tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1597761046378693913.post6356642632009741663..comments2023-11-07T22:43:36.262-08:00Comments on Notes from the Ironbound: The Persistence of BaseballUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1597761046378693913.post-40936030097695912382012-02-23T11:19:46.804-08:002012-02-23T11:19:46.804-08:00I get giddy this time of year, too. Here are my t...I get giddy this time of year, too. Here are my thoughts, which are mostly unoriginal. <br /><br />There are many things that make baseball both unique and enjoyable. First of all, while baseball requires athleticism, winning is based more on highly specialized skills than upon sheer force or talent. It is a game of talented workers, not just endowed bodies. Each player on the diamond has a very specific role to play and a specific space in which to play it, more so than in other sports like baseball or football. Physical size is less important in baseball than in those other sports, too, in large part because offense is not about taking an object to a specific part of the field of play. Rather, it is about directing that object to a place where your opponent has less chance of retrieving it and returning it to you. This limits the offensive team's ability to control scoring directly (except in the case of the home run, the one play based on sheer strength or force). Baseball is, therefore, a game of chance. While said chance can be minimized through dominant pitching or hitting, it is still there. No batter, practically speaking, can hit the ball every time up; no pitcher can get every batter out. (Football has a regulated form of chance, in the guise of the forward pass, which was introduced in 1906 in large part to reintroduce some risk to a game that had become overly monotonous and dangerous since downs were introduced in the 1880s). Baseball teams win not by dominating every time out, but by winning a complete game the most number of times over the greatest number of chances over the course of a long season. More so than other sports, baseball pits one player against another, with the rest of the team serving a supporting role; each player gets the chance to play defense and offense (which is why the DH is such a heinous crime). Baseball is also intriguing because it not only reflects natural rhythms of the seasons, but its structure mimics the urban society within which originated. The player needs to distract his opponents by hitting the ball past the crowded, urban infield, into the less crowded rural or semi-urban hinterland of the outfield--and do so well enough that he can circulate throughout the safe places surrounding the infield so he can get "home." And although the game is rationally split up into sections of time called innings, it is not hyper-rationalized by a clock the way basketball and American football (both late 1800s games) are. The game feels less artificial because its temporal boundaries are set by a number of actions, not by measured time. <br /><br />Those are some of the reasons why I love baseball. That, and the fact that my dad and I played catch when I was a kid, we watched the Cubs on WGN just about every day, and I collected baseball cards maniacally. All very rational things, indeed.Brian Inoreply@blogger.com