I’m not a sports guy. Hockey has generally been a preference but without much real fandom, despite marrying into hockey people. Baseball is one I could see future me getting into, particularly with two baby boys in the house now.
I’m also not a National Review reader, so I’m stepping outside of my wheelhouse a bit to critique Christian Schneider’s piece on baseball as the ultimate modern sport. There’s some mixed messaging toward the end of the piece, and Schneider clearly praises the continued and even increasing popularity of baseball. But the way he wanders there strikes me as nothing short of erroneous.
The conventional wisdom says that baseball is a “pastoral sport” that is, for better or worse, out of step with modernity. Except that it isn’t, says Schneider.
Here’s the thing, though: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Not a little wrong. Substantially wrong. Baseball isn’t a dying sport desperately clinging to its past. It’s one of the most modern entertainment products in America — and it’s been hiding in plain sight.
Why is baseball the ultimate modern sport? you ask. Schneider tells us. Because it has… fastballs, and dive-catches, and home run hits. It’s also quite clippable for social media consumption. And then there’s (get this) lots of data and analytics.
If you sat down and tried to design a sport for the analytics era — for the kind of person who enjoys arguing at dinner about underlying metrics and model-based projections — you would invent baseball. The sport now tracks launch angle, exit velocity, spin rate, barrel percentage, expected batting average, sprint speed, and, yes, actual swing mechanics in real time.
We can’t forget to add the fact that MLB has, according to Schneider, made concessions to modernity by altering some of its rules and practices, like pitch clocks and bases that are 18” wide instead of 15” wide. And lastly, because baseball is casual enough in its play and atmosphere for fans to talk to each other, that doesn’t actually mean that it’s casual enough in its play and atmosphere for fans to talk to each other; it means it’s a great “second screen” lifestyle sport perfectly tailored to modern screen-scrolling attention spans.
I hope I stumble upon some takedown response to Schneider from a writer with more knowledge and wit and love of the game than me, but I’ll happily plant a layman’s flag here and call foul. (I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist. And I rarely skip a chance to use the word bullshit.)
If you tried to design a sport for the analytics era, says Schneider, you’d invent baseball because — well, look at all the things we analyze! But Schneider could just as easily have said ping pong, or flying squirrels. The fact that a sport, or an event of any kind, can be grotesquely analyzed does not say one single meaningful thing about its design or value, especially for a game that goes back at least as far as the 1740’s.
In fact, follow that link and you’ll see that it’s precisely the point that baseball wasn’t designed for anything. The“conventional wisdom” for a long time had been that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York around 1840. But, uh, conventional wisdom was wrong, and it wasn’t just off by a hundred years:
[David] Block was offering a whole new way of approaching paternity. “Who is the father of baseball?” is the wrong question. As Thorn put it, “The game was not invented so much as it was accreted.”
That’s what Block is telling us. To put away the bedtime stories. To think of baseball as we would Homo sapiens, as something that crawled out of the primordial ooze at a hazy date in history and developed, slowly and mystifyingly, over the centuries. When you think like that, time spreads out before you like center field at the Polo Grounds. The first entry in Larry McCray’s Protoball chronology isn’t Doubleday. It’s “Overhand Throwing Evolves in Primates.”
[…]
This is the great irony of English baseball. Historians once assumed it went unrecorded because it didn’t exist. But it’s just as likely the sport wasn’t written about because it was mostly the stuff of commoners. Baseball was everywhere. The newspapers didn’t cover it because it was so mundane.
Modernity’s gaze of data-fication and social-media-fication and analyze-to-death-ification can be fixed on anything. As Sheldon and Alan Hirsch have argued in their book, The Beauty of Short Hops, the sabermetricians treat baseball as a game “where the players are primarily vehicles for organizing data — names to attach to sets of statistics.” But that means only that baseball has been “hijacked by people with such a mindset.”
Baseball is a game — a peaceful game! — intimately evolved among down-to-earth Homo sapiens. And down-to-earth Homo sapiens still love it. Is it the ultimate game for modernity? Or an anti-modern pastime being hijacked in plain sight?