The Magic of Baseball Is Back

Well, sort-of back... But putting in a pitch clock has made a massive difference.

I did not pay for these seats, I just snuck here after a few beers.

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The transition of America’s pastime from baseball to football is an apt metaphor for the corruption of the American soul. Baseball is boring, but it is graceful and romantic. The undeniable clutchness of David Ortiz has made many opposing teams fear an impending walk-off hit, and it is one of the glories of baseball that one player can bomb a home run and change the fate of the game. Football, instead, is lethargic and brutal; an average NFL game has the queasy pacing of rush-hour traffic, the jarring violence of a car crash, and the fuddy legalism of traffic court, and it somehow manages to be three hours long and littered with cornball State Farm commercials. This strange, violent, astonishing game turns superhuman specimens into a bundle of torn ligaments with apple sauce brains, and any chance for heroism can be cut short by another behemoth literally pummeling you to the ground. The moral ambiguity of enjoying the NFL in no way deters me from tuning into Red Zone every Sunday or taking advantage of my dad’s Patriots season tickets, because I enjoy football against or despite my better political and aesthetic judgment.

The apex of my baseball fandom lasted throughout my adolescent years spent in suburban Connecticut rooting for the Red Sox in the early aughts. My interest in the sport waned as the arbitrage-obsessed Moneyball era unleashed a smug and unlovable fetish for optimization and efficiency that spread across the MLB like an ice sheet. This sabermetrics-humping has been somewhat of a destructive force that has both flattened the fanciful aesthetic experience of the game and squeezed some essential unpredictability from it. There was something nauseating about the sign-stealing scandal that embroiled the scowling McKinseyfied Astros, mostly because it involved the same kind of hunches and tweaks and deft ratfucking as the Loblaws bread price-fixing graft that was also the outcome of some fleece-vested quants blankly espousing the power of big data.

The stodgy pundits covering baseball seem beholden to the game’s encrusted lore and biases, like the extremely dusty curmudgeons drumming up the energy to fume about bat flips. It didn’t help matters that postseason games were exceeding three-and-a-half hours of average length, and an outlandish example came last postseason with the Houston Astros’ 1-0 Division Series clincher over the Seattle Mariners that lasted six hours and 22 minutes over 18 innings. So in a wan attempt to rid the game of its distinctive boomer vibe, the people in charge of Major League Baseball convened to mess with the aerodynamics of baseballs that uniquely and deliriously warped home run totals, and followed up with a series of other sourly whimsical micro-tweaks.

These subtle nudges never really compensated for the soft collusion that has undermined the basic good-faith assumption underlying baseball’s churn—that teams will make some effort to field a competitive roster. The last few sluggish, peevy offseasons have demonstrated that Major League Baseball’s hothouse economy is not any more logical or predictable than our broader one, but then, any marketplace that includes the New York Mets is by definition not a rational one. Baseball’s new and selective austerity even affected stars like Bryce Harper and Manny Machado and has wrecked the free agent marketplace out of greed and spite. This tends to reflect the minor-key depravities and general cynicism and self-dealing of American capitalism circa now, if only because the same crew of pink and jarringly damp finance swells sit atop both.

When winning is no longer a priority, a number of things slip wildly out of joint. With a number of front offices pursuing bespoke ownership-directed courses of idiocy, roughly 20% of teams are stuck in a perpetual botched tank job or a rebuild that operates along a queasily open-ended timeline. There are certain franchises that operate as ad hoc men’s bible study groups or failing family businesses or corny real-estate scams or  buckraking potemkin franchises or gilded fidget spinners for mediocre local tyrants or fractious country clubs or an acidly satirical anti-capitalist art installation called The Florida Marlins. Baseball teams bungle things in weird ways that reflect the weirdness of their owners because they are subject to the same risks as anything else owned by tacky and shortsighted rich people.

While some front offices are held hostage by owners who are either actively incompetent or insufficiently committed, it is almost endearing to watch small-market teams take advantage of these inefficiencies and construct a quality roster almost entirely out of imperfect or remaindered players. A team like the Rays build and regularly rebuild their roster by betting that they understand the players they acquire from their previous employers and then working to make that assessment correct and doing it all over again. The Milwaukee Brewers draft and develop players that become valuable contributors, identify free agent values that other organizations deemed used-up or useless, spin their busted starter prospects into component parts of a deep and affordable bullpen staff, and get the most out of unidimensional position players by featuring them as complementary parts in ways that flatter that dimension only. It is worth noting that “small-market team” is in practice mostly a euphemism for “team that is vigorous at exploiting the inequalities built into the league’s collective bargaining agreement.” There is no small grossness inherent to pulling for a team to more effectively get over on their players, but it beats rooting for the Yankees.

All of these dynamics have conspired to produce roughly two decades of a stale and stagnant product. The most interesting thing to come out of baseball in the 2010s was Chris Christie’s transition from doomed and rather embarrassing presential campaign to co-hosting an episode at local New York sports flagship station WFAN; at the time, his approval rating in New Jersey was pegged at 15%, and regular callers snuck past the producers and taunted him for being “a bum” and a “fat ass” and then he said “look at the big tough guy on the phone,” or something like that, and this went back and forth for a few hours. Christie seemed to know his stuff and talked about it with some passion and normalcy, even if he still sounded like a blowhard uncle at a wedding reception who begins every sentence with “Listen.” He did not get the gig. Later that year, he was spotted at Miller Park yelling at a Cubs fan while cradling a pile of nachos.

This past offseason, the MLB finally caved to the jittery demands of modern attention deficit disorders and implemented a pitch clock that has shaved a half hour off of average game length and increased the total of runs scored. At the very least, the MLB is no longer in the same universe of dysfunction as the previous seasons of sucking around soul-rendering banality. So I have spent the summer maintaining a pace of attending one Blue Jays game a month, mainly because sitting first or third base side in the 100s section is one of the few remaining reasonably priced recreational activities in Toronto. I have experienced the ghoulish delight of eating a poutine hot dog and rediscovered what I used to enjoy about professional baseball.

Watching ace pitchers throw with mastery and breezy malice. Lineups too dense with threats to safely navigate. Batters trying to wreck the psyches of their opponents by hitting the ball just beyond the reach of the defense. The buffed-out little frailties and foibles of being human—in this case, a few neurotic middle relief jobbers or a punchless middle infielder or egghead create-a-player catchers topping out four times a game at the bottom of the lineup. The way the dog days of June and July sort out the pennant contenders from the galoot-forward rosters with unignorable factory defects. The way a 162-game marathon can be wrecked by blowing an eight-run lead in a single-elimination game. The emergence of the Wet Guy as an aesthetic archetype. Deciding who your favorite player is based on their walkout song. The way Fenway Park dazzles with beer-drenched electricity during “Sweet Caroline,” the instantly recognizable feeling of pure delight and tomfoolery when you sing a familiar tune with half-lit strangers.

There is no sport where the athletes look as visibly bored as baseball players taking the field, and it is a little heartening to see a designated hitter position reserved for Joe Schmoes who look like they crush High Lifes in the parking lot after a rec league bowling match. There is also no other sport that mandates the coaches and managers to dress exactly the same as the players: Do these teams think they’re going to run out of bodies and some 68-year-old guy named Frank will go out there? I notice these details mostly because I’m a neurotic idiot, but also because I am among the 5% of the game’s attendees that actually pays attention to what’s happening on the field and don’t just sit down for one inning and spend the rest of the afternoon aimlessly walking around the stadium and trolling for Dippin’ Dots. The increase in the quality of stadium food is also particularly noteworthy, which may be another foreboding sign of relentless gentrification. The seventh-inning stretch song used to be, “Buy me some peanuts and crackerjack!!” and now it’s, “Buy me an A5 Wagyu beef burger and a top-shelf liquor Mojito!!”

My favorite aspect of baseball is not the sport itself, but the game on the jumbotron where everyone sees three helmets shuffling around, and one of them is covering a baseball, and we have to guess which helmet has the baseball underneath. Everyone falls for it every time. You and your friends could be enchanted under the spell of a deep and enrapturing life chat and it’s immediately snapped when one of you leaps out of your seat and bellows, “IT’S UNDER THREE!!” The cap game lets you know if you’ve reached your liquor capacity for the evening. A treat for all, really.

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