It is one of the few sporting events that I can distinctly remember watching on television. After all, I got to stay up late on a school night to watch the best team in baseball beat those goddamn Red Sox, made all the more sweet as they were my little brother's team, and when you're ten years old, you are kind of evil that way. It didn't matter that the Yankees lost the World Series that year; Aaron Boone's fifteen minutes of fame is the sweetest thing in my sports memory.
Fast forward to 2012, and I barely care anymore. I sometimes look back and wonder what happened to the days when the Yankees and baseball were my life. What happened to the days when I was disappointed that the Yankees traded for Alex Rodriguez because they traded away Alfonso Soriano? Or when I actually cared about an interleague doubleheader against the New York Mets? What happened? Where is the love?
The thing is, I'm not entirely sure that my love of baseball ever actually diminished. At least, my interest in baseball's history never went anywhere. I'm not sure that the connection to baseball's history could ever leave. Unlike the other major American sports, baseball is obsessed with the past. Whereas football and basketball are almost always focused on the present with cursory glances to the old days, baseball is defined by the stars and games of the distant past.
One reason for that tendency is that, compared to the NFL and NBA, baseball actually has a past, one where it was the undisputed king. It essentially defined the nation and what it meant to be an American. In the documentary Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story, Rabbi Michael Paley argues that Detroit Tigers' slugger Hank Greenberg may have been the most important Jewish American in history. As a baseball star, few people could make it easier for Jews to claim a legitimate place in American culture.
In the United States, baseball has that mythic quality to it. Not only was it massively popular, it mattered in a cultural sense. If Hank Greenberg or Sandy Koufax had played some other sport, even one as popular as baseball, I doubt that they would have had the same societal impact. Even separate from their cultural importance, the baseball giants, from Babe Ruth to Roberto Clemente, seem to shine brighter than their counterparts in other American sports.
Granted, the other sports have had their stars, and the soccer greats such as Pelé likely inspired a far greater number of people. But for some reason they aren't shrouded in the history perfume, and the ones that do don't stretch back that far; I don't see many basketball retrospectives focusing on Bob Petit. Not so for Major League Baseball. So even when sports in general stop mattering all that much to me, baseball still held a special place in my heart.
So if baseball as a game and as a cultural force is still interesting to me, then what explains my present state of apathy? All I really know going in that my current state of mind set in some time in the last four years or so. I figure that, at least, because the last bit of random baseball trivia I remember memorizing was that Jose Molina hit the last home run at the original Yankee Stadium. Whatever happened, it was some time after that.
One possible explanation is a version of nostalgia. The state of baseball in 2012 is pretty different from the state of the game a decade ago. Maybe I just respond negatively to that change. I mean, in my personal ordering the universe, the Atlanta Braves should win the NL East every single year and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays should be a doormat. And the idea of the Texas Rangers winning the World Series is patently ridiculous.
I suppose there is somthing to that. But given how nostalgia generally works, I should not have entered that phase of my life yet. After all, when people complain how everything sucks nowadays, it's usually in comparison to their teenage and early-20s years. Hell, in two decades, I should be regretting that baseball isn't the way that it is right now. I mean, I've been told I have an old-man mentality, but it just doesn't seem like a plausible answer.
Could it be that the steroid cloud hanging over the game affected my attitudes? I actually know the answer to this one: no. For one thing, steroids have been a part of the game the whole time I've been watching it; for me, it's baseball's status quo. For another, I really, honestly do not care if players cheat by using steroids. I'd rather they not cheat at all, but ethically, how is it all that different from Ty Cobb sharpening his spikes to injure second basemen?
Actually, the best explanation I can think of is a fairly simple one: time. At a certain point, one simply does not have the time or energy to follow things as one did while a child. In fact, Bill Simmons argues that this, in the form of getting old, is one of the things that caused him to fall out of the loop with Major League Baseball:
But when you reach your 30s, your Tolerance Level drop dramatically, your Responsibility Level increases, and it becomes much more difficult to subject yourself to the day-to-day grind of a professional sports season--there simply isn't enough time in the day. I find I'm choosing sports over each other. The first to go was college football...The NHL followed quickly...College hoops was next...Now I'm down to the NBA (my favorite sport), the NFL (a close second) and baseball (a distant third). (1)Granted, to apply this to my own situation would still require my old-man mentality, but it seems to be the most logical option. Though I would also add the work required to be a fan varies by sport. I maintain that the reason the NFL remains popular in the modern TV landscape is that it requires the least effort to follow--one game per week. Similarly, work is why I never got too into the NBA and NHL; one must diligently follow the team to figure out when they're playing.
Baseball is a mixed bag in this sense. On the one hand, it requires little effort to get into; just flip on the TV at 7:00 p.m., and nine times out of ten there'll be a game on. But, because of the 162-game schedule, it can get tiresome very quickly. Even when I was ten and could follow the Yankees with little getting in the way, I would still go on two week stretches without watching a game, just to take a break. Nine years later, and those breaks have gone on indefinitely.
Whatever the reason that I lost contact with America's past-time in the modern day, I figure that it is only appropriate that I determine whether I can fall in love with it again. To test this idea, I sat down with my younger brother and watched a Yankees-Red Sox game. The first game of a July 7 day-night doubleheader set at Boston's Fenway Park, if this contest couldn't wake me out of my baseball apathy, then it's unlikely that anything else could.
Furthermore, I wanted the full baseball nerd experience with this. And I can't think of anything that screams "baseball nerd" than actually keeping score of the game. I even hand drew a double-sided baseball scorecard for the task, since the computer connected to the printer in our house is barely functional. "This better be worth it," I was thinking. "It took me over two hours to draw up this damned thing." So what did this game tell me?
Well, for one thing, I was surprised by just how many of the players I had never heard of. I realize that as the first half of a doubleheader, coming after a game the previous night, there would be a lot of benchwarmers getting some playing time. All the same, the bottom third of the Yankees line-up was pretty foreign to me: Jayson Nix at shortstop, Darnell McDonald playing left, and Chris Stewart behind the plate. Not a classic Yankees line-up, that.
But that was at least better than with Boston; I recognized exactly one player from the Red Sox of a few years ago, and that was David Ortiz as the designated hitter. Other than him, who the hell were these people? Maura Gomez, Daniel Nava, Ryan Kalish: as far as I could tell, the announcers were just making up names as they went. Give me this, at least I realized that half of the Red Sox key players were on the diabled list. But one out of nine, that's pretty bad.
On the plus side, it told me watching the Yankees destroy the Red Sox is still a satisfying experience. In a 6-1 victory, the Yankees hit four home runs over the Green Monster, including two blasts from Andruw Jones, who apparently joined the team last year. And keeping score helped me get some enjoyable digs in at my brother. "Hey, whoever this Kalish fellow is, he's grounded into two 4-6-3 double plays today." Though now I sound like that guy, which is never a good thing.
All in all though, I had a good time watching that particular game. I missed most of the night game on account of July 4 weekend affairs, but I did catch some of the action on Fox, and even though the Yankees lost, it was still a cool experience. The same held in the fourth and final contest, this time broadcast on ESPN. Some guy named Ivan Nova got ten strikeouts for the Yankees, and had he not struggled with pitch count I'm sure he'd have gotten some more. I'll have to keep my eye on him.
But I also found a few things rather bothersome about baseball. Well, not baseball itself, but the presentation. The broadcasters in all the games I watched for this project--whether on YES, Fox or ESPN--proved incredibly distracting. In fact, the annoyance factor increased with every game. By the time we got to Sunday Night Baseball, I was yelling at the television for Dan Shulman and company to focus on the actual game, instead of uninformative interviews with the managers or the several thousands references to the upcoming Home Run Derby.
Actually, watching that train wreck of digressions punctuated by Nova strikeouts calls to mind an article by Noel Murray I read over at The A.V. Club a couple of weeks ago while perusing the archives:
On the national level...I've noticed an increase in time-filling business only loosely related to the game at hand: more guests in the booth, more uniformative sideline reporting, more in-game interviews with coaches, and the like. Watching a Saturday baseball game on Fox is like tuning into an especially lame daytime talk show, interrupted by an occasional play in the field. (1)This quote may have finally help me reach a conclusion, or at least a rationalization, for I stopped watching baseball. The time factor I mentioned before is a factor, but it's ultimately coupled with this problem of presentation. I always say that if you love to do something, then you will make time for it. Well, I may love baseball, but not with this terrible packaging around it. I can make time to watch baseball, but I won't do it to listen to the broadcasting.
That's the sad part of the conclusion, but the happy news is that, hey, I still love baseball. It kind of makes me sad that I wasn't keeping up with it at all at the beginning of the season. And keeping score allowed me to ignore the announcing to a large degree; I don't need to depend on the ESPN crew to point out that Rafael Soriano was struggling in the bottom of the ninth when I can see that he's been worked into three straight full counts. I can still love baseball.
Now, if only I got the Yankees games out in Pittsburgh.
Works cited:
Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story. Dir. Peter Miller. Narr. Dustin
Hoffman. PBS. WLIW, New York, 5 July 2012. Television.
Murray, Noel. "Why Does Most Modern Sports Broadcasting Suck So Hard?" The A.V.
Club. Onion, 7 Dec. 2010. Web. 9 July 2012.
Simmons, Bill. "Falling out of Love with Baseball." Page 2. ESPN, 28 Mar. 2002, Web.
8 July 2012.
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