Reflections on Baseball (The Counter-Cultural Sport)

Watching the Major League Baseball playoffs and now the World Series has led me to reflect on the game.  According to a recent Harris Interactive Poll, in the last 25 years, baseball has fallen off dramatically in popularity among other sports.  It gets crushed by the National Football League and College Football is close behind and gaining.  But this is baseball’s time to shine – it’s moment in the Autumn sun!  So, a few thoughts on why baseball is a great game and an interpretation of why it is becoming less and less popular in the United States.

1. Baseball is a great game because it invites community.  I’ve attended almost every kind of sporting event in my life, and none is as relationally rich as baseball.  During an NFL game, there are 20 to 30 seconds between plays for conversation with your buddies, but visual and (loud) audio stimulus is over-bearing and limits even short conversation.  College basketball is too fast-paced to invest attention to your friends and fellow fans.  But baseball provides time and space for conversation and and relational give and take, all in the camaraderie-building environment of ‘the game!”  The pace of the game is perfect …
2. The pace the game is counter-cultural, in a good way! This is one of the biggest critiques of baseball:  the length of the games.  And while a sluggish, 4 hour game in the middle of August doesn’t make for great TV, it’s the lack of a play-clock that makes baseball wonderful.  We’re a micro-wave society and we want it now, now, now!  And baseball stubbornly remains a slow-cooker game that yields it’s pleasures over time.  I’m fine with this.  The rhythm of life is too hectic and if a baseball game can slow the pace a bit, all the better reason to watch.
3. Baseball is great because it is built on anticipation and imagination. Most other sports, where the action is fast paced and there is a limited time between plays, force their fans to be reactionary.  Watch play.  React.  Watch next play.  React.  And repeat until the final buzzer sounds.  And here’s the thing:  sometimes this is exhilarating!  Sometimes.  But when the game is a blow-out or boring and there are no spectacular plays to react to, the fans are left empty.  Baseball has the potential for the great play and natural fan reaction just like the other sports (and sometimes those great plays come and sometimes they don’t).  But baseball also has the built-in time for anticipation and imagination.

It’s the bottom of the 6th inning, 2 outs, 3-2 count, the home team’s slugger steps out of the box, the opposing team’s starting pitcher rubs the baseball, thinking through the scouting report, contemplating the payoff pitch. The fans are engaged – anticipation inches them to the edge of their seat and their imagination runs wild with the possible outcomes of the next pitch.  And if the slugger fulfills the anticipation with a towering home run or a laser into the gap, the fans go wild with reaction, just like the fans of other sports, but they’ve gotten to experience so much more.  If the slugger fails and strikes out to end the inning, the fans still got to experience the anticipation and the imagination of what could have been.

Rarely, in other sports, do the fans have time to allow anticipation and imagination to develop like this.

So, there are three reasons why I think baseball is great.  And they are also some of the reasons it will continue to decline in popularity in the U.S.

1. Community? Who wants that?  Who has time for it?  I don’t go to the game to build relationships, I go to get something in return for my entertainment-dollar.
2. The pace of the game simply doesn’t jive with the Twitter-ized world of instant everything and drive-through satisfaction.
3. Imagination takes effort and creativity.  In a world increasingly marked by group-think and being told what’s cool by a preferred media outlet, anticipation and imagination are foreign concepts.  The fans of sports in North America, paralleling the society at large, are passive consumers.  Entertain me – I don’t want to have to expend any energy or be engaged in the process.

Are you a baseball fan?  Share your thoughts in the comments.  Any other reasons why you like baseball?  How would you rank baseball among the other team sports?