Sitting on my couch, thinking about baseball, or rather "Base Ball," as Henry Chadwick called it. As I type this the new Yankee Stadium is set to open for its first live game — an exhibition between the Yankees and the Chicago Cubs (in which Derek Jeter got the first base hit and Robinson Cano got the first home run in the new Yankee Stadium).
My interest in baseball (we call it "baseball" today, Mr. Chadwick, though your biographer got it wrong) has diminished considerably over the last couple of seasons. I still watch games on TV and listen to the games inside my radio but I regard professional baseball as irrationally bloated with money and infested with an outsize sense of its own value to society. In baseball as in so much of modern times I think that today’s standards of success — affluence and media adoration — will be regarded by future generations as synonymous with gluttony and waste. I recognize that ours is a free market and that money flows as freely as the market will bear but I am nevertheless puzzled by the prestige granted to athletes in our society.
Henry Chadwick’s role in baseball history is well-established. He took sports journalism and made it a source for the popularity of the game. This inter-twining of disciplines escaped me until I learned that sports writers are among those who vote players into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
Baseball is a stats-centric sport and because of this I imagined that the criteria for Hall of Fame inductions were more formulaic and not influenced by editorial biases. That is a foolish thought but no more foolish than thousands of other thoughts puttering un-uttered around my mind.
My similarly näive notions of journalistic objectivity were bumped around when, in high school, I learned that newspapers traditionally endorse political candidates. News sources, I thought, were objective purveyors of news and stories about the world, not sculptors of public perception. I was wrong, of course — reporting and journalism differ in that reporting reports facts in a way that allows journalists to craft a story around it — but I still regard with suspicion that practice of newspapers endorsing political candidates. I have never been comfortable with journalists taking unobjective positions on matters like voting and public policy. I think it depletes the meaning of journalism, reducing it to entertainment.
The return of baseball also heralds the return of Avis Rental Cars’ "Wrestle With God" commercial. I call it "Wrestle With God" because the first several times I saw the commercial I thought the actor who said (in a thick Boston accent) "You guys ready to rent some cars?" was saying "You guys ready to wrestle God?" The apparent allusion to Old Testament (Genesis) Bible verse puzzled me the first several times I saw the commercial.
One of my favorite graveyard finds was Henry Chadwick’s baseball-themed tomb at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The marker appears to be actively maintained and contains atop its obelisk a giant granite baseball. It is one of the happiest grave sites I’ve ever seen. The marker is decorated with a catcher’s mask and other Base Ball ornaments. On the plaque we see the words "Base Ball," the two-worded name by which the game was known in Chadwick’s day. Chadwick did not invent Base Ball but he popularized it through his sports journalism and by inventing the box score, contributing mightily to crafting the public’s understanding of the sport.
My own understanding (if we can even call it something as rich as "understanding") of today’s sport of baseball is tremendously influenced by what reporters and sports writers say. When talking with friends about baseball I, like many casual fans of the sport, will simply repeat verbatim what one announcer or another said on the radio or television. I like to imagine that my world view is pure, or at least relatively un-polluted by the presumption of media authority, but I know that as far as baseball goes I generally just believe what they tell me. Nothing could be farther from the truth when matters turn to real news. I do not listen to television news so much as I interpret it, peeling away the sensationalism and other agendas to decide for myself what matters and what does not.
But for sports, in which the people covering the events are as much a part of the experience as the players, I choose to suspend critical thinking and take all of it for the entertainment that it is.
I think the game of baseball will endure not so much by virtue of its fundamental greatness but by the lack of competition. No other professional baseball league exists to compete with MLB.
A few friends and I sometimes amuse each other with talk of an XBL: an Extreme Baseball League with rule enhancements in the original spirit of the short-lived XFL (Extreme Football League). The XFL claimed its rule changes would, among other things, make the game rougher and more exciting, but XFL football looked pretty much like the NFL game. Two elements of XFL football that I remember were the creative names the players could put on their jerseys and the over-the-field camera that followed the game from overhead. The first time I saw that camera I predicted it would become standard in the NFL, and it did becaome standard.
My interest in an XBL, or in simply adjusting the rules of modern baseball, come from what I think is a fundamental flaw of the game: The pitching team can not score. It is the only one of the major U.S. sports where one team on the field can not score. There are no obscure rules or exotic technicalities that change this fact. The only possibly related technicality would be the forfeiture, in which a team could be awarded 9 runs without ever stepping onto the field. But that is not germain to my point, which is that baseball rules should exist to allow both teams on the field an opportunity to score runs.
One approach would be to reward strikeout pitching by giving the pitching team a run for every 5 strikeouts a pitcher throws in a game. This would raise the stature of a strikeout and of good strikeout pitchers, elevating the hard-earned strikeout to something more than just another out.
Another idea: Somehow a scenario should exist in which a runner at 3rd base and the 3rd basemen are required to race to home plate. The player reaching home plate first would score a run for their team. Thus, to be fair, it would have to be a scenario that both players could see coming and that gave them both enough time to line up at an even starting point. A possibility: When a batter reaches a full count of 3-2 and hits a fly ball then the 3rd baseman and a runner at 3rd would wait for a fielder to catch the ball then race to home plate. That’s not a perfectly designed scenario but that’s something like what I think could be done.
A more ludicrous scenario has players on the field entering into physical combat with players from the other team’s dugout. This scenario might imply that p
layers have some kind of weapon on them, a weapon that would have to be pretty light weight for the players to b
e able to carry them while playing the non-combat portion of the game. A fencing foil or an even lighter weapon would be used when, under some circumstance in the game, the players on the field enter hand-to-hand combat with the opposing team. I can imagine the players rushing from the dugout to take on the players on the field. Maybe weapons would be unnecessary and the players could start boxing or get into a controlled rugby-style scrum.
That is all I can think of at the moment, though a handful of web searches lead me to the N-XBL, the National Xtreme Baseball League. The N-XBL has what looks like an interesting variation on the game. I think I would need to see this game to appreciate and understand it but for now I am glad to know it exists.
Other XBL ideas I’ve come up with over the past few weeks.
* Some way to engage the players in the dugout so they are not just sitting there doing nothing for the majority of the game. I see a smaller field where the dugout sits directly along 1st and 3rd base baselines allowing players on the bench to harass or otherwise interact with the players on the opposing team.
* Announcers who speak their minds. I think announcers should be allowed to curse openly, suggest inadequacies of opposing players, and generally be shameless about favoring one team over the other. A game-winning home run could be described by announcers as a vulgar sex act, or as some other metaphor of disdainful conquering.
* Change the way television coverage focuses on the damn ball. Cameras always follow the ball while making the base runners and other action on the field invisible. I do not know if this implies a 70’s-style split-screen bit of hokum (but hey, why not?) or something more sophisticatedly interactive (oh how I hate that word “interactive”) but whatever the case I find that television coverage is inadequate at expressing the scope of the field. I think that replicating the experience of being at the stadium is more important than it might have been in previous generations because the cost of admission to a baseball games has become preposterous in some markets. For the price of a virtual reality headset and other gear I think that genuine baseball fans like me who have been priced out of stadium seating could at least get better coverage of the game and at best have an experience that is closer to actually being there.
* Another aspect of broadcast coverage involves radio. I may be influencing these thoughts from the specific coverage of the Yankees Radio Network, but I think there should be a premium service available which allows these announcers to keep talking through the commercial time. Commercials would still air for the non-paying audience but continued discussion and conversation among the booth announcers should somehow be allowed between innings. I think this is important because the announcers I listen to regularly begin discussion of something but are forced to abandon the subject when an inning abruptly ends.