“Baseball’s time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers’ youth, and even back then … there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.” – Roger Angell
Not anymore, it’s not. Nearly every day, I pause to give thanks to having been born when I was, well before colors were invented and dirt was cheap, and baseball was the same game as when Philmont’s Claude Rossman batted fifth behind Ty Cobb on the 1907 pennant-winning Detroit Tigers. And no, I was not experiencing my childhood in 1907!
Yessssssir, take me out to the ballgame … or, maybe not.
Giving up on the game?
This is not even close to what I expected. At all. Nope, I’m not chattering about all the goofy nonsense that happens when one grows a bit long in the tooth, some expected, some decidedly not.
This one in particular has completely blindsided me. It’s become abundantly obvious over the past few years: My life as a serious, hardcore sports nut is over. Kaputski. What in the world happened? Have I devolved, or perhaps evolved, into the cranky old guy sports fan?
In customary fashion, I needed to get to the bottom of what happened.
In 2015, at which point I had been a season ticket holder of the New England Patriots for 22 years, my career as a fan of NFL football came to a screeching halt when the game’s preponderance of foolishness sent me packing, and I’ve not looked back. Attending Patriots games and watching weekly on TV provided a bit of respite from daily living, something we all could use. But baseball, in particular the New York Mets, was injected into my veins in the early 1960s by my dad, an orphaned Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and a fanatical one at that. Football and all the rest rode in the backseat until baseball was done being played for the year.
At one point in my life, I was given to consider moving – when “retirement” rolled around – somewhere close to a Major League Baseball stadium and thereafter attending as many games as possible, such was my allegiance to the Grand Old Game. These days, whereas once a quiver of cobras couldn’t stop me, I can’t be bothered to turn on some screen, any screen, to take in an MLB game. Once upon a time, I could be heard to aver, many times over, “They’ll never be able to wreck baseball. It’s the perfect game.” Oooooo-weeee. Wronggggg. Again!
Time’s are a-changing
Much like the well-established foundation of a snowman, the change started small. The overabundance of strikeouts, the propensity for everyone on the roster to swing for the fences on every pitch, the gibberish about launch angles and exit velocity, it all began to gnaw on me. It all added up to one thing: boring baseball games.
Then the real lunacy kicked in, as an avalanche of newfangled rules began to descend: The extra innings ghost runner. The designated hitter for the National League. The banning of defensive shifts. No more than two throws to first by the pitcher, designed to hold the runner close. Automatic walks, rather than the pitcher being required to throw four pitches (see Rollie Fingers and Johnny Bench in the 1972 World Series). Then, along came the pitch clock.
As I’ve maintained ‘til I’m blue in the face, the purpose of life, much less a baseball game, is NOT to speed things up. If you’re being chased by a bear, okay, run.
Rules to help … or hinder?
Perhaps the most exotic rule change to have invaded the game from 1907 to, let’s say, 1967, came in 1954, when players were to “remove their gloves from the field when batting and no equipment was to show on the field at any time.” Crazy, huh?
In 1969, in response to anemic offensive production, the height of the pitcher’s mound was lowered from 15 to 10 inches. Holy moly!
On the other hand, when, in 1973, the American League introduced the designated hitter rule, I and many others were reasonably well convinced that the apocalypse had arrived, yet we hung on, hoping for the best, since the game hadn’t been altered all that much. Plus, being a fan of the Mets, and the National League by extension, I was not exactly on pins and needles over what went on over in the American League.
Take a moment to wander into YouTube and watch a major league game from, for instance, the 1969 World Series. Somehow, batters in the past generally stood in the batter’s box and remained there unless afflicted by a bee in their bonnet. Pitchers received the ball back from their catchers, got back on the rubber, and chucked it. Standing around preening was not acceptable. Games ordinarily whipped right along of their own accord, absent some dumb clock.
One may be getting the impression that I’m fairly well worked up over all this. Allow me to unveil what it is you’re working with here. In my days as a little squirt, I once overheard this exchange between my dad and an uncle. Uncle: “He sure knows a lot about those baseball players.” Dad: “He knows what they had for breakfast.” This was a matter of life and death, yessir, down to sitting by the radio and keeping score of Mets games even when they were so brutally awful it seemed as though they could hardly get much worse. Didn’t matter.
In those days, the mystery was still intact: Ballplayers were mythical figures, some upstanding and good, some neither. The Sporting News was the most highly anticipated publication of the week in my world. Box scores of all games played over the past week were scrutinized.
Money talks and bull… walks?
Let’s work backwards here for a second. Is the basis for my disgruntled state the big money in sports during this so-called modern era? Not necessarily. As I’ve heard popping out of many a mouth over the years, “They make too much money.” Yes … from the same folks who wouldn’t blink an eye at Fats Domino commanding top dollar for a performance. Owing to her abilities, Aubrey Plaza rakes it in. Why shouldn’t Juan Soto or Aaron Judge?
We have been hearing that money (as if team owners clearly hadn’t been sitting on their fat wallets for decades on the backs of the players) would corrupt the Grand Old Game since the inception of free agency in the mid-1970s. For the longest time, the increasing player salaries could often slither into the humorous, such as the times New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner would pay some journeyman, career .500 pitcher $70 trillion and expect him to win 25 games the next year. THAT was funny.
One thing ol’ George had going for him: He wanted to win. It’d be tough to convince me these days that every single owner or ownership group of an MLB team is similarly motivated. An organization the scope of MLB gets to looking like a Rube Goldberg gadget when you have one of your teams playing home games in Sacramento, while another underwent decapitation when the roof of its ballyard succumbed to a hurricane, leaving the team to play its home games in a spring training facility. What’s the solution to that? No one seems to know. Maybe a raft in Tampa Bay?
What the big money did remove was the closeness between player and fan, which actually began in 1957, when the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants transformed themselves into the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants. Dodgers’ players, in particular, were noted for living in and around their home stadium, Ebbets Field, or at the very least somewhere in Brooklyn. Still, tragedy that the abandonment was, nothing was fundamentally altered in the game.
If I had to identify when my rabid sports fandom went from, well, rabid, to nearly non-existent, it dawned on me that it roughly coincided with when things transitioned from athletic competition to an entertainment-based spectacle. As a young-un of mine once said, “I’d rather you were mad at me when I do something wrong. I hate it when you’re ‘disappointed.’” That’s precisely my current state: disappointed.
No action
Okay, so maybe I’m out of my gourd. To serve as a possible check on this, I turned to a fellow geezer with whom I once played Little League baseball, and who also has had been a lifelong diehard baseball fan. It doesn’t seem a major coincidence that his love for the MLB game started circling the drain around the same time as mine did. His thoughts?
“Baseball games are boring and predictable,” emailed the gent we refer to as Stevius. “There’s no action, no balls put in play – it’s only strike outs or home runs. Every swing is a home run swing. Oooooh, how exciting to hear announcers pretend to be excited about exit velocities and swing angles. The games have no rhythm or beauty, no development. [Longtime Dodgers announcer] Vin Scully would be lost, unable to color the beauty of even the very next pitch as he did when the true game was played.
“Batters have lost the ability to protect the plate, work the count, or even put the ball in play,” he continued. “Watching baserunning and fielding is sometimes not much better than watching a Little League game. And none of it is done with the savvy or cunning that used to make legends out of the best. They have slashed the Mona Lisa, burned down the Met, and run scissors over the red, white, and blue.”
Sadly, I couldn’t agree more. •