Baseball: The Boring Game I Somehow Still Love

Though I never saw him play, Mickey Mantle equaled god in a Yankee uniform. Yes, I’m THAT old. I blame the Mick for my becoming a Yankees fan at a time when the Yankees sucked and everyone loved the Mets

My dad loved Dimaggio, the baseball god of the 1930s and 40s. Between Mick and my dad, my Yankee embedded fandom so deeply I can’t root it out no matter how loutish Steinbrenner was, or how much Yankee fandom feels like rooting for Amazon.

I remember the excitement of just putting on the little league uniform. I fondly recall sifting dugout sand through my fingers while I waited for an at bat.

One thing about baseball, it’s got tons of waiting for something to happen time.

With decreasing attendance, the game’s overlords are panicked by the thought that everyone under 35 will consider watching paint dry more exciting than going to a ballpark. And about $100 less expensive!

I had cause to wonder just how long this anachronistic game could last during the recent 2018 playoffs when my Yankees bowed out meekly to the hated Red Sox. I’m a hardcore fan happy to watch parts of 100 Yankee games per year, (don’t judge) but I fall asleep during literally every PLAYOFF game.

I think doctors should recommend baseball for insomniacs, it’s a much healthier way to get some z’s than Ambien.

Baseball games meander along with little besides a pitcher staring straight ahead for long periods of time until those few moments of drama whip up the crowd of half-drunk fans (giving credit where it’s due, many are fully drunk). Then there’s a fabulous amount of beer drinking, towel waving and screaming vitriol at the opposing players. These days Americans need constant action, or at least consistent shouting, to maintain our interest while reclining on the couch with our favorite adult stimulant.

Baseball gives us green lawns, watching players scratch and shift their groinal area, and sonorous announcers pontificating on launch angles.

Basketball gives us constant motion of semi-undressed hyper-athletic specimens who sometimes fly. Football provides shouting, violence, drama, violence, tactics, and more violence.  Hockey gives us fighting combined with figure skating, and beer. Even Soccer has constant action, albeit some of the “action” seems like meaningless running about for the uninitiated.

Walt Whitman thought the game would cure the nation in the 1870s after the civil war nearly tore it asunder. But in those days just being able to see grass meant a ton to the urban masses. And before the days of constant stimuli, baseball seemed amazingly active. Seeing adults run was a novelty in and of itself. Back then no one ran after the age of 12; it was the law.  

Pundits proclaimed the boring game dead many times: first in the 1890s when horse racing, cockfighting, and boxing ruled; again in 1919 after the World Series was thrown; and in the 1990’s when management greed killed the world series. Yet baseball still enriches old white dudes (show me a non-pale baseball team owner not named Derek or Ervin) and defies expectations by increasing revenue.

But kids play games that are more fun.

How long can a game last when a late fifties guy like myself inhabits the younger fan demographic?

Predicting the future is a stupid endeavor – ask the vast majority of economists who never saw the 2008 deregulation depression coming on – so I’m going to predict away. Sometime around 2030 baseball fandom will be the exclusive realm of old dudes like me who usually fall asleep by the third inning. Baseball will probably go the way of bowler hats sometime around 2050, about the time the last owner extorts billions from a dying city to build a stadium.

But then again, people have said that sort of thing before.