September 28, 2011
It’s the last night of Major League Baseball’s regular season, and both the AL and NL Wild Card races are knotted up.
Oh, fun.
In Atlanta, the Braves blow a one-run lead over Philadelphia in the ninth, and eventually fall in the 13th. Meanwhile, St. Louis whips Houston, and claims the NL Wild Card spot, tearing it from a Braves team who led the race by 8.5 games less than a month ago.
As Tampa Bay trails 7-0 to the Yankees, it appears Boston will escape total humiliation after blowing their own 9-game Wild Card lead during September.
Not so fast.
By the power of well-swung ash wood, and perhaps a drop of early-autumn magic, shit got weird. A 3-run shot from Evan Longoria caps a 6-run 8th inning that brought Tampa Bay within one, followed by a two-strike, two-out bomb from pinch hitter Dan Johnson that tied the game in the 9th. Keeping the Buffalo Wild Wings reference to myself, Longoria shoots a walk-off line drive to left field in the 12th, and in an all too wonderful night of baseball, Boston chokes on a one-run, ninth inning lead in Baltimore, drowning Red Sox playoff hopes.
But we don’t care.
Despite childhoods blessed with little league every spring, big ballparks with our parents in the summertime, and Ken Griffey Jr, our generation has misplaced our love for baseball.
How? I will attempt to loosely corral that explanation in six parts:
1) Mark and Sammy chase Maris. Mark wins.
2) Three years later, Barry beats Mark.
3) We find out everyone was cheating.
4) Cell phones destroy attention spans.
5) Pitchers get better.
6) Pitching dominance bores everyone.
It’s not just baseball though. A lot changed. Jerry Rice retired, and suddenly a 4.5/40 was slow, LeBron James redefined the threshold of human athleticism, Usain Bolt shattered the 100-meter record by accident, and Kim Kardashian dumped Reggie Bush and Miles Austin for Chris Humphries. You, me and Lamar Odom were like, “WTF!”
So what’s the constant variable here? It’s speed, man. Speed kills, and speed killed baseball. If one human being embodied the population of the world, a single eyelash represents the number of people on this planet that can hit a big league pitch into the outfield. That’s probably generous. But if that eyelash can’t hurdle a defender en route to a windmill, we don’t give a fuck – change the channel, dude.
What makes baseball incredible, and truly unique, is what can happen in a split second. While professional athletes of other major sports utilize constant motion and rhythm to draw their special talents, big league baseball players can make a play; can make music, spurred from a dead standstill. Our attention to detail is so frail, that if a man isn’t running down a line at 25 mph, or flying towards the rim changing hands, it doesn’t seem “athletic.” Baseball is just a bunch of bearded men, spitting tobacco, standing around until the (I surrender) pathetic pulled hamstring on the way to first base. I’ve sat with my friends through wonderful baseball games, complete with great pitching, hot bats and slick plays in the field. But as soon as a guy makes a funky error or base-running blunder, their heads are back in their phones, pessimistically unmoved by the best stickball in the world.
The game just isn’t beautiful to younger people right now. Baseball, everyone all together now, “clogs up Sports Center.” We won’t kill our electronics and ambient bullshit for two hours to enjoy one of the oldest, most celebrated American pastimes. We certainly love eating, drinking and enjoying sports during the sunny seasons. Somehow, we’ve abandoned the ballpark, a place America built for that company and joy.
The late author David Foster Wallace once discussed the human side that desires silence, and doesn’t get fed.
It becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read, or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen to a piece of music that’s complicated, and that takes work to understand.”
With that sentiment in mind, I wish for days ahead where we embrace silence, the pre-pitch hush of the crowd, and sit patiently, content until the crack of the bat, when beauty ensues.
