The Greatest Game of Them All

I'm going the sports route here today. Even if you're not a sports fan, please continue reading, because it's a sports piece that's not a sports piece, you know? It's kind of about life in a microcosm, savvy?

To start, I'm sure you've heard by now, but my Saints won the Super Bowl. That still hasn't sunk in for me, really. It's just unreal, and no team deserved a Vince Lombardi trophy more. My team, that being my favorite team, a team beloved by me (that list really is restricted to the Saints in football and the Reds, of course, in baseball), had not won a world championship in my conscious memory. That was the Saints' first in their 43-year existence, and the Reds last World Series victory was in 1990, when I was just six and only just becoming aware of baseball, and I certainly had no emotional investment in the ballclub at the time. And what an opportune time to discuss that one thing that I love above anyone or anything else, save for Audrey.

With the conclusion of the football season, there is a brief week or two during which I feel vaguely lost, but that feeling is fleeting. I like football, and I enjoy my football league, the friendly arguments and the competitiveness, but I don't live and die with the game, even the Saints. Baseball is a whole other matter. Many who will read this know of my great love of baseball, though perhaps you don't know what about the game is so compelling to me. As spring training is set to begin once again next week, I feel that this is an apropos time to explore that, and I will attempt to do so in at least a vaguely poetic manner for once.

Baseball is a game marked by its deliberate pace. The other major sports in the United States, football, basketball, hockey, all are marked their near-perpetual action, or at least intense action in short bursts. Baseball has its bursts of activity as well--a hustling triple into the corner, an outfielder making a diving catch, a collision on a play at the plate. Yet baseball is known as a slow-paced game. This is in part due to the absence of a clock; the game is not timed, it could go on forever. Major League Baseball has made recent attempts to quicken the pace of the game due to a feeling that fans lack the patience for a game that is not only deliberate but also lengthy. How ironic that a game long known as America's pastime is now too slow for the average American, who now needs constant and immediate stimulation.

To someone like me, however, baseball is paced just right. It is leisurely in places, yes, but this is by design. I know that nobody reads books anymore, but a baseball game is like a good book. If you crammed all the action together, it would only be twenty pages long and would be far less interesting for it. Instead, a good book is, say, three hundred pages for the same reason that a baseball game lasts for three hours rather than twenty minutes. Much of the early and middle parts of both the book and the game are creating a storyline, developing central characters, all the while slowly building the suspense towards what will (hopefully) be an exciting climax. The suspense lies in the inaction of a baseball game. Since there isn't something happening at all times during a game, you have a chance to sit and absorb the situation periodically, to ponder what might happen next, to play out all possible strategies and scenarios in your mind before they take place on the field itself. To me, constant action is not desirable in a game. Constant stimulation is a shock to the senses; it is too much to absorb all at once.

There are few ways in which I could be called a traditionalist. For the most part, my personality lends itself to progressiveness. Baseball, however, is one thing that I believe is in need of very little change in terms of the game on the field. Yes, salaries are out of control, the draft needs revamping, and there is simply nothing in place that prevents teams like the Yankees and Red Sox from outspending any other team for the services of the best free agents every off-season. The game itself, though, has remained remarkably intact over the last century or so. We need to do away with this ridiculous designated hitter experiment. It served its initial purpose, but it has become vestigial. It eliminates strategy, and there is plenty of offense in the game without it. I'm not a big fan of instant replay either. It largely serves to remove a human element from the game in terms of the officiating. Replaying calls to determine their accuracy is not the way to handle poor umpiring. The better way is to reward the umpires with the lowest percentages of missed calls with higher wages.

Aside from these two minor qualms, I wouldn't change a thing about the game I love. I have thoughts about a great many other things pertaining to baseball, but the things that have been a part of the game since before my grandparents were born are the things that so appeal to me: the way a baseball fits perfectly in your hand, the bit of dust you can't help but get on your hands standing in the infield that would drive me crazy anywhere else but somehow I can't get enough of on the diamond, the slight smell of peanuts throughout the ballpark, the sound of the bat (a wood one, of course, none of that aluminum for me) as it connects with the ball, and then the dull thud of the ball as it lands in the outfield grass and rolls towards the wall, the brief anticipation as you wonder if the hitter will settle for a double, or if he will round second and try for three, the determination evident on his face as he digs for that extra base, the cloud of dust as he dives into third...So many other things, all of those things which embody the very essence of the greatest game of them all.