Why Baseball

Tomorrow I’m heading to Phoenix to indulge my new favorite springtime ritual, spring training. I did it last year with my son Chase, to great effect, so am doing it again with sons Chase and Silas. If two of us could boost the A’s into first place in the AL East last year, what will happen with the power of three?

But it raises in my mind a perennial question: what is this about? Why does baseball mean so much to me?

Partly, it’s just sports, any sports–equally mysterious. But I do have a special feeling for baseball, so I’ll focus on that.

Baseball is a daily ritual. For six months of the year, six days a week, I follow it as a kind of second life. It’s something like reading a really engrossing novel, with characters you come to know and care about, with the future unknown. The dailyness is important.

It’s a spacious, outdoor sport, its visuals dominated by grass, merely dotted with players. Timewise it’s spacious too, with pauses between pitches, with 17 between-innings, each offering almost enough time to get something to eat. You can talk at a baseball game. You can let your eyes wander.

Baseball is human sized. Its players look normal. You can almost imagine yourself doing what they do.

Baseball is linear, which lends itself to storytelling and recapitulation. Most sports, a dozen people are moving at once; or the action is essentially repetitive (think tennis). It’s hard to tell the story of such games, at least in any detail. But I can recap the story of a baseball game pitch by pitch, inning by inning, with the rise and fall of drama as runners reach and score and the action see-saws. The linear nature of baseball also explains why it’s the most statistical of sports: it can be broken down to individual pieces in a way that basketball or football never can. As a result it can be savored, turned over, historicized.

Probably most of all, though, baseball (like all the other sports) connects the generations. My dad loved baseball and took me to my first games (in Yankee Stadium). I coached both my sons in Little League, which I believe they cared about nearly as much as I did. Baseball reminds me of days playing catch and hitting fly balls. It’s timeless, just the same now as it was when I was a child. So when I watch a baseball game, I haven’t aged at all.

Spring Training

Today I’m heading for Phoenix to meet my son Chase and take in some spring training baseball. Wow. We’ve been wanting to do this for years, and we finally pulled the trigger. I can’t wait to sit in the warm Arizona sun and watch meaningless baseball.

We are A’s fans, and if you want to know why I can’t tell you. All long-term baseball fans know this: you don’t choose your team, it chooses you. (David Brooks has a charming column about this in today’s NYTimes.) Once hooked, you become a helpless victim. Your millionaire players and owners may sell you food and tickets at extortionate prices, they may disappoint you and torment you, but your only choice is how loud to groan and complain.

Why do we do it? Why do we pay to do it? This is one of the great mysteries of the ages. No doubt evolutionary theorists tell just-so stories about how primitive man identified with the tribe in order to survive on the African savannah, and I’m not going to argue with them. All I want to know is: did they wear baseball hats? Did they have tribal logos inscribed on their leather jerkins?

Personally, I think those tribal instincts go better with football. Baseball brings out something different in me, something fundamentally lazy. I like the weather. I like the slow drone of baseball announcers on the radio. I like the spaces in which you can talk. I like watching the people. I like the sounds. I like studying the minutia of how pitchers throw and where outfielders position themselves.

One of my happiest memories is of my only other foray into Phoenix spring training. This was in February, when games had not yet begun. It was chilly, a bit foggy. I was in Phoenix for other reasons, but I got out to Giants stadium during a brief interlude. With about eight other fans I sat in the bleachers watching Dusty Baker hit ground balls to infielders. I sat there for 45 minutes, utterly content. That’s baseball.

GM Sisyphus

I highly recommend “Moneyball,” the new movie. Of course as an Oakland A’s fan I have a special relationship to the movie–its events and its setting are very familiar to me. And I loved Michael Lewis’ book, on which the movie is based. Ultimately, though, this is not a baseball movie. It’s a movie about Sisyphus, the Greek tragic hero who is doomed to keep rolling the rock up a mountain, though it always rolls back down. What makes Sisyphus tick? Why does he keep trying when he is certain to lose?

Billy Beane is the A’s General Manager, and his task is to beat the Yankees. He doesn’t have anything like the Yankees’ budget, so he tries desperate measures to outsmart them. The film portrays Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) as a high strung, emotional, impulsive and fundamentally caring man driven by his own failings as a baseball player. It’s a subtle, almost delicate performance. You won’t forget Billy Beane.

Also notable is his sidekick,played brilliantly by Jonah Hill. It’s all done with body language.

Trust me, you don’t have to care about baseball to love this movie.

The Strangeness of Sports

I am a fan of the Oakland A’s. Our tribe cohabits the Bay Area with San Francisco Giants fans. In the old days, our teams would only play in spring training and—once in a lifetime—in the World Series. But now, due to interleague play, we see each other six times a year.

The Giants have had the upper hand as of late, probably because they are the better team. Like this last week, when the Giants swept the A’s in three very close games. Ugh.

Immediately after the third game a good friend, a Giants fan, thrilled by his team’s success, called me up to talk about it! I thought he had called to gloat, though I now think he was actually just so excited he didn’t stop to think what he was doing. He wanted to talk to another baseball fan. He called me. Bad idea.

I wasn’t very polite. In fact, I’m ashamed to say, I hung up on him after a few terse words. He felt excited. I felt miserable.

I’ve never really understood this substitutionary deal. How  it is that the fortunes of 25 millionaires none of whom I have ever met seem to control my sense of success or failure, I don’t get, at all. But they do, and not just for me. Millions and millions of us poor devils live and breathe through sports. We can’t help it. We revel in their victories and, more often, we suffer in their defeats.

As I thought about my friend’s call I was struck by the razor blade that separates joy from misery in any competitive event. They are conjoined: one always goes with the other, often on the same field. And they are blind to each other’s existence. The ecstatic victor cannot feel the loser’s pain, nor can the losing sufferer enjoy his opposite’s victory. Each emotion stays pure and separate—even though they are as close as twins.

In life there are win-wins, and there are also lose-loses. Win-wins are seen in growing economies and happy families. Lose-loses appear in riots and trade wars and divorces. But for entertainment, we seek the win-lose of sports, and more all the time. We crave the sharp, cleansing drama of “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”—both, together, for they cannot be separated.

This is part of our human nature that I do not understand.

March Madness–It’s Opening Day

This is a happy time of the year, when March madness meets Opening Day. Both feature endless hopeful possibilities, especially for underdogs. Will Cornell bring down Kentucky? (Ooops, no luck.) Will we beat the Yankees? It’s possible.

Even in this springtime of hope I wonder why I care. I do, deeply, as do all sports fans. For the next six months, the success or failure of the Oakland Athletics will play a significant role in my daily cheerfulness. Since there are no undefeated seasons in baseball, I will be in the dumps quite a few times. Why? I don’t know any of those people. Really?” asked the wife of one sports fan. “Really, the reason you have been in a nasty mood all day is because your fantasy football team did poorly?” And what can anyone say to that?

I just finished Fever Pitch, in which novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy, How to Be Good) tells of his own fanatical fandom of British football, specifically the London team Arsenal. He has a far worse case of the disease than I do.

The book contains far more information than any sane person wants to know about literally hundreds of games that Hornby can play back in his head. It was good to read an articulate and intelligent person owning up to his own madness.

Here are a few quotes:

On sports talk: “And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have [for finding easy comrades through sports fandom]: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But, you know, what the hell?” [23]

Yes, listening to sports fans talk to each other is excruciating if you do not happen to share their fantasy. Unlike talk of politics, religion, technology, or even traffic and home prices, sports offers no sign of intelligent life that an outsider can appreciate. But, you know, we can’t help ourselves! It goes down like ice cream to us!

On loyal fandom: “I had discovered after the [horrible] Swindon game that loyalty, at least in football terms, was not a moral choice like bravery or kindness; it was more like a wart or a hump, something you were stuck with.” [35]

I’ve marveled over this: whereas non-sports-fans think we choose our teams, in reality we are chosen. In many cases we are born into the elect, because we cheer for the team we happen to live near, or the team associated with the college we happened to attend. But in my case it isn’t even that. I have no idea why I like the A’s better than the Giants. I actually admire the Giants, I follow them and would be happy to switch to their side. But I can’t make myself do that. Not even close. When the A’s win I am happy. When the Giants win…. Eh?

On whose triumphs these are: “One thing I know for sure about being a fan is this: it is not a vicarious pleasure…. When there is some kind of triumph, the pleasure does not radiate from the players outwards until it reaches the likes of us at the back of terraces in a pale and diminished form; our fun is not a watery version of the team’s fun, even though they are the ones that get to score the goals and climb the steps at Wembley to meet Princess Diana. The joy we feel on occasions like this is not a celebration of others’ good fortune, but a celebration of our own; and when there is a disastrous defeat the sorrow that engulfs us is, in effect, self-pity…. The Wembley win belonged to me every bit as much as it belonged to [the players], and I worked every bit as hard for it as they did. The only difference between me and them is that I have put in more hours, more years, more decades than them, and so had a better understanding of the afternoon, a sweeter appreciation of why the sun still shines when I remember it.” [187]

It is a remarkable human attribute, that we can live our lives through other people, even (especially?) people we don’t know. And we work at it. It is such an emotionally engrossing passion, it leaves us drained. It satisfies us, and leads us to hope, and makes us dream. It also distracts us from life and relationships, it regularly makes us grumpy, and it costs us money. For real sports fans this is not entertainment, as the word is conventionally understood—it is not relaxing, fun, diversionary. Rather it is almost too serious to allow breath to anything else. We care, so much that it hurts. How do you make sense of this?