Essay: "In Defence of Baseball"

I'm not going to look up the stats, but I understand that they're pretty grim: young people aren't as interested in baseball as they are in other sports.  The reason for this is pretty straightforward - baseball is fucking boring.  I love baseball, I was raised on it, it's probably my number one team sport (although my passion is on a slow burn these days until the Blue Jays look like they have a chance of making the playoffs) but even I'm aware of it, especially early in the season, when I'm adjusting from the frantic pace of the NBA and NHL playoffs or the structured mayhem of the NFL.  I'll be sitting there, enjoying a 5-3 win in April over the Kansas City Royals, while the pitcher and the catcher are leisurely talking to each other, and I'll think to myself: man.  This game is boring.

It's tempting to think that baseball is a relic, a 19th century game that will get squeezed out by more marketable sports and slowly decline along with its aging viewing base.  I don't think so.  I think baseball has something amazing going for it, something that people don't talk about but which I've really grown to appreciate.  Namely, it's one of the hardest games in the world to play dirty.

There are two main ways of playing dirty.  The first, and most obvious, is to break the rules.  To whack a skilled player with your stick, to obstruct him from behind, to Hack-a-Shaq or to flop to the ground after minor contact.  To trash-talk, to physically intimidate.  To pretend to be injured.

You see this in almost every sport.  Soccer particularly aggrieves me.  At the start of every World Cup I'm stoked for soccer.  By the time it's over I'm sick of it.  The diving, the fucking diving.  It is not unusual to see 3-5 games in the tournament seriously impacted by grown men pretending to be injured.

Remember the clutching and grabbing in hockey? The baloney foul calls on Kobe during the Lakers/Kings series in response to his whining?

Baseball has almost none of this.  How do you cheat?  If you throw outside of the strikezone, it's a ball.  If it's inside, it's a strike.  There's nothing you can do to screw around.  The players do not touch each other and there is little room for the subjective opinions of the umpires to interfere with the game.  You can't just beat up Jose Bautista.  Sure, you can pitch around him, you can throw at his head, but that's about it.  If you screw around too much he just takes his free pass, and now you've got a runner on first.

The second way to play dirty is more subtle.  You don't break the rules, per se, but you break the game.  Think of Greece's "magical" championship at Euro 2004.  All they did was play eleven men behind the ball.  If the other team had played the same way, every game would have ended 0-0 and gone to a shootout.  Greece would have been fine with that, because their soccer team sucked at soccer.  It's not against the rules, and you can't really blame them, but it's not fun to watch.

Another example is the last few minutes in a football game. We've all seen it.  One team is up and they're running out the clock.  Perhaps the other team is mounting a huge comeback, but there just isn't enough time left.  I can't speak for you, but I'm always a bit frustrated to see the best players in football touching their knees to the grass on purpose, killing time off the clock.

That can't happen in baseball.  As long as you have one out left you can, theoretically, score an unlimited number of runs.  They also can't just decide to play for a zero-zero tie.  They have to pitch to you, by God.  They've got to get you out.

I don't mean to suggest that this is all baseball has going for it.  There's the strategy, the drama, and most of all, the anticipation.  When October comes around, the NHL and NBA seem unstructured and hectic (with all the players just running back and forth), lacking the focused intensity of the late innings of the World Series.  But I don't think the purity, or integrity, of baseball should be underestimated.  It's one reason why I find myself constantly pulled back to the game.  And as the world gets crazier, subject to vague rules and principles that constantly shift and change, it's nice to have a sport that seems like it belongs to an earlier, more sharply defined era, where everyone knew where they stood and got what they deserved, in the end.