Time Begins On Opening Day

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.  -- Jim Bouton

Thomas Boswell, the long-time sportswriter for the Washington Post, wrote a timeless piece collected in a book of the same name, Why Time Begins On Opening Day, published in 1984.  Boswell muses on the "resolute grasp" that baseball maintains for so many of us" and why our "affection for the game has held steady for decades, maybe even grown with age."  He asks what baseball is doing among our other "first-rate passions."  And, indeed, when one looks over the posts on this blog, it could seem incongruous to have baseball pieces interrupting the rants on politics and pleas for social justice. 

Boswell explains that "in contrast to the unwieldy world which we hold in common, baseball offers a kingdom built to human scale.  Its problems and questions are exactly our size.  Here we may come when we feel a need for a rooted point of reference."  It is not that baseball is an escape from reality, "it's merely one of our many refuges within the real where we try to create a sense of order on our own terms." 

This refuge has never seemed more urgent than this season. What Boswell wrote more than thirty years ago speaks volumes today:  "Born to an age where horror has become commonplace, where tragedy has, by its monotonous repetition, become a parody of sorrow, we need to fence off a few parks where humans try to be fair, where skill has some hope of reward, where absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket."

Yet there are a growing number of naysayers.  There are those, including the current MLB Commissioner, who are determined to use various gimmicks and quick-fixes to address three purported problems with the game: 1) the umpires blow too many calls; 2) the pace of play is too torpid; and 3) pitchers are too dominant.

With regard to the first perceived problem, the solution appears to be not only more reliance on instant replay, but also an automated strike zone. What's next?  Robot umpires?  The original instant replay rule, designed to review home runs, made some sense.  New-fangled ballparks with unusual angles and idiosyncratic seating make it much more difficult to discern with the naked eye when a ball is actually hit out of the park.  But the success of the original rule has led to the inevitable slippery slope -- expanded replay into many more areas of the game.  And now, the possibility of replacing home plate umpires with an electronic strike zone.  Instant replay already upsets the flow of the game at pivotal moments.  But more significantly, it attempts to eliminate chance and human error, which are woven into the game's history where the best team doesn't always win.  There is the bad hop eluding a fielder that should have been an easy out, a bloop hit on a check-swing despite the pitch badly fooling the hitter, and, inevitably, the missed call from the umpire.  These are essential parts of the game and those who insist on perfection are missing the point.

The game is slow, but not TOO slow.  As Roger Angell puts it, "each inning of baseball's slow, searching time span, each game of its long season is essential to the disclosure of its truths."  But, fine, I'm willing to compromise -- shorter commercial breaks between innings, hitters staying in the batters box between pitches, a pitch clock, and restrictions on the number of mound visits the catcher can make.  But did we really need to do away with the intentional walk? The geniuses running Major League Baseball keep trying to remove its idiosyncratic charms under the guise of speeding its pace.  They need to slow down.

Fifty years ago, after the "Year of the Pitcher," the mound was lowered from a height of 15 inches to 10 inches to give pitchers less of an edge.  There is talk of lowering it further.  Or worse, moving the mound back, which arguably would help hitters, but probably would cause injuries to pitcher's arms.  One of the delightful, remarkable things about baseball is that for generations, the sacred measurements between bases (90 feet) and between the pitching rubber and home plate (60 feet, six inches) have remained the same no matter how players have grown in size and strength.  You can't mess with this.   Another proposal, apparently going into affect next year, is requiring relief pitchers to pitch to at least three batters or until the end of an inning.  This would prevent managers from using three or four relief specialists in an inning, which not only dampens the offense but does, admittedly, slow down the game in the late innings considerably.  I'm OK with this.  Just don't move the mound.
.
Behind many of these proposals seems to be an effort to accommodate purportedly impatient, distractible millennials who love basketball and football, but are bored by baseball.  But these fixes will not magically bring more fans to the ballpark. Making the game more robotic and removing the game's traditional quirks are self-defeating. (MLB should pour funds into youth baseball -- and fairly compensate minor leaguers -- if it truly wants to have a long-term impact.)  A few tweaks here and there are acceptable, but we need to have faith that baseball is just fine the way it is.  The arc of the baseball universe is long.  As Yogi or Casey or (actually) Bob Veale said, "good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice versa."  Sure, right now pitchers have the upper hand, there are more strikeouts, and fewer balls in play.  Eventually hitters will adjust, and the balance of power (literally) will shift.

Boswell reminds us how baseball "offers us pleasure and insight at so many levels and in so many forms."  There is history -- an "annual chapter each year since 1869."  At the ballpark itself there is "living theater and physical poetry."  And perhaps, "baseball gives us more pleasure, more gentle unobtrusive sustenance, away from the park than it does inside it," pouring over box scores, crunching statistics, debating players and teams with our cohorts, and watching games and highlights on TV.  "The ways that baseball insinuates itself into the empty corner, cheering up the odd hour, are almost too ingrained to notice."  Let's not fuck it up.