The end of basketball season can sometimes be bittersweet on Duke’s campus, where hoops is king. But it’s nice to know there’s something to look forward to in the seven months between games in Cameron Indoor Stadium: It’s baseball season again.
For those of you that have loved the game through the years as much as I have, you know the anticipation I’m talking about.
You’ve sat through a winter of trade rumors and free-agent signings and a spring of headlines about players in the “best shape of their lives.”
You’ve heard the trash talking from fans of rival teams and listened to the pundits blather on about what’s going to happen, as if they already saw the advanced screening.
And now you’re just ready to get on with the games, with the summer, with the march toward October, where miracles happen.
You know exactly what Christina Kahrl, a writer for Baseball Prospectus, means when she describes baseball as “a thing of its own, with a soundscape you can hear in the back of your head without prompting…a living thing moving at its own unhurried pace, a daily escape from the everyday race.”
There are many of you, though, who are sports fans but not baseball fans, and I can understand that. Appreciation of the game is much easier when you know the stories behind the action: the pitcher recovering from surgery, the rookie adjusting to life in the big leagues. Baseball brings out those storylines like no other sport because it’s a game that has plenty of time for them.
Baseball has time for stories because it’s the only game that doesn’t have a clock ticking overhead. The players make their own time: As long as a team doesn’t make outs, it gets to keep batting. There’s no buzzer and no play clock. The game paces itself, and the spaces get filled up with the people that make the game.
But it’s those spaces that seem to turn most people off from baseball. “Baseball takes forever,” people complain, in spite of the fact that the average game length of two hours and 50 minutes isn’t that much longer than the average college basketball broadcast, and is dwarfed by the NFL’s four-hour time slots.
If it isn’t long, then it’s at least slow, they say, even though a January 2010 study by the Wall Street Journal concluded that “the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes.”
As the NFL and the NBA ride the rails on an apparent crash course to labor strife and lockouts, baseball is as healthy as it’s ever been. That’s not to say the sport hasn’t had its ups and downs, since it had its own lockout back in the mid-1990s and is still haunted by the specter of steroid use that infiltrated the game in the decade that followed the 1994 strike.
But baseball is now ahead of other sports in regulating performance-enhancing drugs, and the current stretch of labor peace is nearly unprecedented in modern sports.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of other sports, too, and I look forward to Monday Night Football and Sunday Night Hoops as much as anybody. But baseball is a different kind of investment altogether.
Pick a team and watch them for a while, and you’ll get used to the rhythm of the announcers, until their voices almost become a comfort. You’ll get to know the stories that shape the players that shape the games, and those stories are as diverse as can be.
Enjoy an athlete with a little quirky humility? Think of the former Astros hurler Roy Oswalt, who asked for, and received, a $200,000 bulldozer for winning a start in the 2005 National League Championship Series.
Like a little Cinderella story? Look no further than the Nationals’ Rick Ankiel, who re-invented himself as a hitter when he couldn’t live up to the lofty expectations set for him as one of the game’s most heralded pitching prospects.
Need a tale of redemption? Baseball has those, too, in the likes of Josh Hamilton, who overcame drug addictions and off-the-field issues to become one of the most feared hitters in the majors.
In fact, for most baseball fans, it’s as much about the people who play the game as the game itself.
But even the old-fashioned nine-inning baseball game is ironically perfect for contemporary society. In today’s world of hyper-attention and multi-tasking, baseball fits right in. It’s a perfect thing to be watching while you’re doing something else. Turn it on as background noise while working on a problem set. Fall asleep to the chatter of extra innings.
You can afford to miss a pitch or two, because the game isn’t in a hurry. Even if you are.
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