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.