Why Baseball?

I am eager to become a baseball fan again. The love of football jersey baseball was once essential to me; my very first story published in these pre-pixel-era pages was about the game, and when I went to tell my son a bedtime story in Paris it was a baseball story, too, and set in 1908 at that. Throughout the nineteen-eighties, my bedtime and bath-time reading was Bill James baseball abstracts, which I still keep in a row on my bookshelf. (And, by the way, anyone who thinks of those books as “stats annuals” or the like is crazy; what made them matter was the brio and irreverence of the writing, just as writing.) Yet last year, with new stadiums there to wonder at in the Bronx and Queens, I went out to the ballgame not once, God help me—not once, nor did my now fifteen-year-old son (or ten-year-old daughter) push me to take them. I listen to Mike Francesa blather on about the basketball brackets and smile; but I hear him talk about the fifth starter and am bored.

Now, the hardest thing for any blogger or essayist or, for that matter, stand-up comic to know is when his “I” becomes a “you”; the observational comic’s audience nod their heads happily as he leads them through airline food and first dates only to descend into an uncomfortable silence as he moves to his haven’t-we-all-been-there? bondage material. All the signs and salaries indicate that baseball is as popular as ever—each morning’s Post attests to it—and what feels like the zeitgeist may be just the very local weather. I certainly miss my team, the Montreal Expos, whose reincarnation as the Washington Nationals has perpetuated their futility while surrendering their circus-cap charm. But let me try and analyze why I have lost my larger, non-rooting interest in the game, and perhaps it will, as the poet nba jerseys says, echo in some other bosom.

1. First, there is the utter cynicism in the relation of team to player. Of course, the mercenary purpose—sign for the money and sign wherever you are offered most—is part of the ethic of professional sport, and has been openly recognized as such for decades. Only a fool or a fan (they are closely related) would have thought otherwise. But there is a difference between cynicism and utter cynicism. Something about the speed and cold-bloodedness, the absolute lack of even the pretense of solidarity in today’s game is chilling to me. The Yankees dropping Hideki Matsui was not the last straw, but it was a heavy one. A player of epic proportions—the first Japanese superstar, Godzilla, a fascinating character in a fascinating story—helps lead his team to a World Series victory, and is immediately dropped by the team and wanders off elsewhere. I don’t doubt that this is both good business and good baseball, but it lends a note of indifference that I’m not sure the enterprise can endure. Some notion of teamhood, of commonality, of shared purpose, however fictional, is part of the magnetism of spectatorship—what makes us fans.

I am well aware that the old form of permanent serfdom, which tied players to a team, was unfair and unsustainable. But the sense that these guys arrive, execute, and leave is now too strong to lead me on; the magnet switch is off. The dance of soccer jerseys shared purpose and loyalty may be merely a mime—but what else but dancing and miming do we go to games for?