cricket. It did indeed gain popularity during the Civil War, as soldiers found it to be an enjoyable way to pass the time between engagements.

After the war, it was carried home by the survivors who introduced it throughout the country. Within a few years, professional teams were organized, and by the turn of the century it was clearly America’s national sport.

At that point, the rules had been pretty well established, to the extent that a time traveler from 2026 would have easily understood everything that was going on in a game. In 1903, the first “World Series” was conducted between the winners of the two largest professional leagues.

Over the intervening years there has been a rule change here and there but nothing that threatened to tamper with the fundamental nature of baseball. Until now, that is.

Those of you who have read my column in the past may know that I am something of an old-school guy. In fact, that is something of an understatement, as I have been known to declare in print that the world had everything it really needed in 1939. My wife says I am nostalgic for things that happened before I was born.

A couple of readers have even politely suggested that I might hold the past in lower esteem if I had actually lived through it, that it was no day at the beach for most people. Ok, I get it, but I still think that baseball is one of those gifts from our forebears that is pretty great just the way it is.

Nevertheless, I have no objection to modern technology being incorporated into the game so long as it is done to improve the experience for the fans or the players. All too often it seems as though we digitize something just because we can, or because somebody can make a buck at it, or because it can hook up with an app on our phone.

For the past 30 years, as technology rolled through almost every occupation in America, sports was largely spared. People could choose to play electronic games, which have boomed in both popularity and sophistication, or they could choose to involve themselves with real sports, which were much the same as ever. Or, like most of the young people I know, they could choose “all of the above.”

In recent years that has begun to change, at least in professional sports, and the change is happening quickly. Mostly it has been a matter of officiating, as the proliferation of high-definition cameras and instantaneous replay have provided us with unbelievably detailed images of what just happened.

The fans love having plays reviewed, partly because they have always been convinced that the refs are either biased or blind. The main concern of team owners is that they don’t want to slow down the game, which would surely grind to a halt if you reviewed every play.

Most sports have adopted some sort of challenge system, whereby the coaches get a certain number of times they can call for a replay, usually retaining their challenge if a call is overturned. Baseball was one of those sports, until now.

Baseball has avoided the notion of a machine calling balls and strikes because it was such a vital part of the game and really more of an art than a science. Even arguments with the umpire seemed to be immersed in the whole iconography of the sport.

But time marches on, and the challenge system worked well on other baseball plays, so this year they rolled out a challenge system in the major leagues for balls and strikes. Basically, each team gets two challenges which are replaced if the umpire’s call is overturned. An objection can be made by the pitcher, catcher or batter.

So far, the system has proven to be quite popular with everyone and has not caused the games to run longer. The image just pops up on the jumbotron or your screen at home, and everybody moves on. Ironically, that tells me that the system will not last very long.

Tennis faced a similar situation a couple years back. Like baseball, it had asked umpires to call a 3-inch ball moving 100 miles per hour to within a 1-inch tolerance, several hundred times in succession.

So tennis set up a challenge system, and, like baseball, it worked better than expected. It worked so well, in fact, that it wasn’t long before people started asking, “Why not just let the machine call everything?”

So that’s what they did, and it turned out that nobody missed the challenge system any more than they had the human officials. I think baseball will go the same way. It’s not that the machine is perfect (it’s not), but it’s better than people, far more consistent and completely unbiased.

Even old-school guys like me can get behind that type of improvement, and I feel the same way about old schools. Prove to me that there is no value to books printed on paper, cursive handwriting and face-to-face instruction, and I’m willing to let them go.

Otherwise, I like things the way they were.