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the good and bad old days

The best words, the most fun words in our language are “Play ball.”

—FORMER COMMISSIONER OF BASEBALL PETER UEBERROTH

Before baseball can move ahead to confront the true challenges posed by the twenty-first century’s culture of distraction, it is necessary to distinguish between essential memories of the real game and an unwarranted idealization and mythicization of a pastime often presented as part of an age of innocence that never existed. When I hear older fans talk about this so-called innocence, I am always reminded of what one of my father’s contemporaries, a World War II combat veteran, said about the tendency of Americans to call the battle against the Nazis “the good war”—in contrast to the controversial “bad war” in Vietnam. “There are just wars,” my dad’s friend said, “but no war should ever be called good.”

I suspect that my own nostalgia, to the extent that it colors my thinking about baseball, has as much to do with the grandfather I loved, and with his bar, as with the game itself. But there is certainly nothing warm and fuzzy about the memory of racial epithets spouted in a major league ballpark six years after Jackie Robinson became the first black American to play in the twentieth-century major leagues. Indeed, this experience belonged to the decidedly unsentimental side of my education, in a school more realistic and rigorous than the one I attended on weekdays.

Baseball, the business, is and always has been affected and afflicted by all the social realities of American life—from racial segregation through drug use. But if the business of baseball is just like life, the game of baseball, as it is played on the field, is anything but a reflection or representation of ordinary experience. Those of us who love the game between the lines should acknowledge that we love it precisely because it is not like life. Baseball, played as it should be, is fair and governed by rules. Never was the difference between baseball and life demonstrated more vividly, in a fashion that could be backed up by statistics as well as emotion, than during the thrilling 2016 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians—a seven-game drama with a final act that ended during the closing weeks of the most disturbing and mendacious presidential campaign in modern American history. Was the presidential election “rigged,” as then-candidate Donald J. Trump claimed? (Presumably it was not, since Trump won in the electoral college—while losing the popular vote—even though he had insisted that the proceedings were rigged against him.) But the millions of Americans, Trump and Hillary Clinton supporters alike, who forsook the endless campaign coverage for the World Series could be certain of one thing: the spectacle they were watching on the field wasn’t rigged—right through the dramatic ten-inning comeback win by the Cubs in the seventh game. According to Nielsen Sports, more than forty million Americans tuned in to the decisive contest, making it the most-watched baseball game in twenty-five years. It may not be surprising that in Chicago and Cleveland, 70 and 69 percent of households with television sets on were tuned to the game. (This figure is known as a “share” in the ratings industry.) What is more surprising is that throughout the country, in places with no rooting interest in either team, the share was 40 percent.¹ Viewership for the seventh game of the 2017 World Series, in which the Houston Astros defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers, was down 28 percent from the 2016 seventh game. The lower ratings were due not to any lack of excitement in the overall seven-game series but to a more pedestrian final game, in which the Astros took command with five runs in the first two innings.

In both 2016 and 2017—years marked by political upheavals and natural disasters—a lifelong baseball fan could be reasonably certain of one thing: the men on the field were playing by the rules, and most of the rules would have been just as recognizable to my grandfather as they are to me. Yet for any modern fan who looks at baseball honestly, nostalgia cannot be the driving force in love of the game.

Yes, I plead guilty to a wistful longing for more of the day games I remember from my childhood, but the truth is that during the week, like most adults, I can make time only to watch night games. I still hate the American League’s designated hitter rule, adopted in 1973, which eliminates a key strategic element from the game—the manager’s decision about when or whether to remove a pitcher in favor of a pinch hitter. And I am not happy about the game’s current tilt toward strikeouts and home runs (both of which have been occurring at a record rate in recent years).² I realize that there are many fans who can’t get enough of home runs, but I am already sick of seeing too many games in which sluggers hit the ball out of the park with no one on base but seem unable to bring a runner home from third with less than two out by hitting an undramatic fly ball or single. I state these reservations up front in the interest of truth-in-packaging. Fans like me, according to one writer who favors speeding up the game, have “grouchy” reasons for resisting any proposed changes in baseball. Grouchy reasons such as “the sanctity of the record books” and “the game’s intergenerational history.” Grouchy reasons that amount to “tired pieties that hold progress at bay.”³ But is it grouchy to insist on distinguishing between changes for the better and changes for the worse? Baseball, despite its robustness as a business, faces a number of serious challenges that guarantee change in the next decade. The question is which changes will enhance rather than detract from the special national significance and beauty of the game.

Indeed, part of the reason I love baseball as much as I did when I was a child is the game’s periodic ability to reinvent itself and transcend some of its self-inflicted abominations as well as external social pressures.

When I was a child, back in the “good old days,” Major League Baseball (M.L.B.) operated with a so-called reserve clause in the uniform contract that prevented a player from negotiating for what his services were worth on the open market and bound him to one team for his playing life—unless his owner agreed to trade him (or, as also happened, traded him against his will). Baseball as it was then, however famous and beloved some of its stars became, resembled nothing so much as indentured servitude. This truth was not fully understood by the many American men who fantasized about the privilege of being a serf in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium. They seldom considered how they would feel if, when offered an ordinary job by an employer at a higher salary, they could not accept because their present “owner” had exclusive rights to their services. I heard almost no talk about the economics of baseball when I was learning the game as a child. My grandfather did mention Babe Ruth’s famous response, when, in 1930, a reporter asked him whether he thought he ought to be making $80,000 a year when President Herbert Hoover’s salary was only $75,000. “I had a better year than Hoover,” the Babe supposedly said.⁴

The reserve clause was hardest on great players like Ernie Banks, whom no owner in his right mind would have traded in the prime of his career. Mediocre players, by contrast, sometimes had the good fortune to be traded and land on a winning team. The reserve clause was finally abolished in 1975 after years of bitter dispute, culminating in a lockout of players by owners who refused to accept an arbitrator’s ruling—upheld by the courts—against them. Although the owners had predicted that the end of the reserve clause would mean the end of baseball as a business, that did not (surprise, surprise!) happen.⁵ Eventually, the owners and the players’ union reached an agreement, modified many times over the years, in which any player can become a “free agent,” and negotiate with any team, after six years in the major leagues. Yet even today there are curmudgeons who fulminate about the vast riches a great, or even an average, player can acquire under the current system. This sentiment is probably the reason why Marvin Miller, head of the players’ union between 1966 and 1982—the bitter height of the battle over the reserve clause—has, shamefully, not been admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I am not among the curmudgeons. Why shouldn’t players with extraordinary skills—skills that, as baseball statistics tell us clearly, decline for nearly everyone after the early thirties—make what they are worth to their teams in the days of their youth? I don’t begrudge Gary Carter or Reggie Jackson the money they made or the money I spent on tickets to see them play. (Jackson, who signed a five-year, $2.96 million contract with George Steinbrenner’s New York Yankees in 1976, was among the early free agents who were able to take advantage of the reserve clause’s demise. One of the most frequent comments from older fans at the time was that no one playing “a kid’s game” was worth that much money—which didn’t stop the grumblers from watching Jackson’s epic home runs.) Why would I, as a fan, feel nostalgic for the days when the player who provided the thrills called his employer his owner? The brilliant pitcher Tom Seaver—the face of the young Mets franchise and its transformative leader from lovable losers into 1969 world champions—was traded to the Cincinnati Reds in 1977 after M. Donald Grant, the Mets’ chairman of the board, told him, “You’re making too much money at a young age. It isn’t good for you.”* As Seaver explained to the writer Roger Angell, “My owner said that to me. And for me to say ‘my owner’ is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Does anybody own anybody else in this country?”⁶ There is a strong case to be made that if baseball had not reinvented its business model, with the players pushing the owners every step of the way, the preindustrial character of the game’s labor relations would eventually have poisoned the well for many fans as well as the players themselves.

*Seaver had signed a three-year contract in 1974—a year before the abolition of the reserve clause—paying him $225,000 a year. The salary was much lower than that commanded by the best of the new free-agent class—Reggie Jackson being a prime example. When Grant refused to renegotiate his contract, Seaver agreed to a trade (and the Cincinnati Reds agreed to pay him far more).

To cite a smaller example of baseball’s capacity for reinvention—or for correcting its own mistakes—one need only turn to the 1980s, the heyday of artificial turf—surely one of the greatest atrocities produced by late-twentieth-century technology’s application to sports. Fake turf is now a bad chapter in baseball history, in part because its unyielding surface was responsible for many player injuries. When it came time to build new parks to replace the artificial turf stadiums dating from the 1970s, the green of the field was, once again, made of grass. The 1992 opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, the first of the new grassy “retro” parks, was part of a process of self-correction at which baseball seems, albeit often grudgingly, to excel.

Of course, putting sod back on the playing field is much easier than facing and correcting a moral flaw that undermines the perception of baseball’s fairness—the heart of the game’s enduring appeal. The steroid era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which casts doubt on every record set during that period, was just such a moral flaw, and it vitiates the marketing of nostalgia to fans over age twenty. Both players and owners initially preferred to turn a blind eye to what was happening. In 2007, a report submitted to the commissioner of baseball by former senator George Mitchell of Maine concluded that for more than ten years, there had been “widespread use of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing substances by players… in violation of federal law and federal policy,” and that those “who have illegally used these substances range from players whose major league careers were brief to potential members of the Baseball Hall of Fame.”⁷ (Mitchell, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998 after helping broker a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, was a man whose judgment and impeccable negotiating credentials could not be dismissed.) He had plenty of hard evidence for his report, because in 2002, M.L.B. and the players’ union had signed the first random-drug-testing agreement for players. In 2005, disgusted fans had listened as their former athletic idols did their best to evade the questions of a congressional investigating committee. For most viewers, the evasions came across as outright lies—though they were clever lies that did not meet a legal definition of perjury. Given the public’s general disapproval of Congress’s performance, expressed in repeated public opinion polls, it ought to be difficult for any witness at a legislative hearing to appear insolent rather than sympathetic. Nevertheless, the former slugger Mark McGwire managed it. His mantra throughout the 2005 hearings was “I’m not here to talk about the past.” What fan, after hearing that, could feel like anything but a dupe for having taken great pleasure in the 1998 contest between McGwire and Sammy Sosa in pursuit of Roger Maris’s record of 61 home runs in a single season? (McGwire wound up with 70 homers and Sosa with 66.) Sosa, who also testified before the committee, was more measured in his language. “To be clear, I have never taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs,” he said. That sounds clear enough, were it not for the fact that over-the-counter anabolic steroids are legal in Sosa’s native Dominican Republic, where he spent much of the off-season. One of the saddest cases was Rafael Palmeiro, who flatly denied using steroids but tested positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol just two months later—as he was closing in on his 3,000th hit. Palmeiro, one of only five players in baseball history to have ended his career with more than 3,000 hits and 500 home runs, would surely have been elected to the Hall of Fame had he not been entangled in the steroid mess. Moreover—unlike some other high-profile players involved in the investigations—he was always considered a model teammate and a model of community service off the field. Nearly all the players who were engulfed by the steroid scandal, including Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, would probably have been great had they never used banned performance-enhancing drugs to extend their careers, heal from injuries more swiftly, and bulk up their muscles—thereby pursuing an advantage over those who played by baseball’s traditional rules. It should be noted here that because baseball had no drug-testing policy in the 1990s, these players are guilty only in the court of baseball opinion, as reflected in the Mitchell report. In real criminal proceedings, Clemens was acquitted of federal perjury charges in 2012, and Bonds’s conviction for obstruction of justice was overturned by a federal appeals court. (Human growth hormone, which Clemens was accused of using, is much more difficult than anabolic steroids to detect in urine.)

The history of the steroid era remains highly contested today, since many star players from the 1990s have been (so far) barred from enshrinement in Cooperstown. That may change, because younger members of the Baseball Writers’ Association (the group that selects Hall of Fame members) tend to judge players like Clemens and Bonds less harshly than their older colleagues for having set records while juiced up on banned performance-enhancing drugs. On this issue, I hope that the older heads prevail. I consider it entirely possible, though, that future generations of sportswriters, raised in a culture far more permissive regarding many types of drugs than was the case as recently as the 1980s, will decide that the statute of limitations has expired and let the ancient steroid users into the Hall of Fame. (One of the stupidest arguments for granting the drug abusers a pass is the frequently proffered rationale that players like Babe Ruth were known to drink heavily and there is no reason why they should be in the Hall of Fame while Bonds and McGwire are kept out. This argument ignores the fact that alcohol, unlike steroids and human growth hormone, is a performance-impairing rather than a performance-enhancing drug—on and off the field.)

The real importance of the Mitchell report, with its account of a pervasive drug culture within baseball, lies in its application to the spirit as well as the letter of rules designed to establish an equal playing field.

No one has articulated the significance of rules more precisely, albeit in a different context, than A. Bartlett Giamatti, best known as a classics scholar and the president of Yale before he became president of the National League in 1986 and commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1989. Giamatti was interpreting baseball’s rules against players gambling on the game, but the same logic would later apply to stars who had set records while using banned drugs.

In Giamatti’s final act as commissioner—his time in office lasted only five months because he died of a heart attack at age fifty-one—he banned Pete Rose from the game for life because he bet on baseball as a player and a manager. The commissioner’s statement combined idealism with tough-mindedness, and it upheld a standard of fairness somewhat higher than the measures of fairness, insofar as they exist, are applied to life outside the lines.

I believe baseball is a beautiful and exciting game, loved by millions—I among them—and I believe baseball is an important, enduring American institution.… It will come as no surprise that like any institution composed of human beings, this institution will not always fulfill its highest aspirations. I know of no earthly institution that does. But this one, because it is so much a part of our history as a people and because it has such a purchase on our national soul, has an obligation to the people for whom it is played—to its fans and well-wishers—to strive for excellence in all things and promote the highest ideals.

I will be told that I am an idealist. I hope so. I will continue to locate ideals I hold for myself and my country in the national game as well as in other of our national institutions. And while there will be debate and dissent about this or that or another occurrence on or off the field, and while the game’s nobler parts will always be enmeshed in the human frailties of those who, whatever their role, have the stewardship of this game, let there be no doubt or dissent about or goals for baseball or our dedication to it. Nor about our vigilance and vigor—and patience—in protecting the game from blemishes or stain or disgrace.

The matter of Mr. Rose is now closed. It will be debated and discussed. Let no one think that it did not hurt baseball. The hurt will pass, however, as the great glory of the game asserts itself and a resilient institution goes forward. Let it also be clear that no individual is superior to the game.⁸

That last sentence illustrates to perfection why the game of baseball (as distinct from the business of baseball) is quite unlike American life. To Rose’s defenders, who consider it a travesty that baseball’s all-time hit leader (at 4,256) is not in the Hall of Fame, every word in Giamatti’s statement condemns him as an unreasonable prig. But Giamatti was not a prig, if one accepts the various dictionary definitions that define priggishness as a self-righteous moralism that assumes superiority to others. Giamatti’s conclusion that no individual is superior to the game is surely one he would have applied to any person involved in baseball—including himself. Baseball must not only be fair; it must be seen to be fair—even, or especially, when its finest players are involved. That is all Giamatti was saying. That is all, and that is more than enough.

I like to imagine, had Giamatti lived long enough to leave his mark on the game as a strong commissioner, that he might have done more than his successors to head off the era of steroid abuse. But I also doubt that a sophisticated man who took as much pleasure in the action on the baseball diamond as he did in the gems of Renaissance art and literature, would have given up on the game because it didn’t comport precisely with his childhood memories. So what if I would prefer that the Cubs, as well as all other teams, play more of their games in sunlight? Could anything have been more exciting, during the day or night, than the team winning its first World Series since 1908 after falling behind three games to one in 2016? Could anything have been more uplifting, in the final weeks of a campaign fueled by resentment of the Other, to see our oldest national game being played at the highest level by people of various races, nationalities, and ethnicities?

Baseball is a game—a beautiful and admirable game that originated in a particular part of the North American continent, the United States of America, for a crazy quilt of reasons that have never been pinned down by legions of obsessed sports historians. That, too, is enough. Make baseball more than an engrossing, difficult, stimulating, and beautiful game, and you set yourself up for bitterness and disappointment.

Consider the case of the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, whose 1954 observation “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” is probably the most widely quoted encomium to a sport ever written by an intellectual.⁹ Not so widely quoted are Barzun’s more hyperbolic descriptions of the game at the midpoint of the twentieth century, among them “Happy is the man in the bleachers. He is enjoying the spectacle that the gods on Olympus contrived only with difficulty when they sent Helen to Troy and picked their teams.”¹⁰ But things didn’t work out well in Troy—not, at least, for the humans on the divinely chosen teams. Barzun went on to describe baseball as “the true realm of clear ideas”—a game unlike any known in Europe. “That baseball fitly expresses the powers of the nation’s mind and body,” Barzun added, “is a merit separate from the glory of being the most active, agile, varied, articulate, and brainy of all group games.”¹¹

It cannot be emphasized enough that the French-born Barzun was writing at the height of American power in the American century, at a time when baseball managed the neat trick of representing the values of a more pastoral, often mythical American past as well as the promise of a better, different kind of future—embodied most visibly by the entry of black Americans into the major leagues. Barzun’s analysis of baseball was a tribute not only to a sport but to the unifying American cultural values the sport represented (or so it was thought at the time). As we now know, the 1950s marked the beginning of the end of a period when the vast majority of Americans believed in the existence of a homogeneous culture. The fragility and exclusionary nature of many supposedly unifying values would not begin to manifest themselves forcefully until the late 1960s. It may not be surprising, though it is saddening, that a man who had compared the fans in the bleachers to the gods might be embittered when, by the end of the century, ballparks seemed to have acquired elements (for example, exploding scoreboards, ear-shattering music) more reminiscent of Hades than of Olympus. Barzun, who died in 2007 just a few weeks short of his 106th birthday, had reportedly changed his mind about the game altogether by the early 1990s, when he was quoted by many sources to the effect that he had become “so disgusted with baseball, I don’t follow it anymore.”* The commercialization of the game, he charged, was “beyond anything we ever thought, the overvaluing, really, of the game itself. It’s out of proportion to the place an entertainment ought to have.”¹² Well, yes. But comparing baseball to the Trojan War and the enjoyment of bleacher creatures to the gods on Olympus did not exactly place the game within the ordinary realm of entertainment either.

*I am fudging this attribution because, although the quote appears in many articles by sportswriters and on many baseball Web sites, none of the references explain under exactly what circumstances Barzun was supposed to have renounced baseball and all its works. His comment is always said to have been made in 1993.

I can understand the depth and timing of Barzun’s disappointment in the business of baseball. The second half of the 1990s ushered in the steroid era, but the first half produced the greedy expansion that established three divisions in each league, thereby ensuring a third lucrative round of playoffs. More often than not, the ensuing wild-card playoffs send at least one genuinely mediocre team to a “postseason” that, in the northern states, often threatens to run into the first November snowdrops. The three-tier playoff system began in 1995. It was supposed to start a year earlier, but the entire 1994 postseason was wiped out as the result of a prolonged labor battle. The cancellation of the 1994 World Series enraged fans of all ages and revived the old resentment about player salaries. Indeed, the unwillingness of many in baseball to confront steroid use could be traced, in part, to the fact that juiced-up sluggers and home run derbies had brought fans back to the ballpark after the labor strife that characterized the first half of the decade.

Nevertheless, baseball—the beautiful but decidedly non-Olympian pastime—not only did penance for its sins but, through some tortuous labor negotiations, figured out a way to transcend them and discourage (though not rule out) repetition of the same follies. Pharmacological criminals have a tremendous financial incentive to develop and distribute new, undetectable drugs, and some players have shown that they will still take a chance on detectable drugs and hope that they don’t get tested at an inopportune time. But that is the business of baseball, dealing with its problems exactly as other businesses do. The game on the field, however, has remained something more in tune with hopes that real life often dashes.

Baseball was first called “the national pastime” in print (insofar as scholars have been able to trace the history of the trillions of words written about the sport) by the New York Mercury on December 5, 1856. The game that would evolve into modern baseball, distinguished by the configuration of a diamond rather than a square or oval and the division of the playing field into fair and foul territory, was largely an urban and a New York–area pastime in the decade before the Civil War. Porter’s Spirit of the Times, one of the earliest publications to provide extensive coverage of sports, described pre–Civil War baseball as “the National game in the region of the Manhattanese.”¹³ So much for the myth of baseball’s pastoral origins—one of the many sentimental notions perpetrated and perpetuated throughout much of the twentieth century by gifted writers who ignored the fact that the first organized (though not professional) baseball teams outside Brooklyn and Manhattan appeared before the Civil War in such decidedly nonpastoral environs as St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland. Semiprofessional teams flourished in the decade after the war as industrialization and immigration swelled the population of cities in a legally (if not ethically or socially) reunited nation. Baseball was not yet an organized business; the better-known players were paid from unpredictable gate revenue and were in the position of insecure, albeit talented, freelance writers.

In 1869, Cincinnati’s Red Stockings became the country’s first openly professional team, touring the nation and providing season contracts for players.* Cincinnati was no more representative of a pastoral idyll than any of the other American cities with a lively baseball scene. Located in what was something of a gray area regarding attitudes toward slavery in the antebellum era (though Ohio was a nonslave state and fought for the Union), the border town became a boom town in the first decade after the Civil War.^† In a sense, it was fitting that the first professional baseball team should emerge in a place on the cutting edge (almost literally) of a conflict that had come so close to destroying the American union. That conflict would, of course, continue to unfold within the segregated “national pastime” for more than eight decades.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the business of baseball has never looked healthier financially. Even before the blockbuster 2016 World Series, baseball pulled in annual revenues—from sponsorships, television contracts, and gate receipts—of more than $9 billion. Between 2015 and 2016 alone, money from sponsorships over the lifetime of contracts rose by 60 percent—from $225–250 million to $360–400 million.¹⁴

*The Red Stockings were not related to the current Cincinnati Reds, who date their continuous franchise, under slightly different names, from 1882.

^† In southern Illinois and Indiana, there were similar patterns of ambivalence about slavery—especially when people had relatives on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line.

Yet it could be a mistake of Ruthian proportions to predict the financial fortunes of baseball on the basis of current revenues. Although baseball’s dailiness is one of the main factors distinguishing “the national pastime” from other professional sports, interest in the game is also unusually susceptible both to the occasional spectacular World Series—and to a succession of dull seasons in which no one except fans of a particular team picks a favorite or cares who wins in the postseason.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, average attendance in ballparks was flat—around 15,000 fans per game.¹⁵ But in 1975, the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds played an extraordinary seven-game series, won by the Reds, that attracted large television audiences throughout the country. No one who was watching will ever forget the moment when the Boston catcher Carlton Fisk won the sixth game in the twelfth inning with a home run just inside the left-field foul pole. I can see, as if it were yesterday, Fisk gyrating toward fair territory with his entire body after he hit the ball—as if he still had any control over where the ball would land. The whole series, won by the Reds in the seventh game, mesmerized fans like me, who had no rooting interest in either team. The following year, baseball attendance topped 30 million for the first time in the history of the game. In 1977, average attendance was more than 18,000 per game—an increase of 20 percent from the pre-1975 figures.

The 1975 World Series was not the only force contributing to the cyclical revival of interest in baseball in the second half of the decade.

I turned thirty that year, and, like many people my age, my interests had focused on the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the beginning of the feminist movement throughout the sixties. I never completely lost interest in the game that was the love of my youth; when I was living in Moscow and beginning my first book in the summer of 1969, I would phone the American embassy regularly to find out the score of the most recent Mets game. But baseball was definitely on the back burner until I was caught up in the 1975 Series, which reminded me of everything about the game at its best.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed it. For whatever reason, I returned to the ballpark to follow the Mets in person in 1976—just in time, as luck would have it, for the team to fall into a torpor under the stewardship of the owner foolish enough to let Seaver get away. And so it came to pass that the baseball gods would take their revenge in 1985, when Seaver won his 300th game in New York, where he was pitching for the Chicago White Sox against the Yankees in the Bronx. Oh, how I wished the milestone had been reached at Shea Stadium. What a wondrous thing it would have been to have Seaver on the rising 1985 Mets team to impart his pitching wisdom to the great young staff that included Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, and Sid Fernandez. And how good it is to remember Seaver fighting hard for Number 300, at age forty, his face and physique the face and physique of a middle-aged man unenhanced by drugs—not throwing as hard as he did when he was young but winning with guile and grit.

But still, there is no real case to be made that baseball was much better way back when—because “when” means different things to fans of different putative golden ages. I prefer Seaver’s way to Clemens’s way, but that does not mean baseball was a more innocent game in the 1980s than it is today. Baseball’s real challenges in this century lie elsewhere, in the way we use our minds rather than the other parts of our bodies.

The greatest problem baseball confronts in the twenty-first century is that it derives much of its enduring appeal from a style of play and adherence to tradition very much at odds with our current culture. In one sense, it seems ridiculous to speak about baseball as “challenged,” given the profitability of the sport for both players and owners. But the demographic makeup of baseball’s typical television audience delineates the challenge: it has the oldest, whitest fan base of any major sport.

If I weren’t a woman, I would fit the typical fan profile perfectly. Nearly six out of ten fans for nationally televised baseball games are white men over fifty-five. Only one out of four people watching baseball on television is under thirty-five. Baseball also has fewer female and African-American fans than N.B.A. basketball, N.F.L. football or NASCAR. In only one respect does the baseball audience, whether at the ballparks or in front of television sets, resemble the changing demographics of American society: the game has a growing proportion of Hispanic-American fans—especially among the young. But many statistics show that young African Americans, like young whites, have been tuning out baseball in growing numbers. The greater presence of young Hispanic Americans in the fan base is undoubtedly attributable to the rising numbers of Latin American stars in major league baseball. For a variety of reasons, the proportion of black American players has dropped steadily since its high point in the 1980s. Most fans like to watch sports (all forms of entertainment, for that matter) in which they can see themselves in the game’s brightest stars. If you’re young, gifted, and black, you see more people who look like you playing in the N.B.A. than in M.L.B. If you’re young, gifted, and Hispanic, baseball is the sport that permits you to see yourself on the field.

There is an aspirational quality about being a serious sports fan, even if you know deep down that you will never be good enough (if you are a kid) or would never have been good enough (if you are an adult) to play the game at the highest level. As a girl, I knew perfectly well that girls did not grow up to play big-league baseball, but that did not stop me from fantasizing about playing second base, like my hero Nellie Fox, for the White Sox. Fantasy is part of becoming a fan, even though the fantasy of becoming a major league baseball star must eventually be discarded by most men as well as women. That is not to say that someday a woman of extraordinary physical and athletic endowments might not reach the major leagues but that the odds against such a cometlike emergence are high. I would certainly like to be around to see the woman who breaks that glass ceiling (or green floor).

While gender, ethnicity, and race all affect baseball’s fan base to one degree or another, I suspect that the aging of baseball’s audience is largely attributable to the profound dissonance between a culture saturated with devices that offer instant gratification and a sport that requires intense, sustained concentration from its fans. Here I must acknowledge that every new technology has brought forth predictions about the death of baseball, often from shortsighted owners as well as from the sporting press. It seems almost incredible today to recall that both radio and television were initially viewed by many owners and sportswriters not as media that would expand the total audience for the game but as zero-sum competitors for ballpark attendance. Of course, one explanation for the animus of a large segment of the sporting press toward radio in the early 1920s was that announcers were becoming better known than newspaper sportswriters. One of my favorite quotes, from the Sporting News in 1925, warned that baseball “is more an inspiration to the brain through the eye than it is by the ear.… A nation that begins to take its sport by the ears will shortly adapt the white flag as its emblem, and the dove as its national bird.”¹⁶ (If there were a prize for mixed metaphors, this long-forgotten eruption would surely be a finalist.) In the late 1940s and early 1950s, television produced the same kind of anxiety about attendance from legendary baseball executives like Yankees General Manager Larry MacPhail (who tried and failed to prevent the sale of television rights to the 1947 World Series) and Dodgers President Branch Rickey. Eventually, of course—and sooner rather than later—all the clubs sold their television rights, and no one benefited more for decades than big-city teams.

Nevertheless, I must and do insist that the digital media are different. Listening to a game on radio or watching one on television demanded the same amount of time and attention as actually going to the ballpark. The difficulty of staying “in the game” in our culture of constant interruptions is responsible for the perception that nothing much is going on in sports that do not involve frequent scoring, as basketball does, or unpredictable shifts from defense to offense and vice versa. Neither radio nor television (with the exception of the small transistor radios that were used mainly on beaches and, surreptitiously, to check the score of World Series day games in school) was portable and therefore a transmitter of inattention.

In any ballpark, you can see (literally) the ways in which devices interfere with the focus required to appreciate the game unfolding on the field. Many fans under, roughly, age fifty—and nearly everyone under thirty—are scrolling continuously through their iPhone screens as play proceeds in front of them. When I first saw this phenomenon at Citi Field, home of the Mets, I thought the iPhone fans might be checking for a close-up of a play they had just seen. I soon realized that most of the people with heads buried in their phones were either texting or watching another sporting event altogether. (And there is almost always a competing sports event; as is well known, baseball now overlaps in September with football and in the spring with basketball and hockey.) Fans checking out another game on a screen can no more be “in the game” in front of them than drivers can operate an automobile safely while texting.

Baseball’s vital moments, in comparison with most other sports’, cannot be appreciated fully without an understanding of what has—or has not—happened before. (The home run is often an exception to this rule.) But when you watch a runner on third base beat a throw home for a run, it means very little if you were playing a video game on your iPhone while the player was staying out of a double play two batters earlier. Yes, you know that the runner scored—but you don’t know exactly how and why he got to home plate. A dunk shot or a touchdown pass are much more dramatic in the moment, regardless of whether you understand what sort of bobbing and weaving or blocking and tackling made the scoring play possible. The perfect example of baseball’s demand for concentration is the classic 1–0 pitchers’ duel, which most novice fans find utterly boring. Most of the time, all that can be seen on the surface is hitter after hitter failing: making an out. Baseball executives have suggested in recent years that games are simply too long for many fans, but the real obstacle for many young fans may be the slow, sifting-and-sorting action within the game itself. Baseball is a game in which one must wait, pay attention, and wait again for startling, defining moments of action. Michael Haupert, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse who studies baseball as a business, puts it succinctly: “The problem for fans with a short attention span isn’t the length of a baseball game, but the perception that nothing is happening within the game. Especially a low-scoring game.”¹⁷ Something is happening, of course: pitchers are consistently getting major league hitters out by throwing the ball where it cannot be hit solidly. But you have to understand a great deal about pitch selection and the art of hitting to comprehend the immense difficulty of what is going on in front of your eyes. You’re not going to appreciate a shutout if you’re standing in line for pizza, texting your friends, and only occasionally looking up at the huge television screen visible from the pizza line.

There are, however, many other powerful, less obvious forces affecting baseball—one of them being widening income inequality coupled with the high cost of an adult-controlled youth sports culture that did not exist when major league baseball was at the height of its popularity. Low-income parents, of whatever race, cannot afford the cost of the long training period and the travel that characterizes elite youth leagues—which serve as feeders for both high-level college baseball programs and the minor leagues.

The major predictor of whether anyone becomes a fan of any sport is whether a person played the sport as a child. But youth sports meant something much less structured and less elaborate when I was growing up than they do today; in fact, sports did mean playing instead of working. I played baseball in pickup games until I reached puberty (the age when active sports ended for nearly every girl who grew up in the prefeminist era). Playing softball at recess or in the vacant lot at the end of my block actually did help me learn the game, even though I had absolutely no athletic talent. One of the greatest memories of my childhood involves knocking in a run with a double in a game between the two fifth-grade classes in my school. It was the only hit I ever got. I knew I had hit the ball solidly (because for me, that was such an unusual feeling) and screamed at the runner on first to “go, go, go.” Neither my utter lack of talent nor my gender prevented me from becoming a passionate fan, but I am not sure that would have been true had I never enjoyed the actual experience of playing pickup ball. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

That old saw would be anathema to anyone involved in the increasingly expensive and semiprofessionalized youth sports culture that has emerged during the past two decades in middle-class and upper-middle-class America. For athletically talented teenagers (in all sports, not only baseball), specialization is the name of the game. Baseball’s complicated set of skills is now honed by private coaches and elite traveling youth leagues. In the hope of their child obtaining a college athletic scholarship, parents may spend thousands of dollars a year. Private coaching concentrates on power pitching and power hitting—the surest way to attract the attention of recruiters for the best-known college baseball programs and the minor leagues. One unexpected result: because fielding is given short shrift, many players who do obtain those coveted scholarships have to be taught how to throw the ball across the infield. At Tufts University, John Casey—a former president of the American Baseball Coaches Association—informs his players on the first day of practice: “You’re no longer in the showcase world of display, display, display. We play baseball here—hit the cutoff man, do the little things that win games.” He has also been known to further admonish the players that they have “been hitting off a tee in an indoor cage way too much. You could teach a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette to hit a baseball off a tee.”¹⁸

Some researchers have concentrated not on income inequality but on the increase in single-parent households headed by women as the reason for the declining interest of teenagers, particularly African-American teenagers, in baseball. Until I began working on this book, I had no idea that there is an entire body of research (part of it academic, part conducted by the sports industry itself) suggesting that the single-mother home is the source of the problem. “We’re looking at a generation who didn’t play catch with their dads,” says David Ogden, professor of communications at the University of Nebraska–Omaha and the author of a fifteen-year study of ten thousand youth baseball players. “Kids are just not being socialized into the game.” The number of fatherless households among African Americans, Ogden suggests, is the main reason why the proportion of black players in the major leagues has fallen steadily during the past three decades.¹⁹ Without those dads playing catch with their little boys, there is no natural pipeline into the big leagues. (This would strike me as a dubious proposition even if I didn’t know that Jackie Robinson’s father abandoned his family when Jackie was a baby.)

I do not doubt the validity of Ogden’s statistics, but neither would I be surprised to learn that children from two-parent homes are more likely to be admitted to a top-notch university. Children raised by two parents have a great many advantages, period. Nor does Ogden’s theory explain why teenage participation in all sports except soccer has dropped sharply since the turn of the millennium. Upper-middle-class parents, who spend a good deal of time shuttling their kids from one sporting competition to another, find this hard to believe. But the drop in youth sports participation is evident in every study of the subject and correlates not only with the rise of expensive elite training for promising high school students but with the increase in the amount of time teenagers spend on the Web. Correlation and causation are not, of course, identical, but the single mother as baseball killer seems to me a much less plausible hypothesis than either the cost of elite baseball training or the preoccupation of many teenagers with video games and social media. After all, African Americans do learn to play basketball and grow up to become the largest group of players in the N.B.A. Is shooting hoops with fathers somehow less important than playing catch? While it is true that you can practice a jump shot by yourself but cannot catch a ball without someone to throw it to you, it is also true that getting a ball to fall through the hoop without defenders is extremely easy and teaches little about how to play basketball as a team sport.

My guess is that in two-parent as well as single-parent households, regardless of race or ethnicity, a child would have to be spectacularly talented—and the parents unusually sports-oriented—for a family to come up with several thousand dollars for special training on the slim hope that a teenager with a sweet swing will one day become a major league player. In spite of the natural desire to see children live out their dreams, most parents are not blind to the cruel trap that college athletic scholarships (in all sports) can pose for young people who will never make it to the pros—that is, for the vast majority of college players. The “student-athlete” who is given a pass on a research paper so that he or she can have more time for practice may wind up with a diploma and no job on or off a playing field.

In Latin America, the economic calculus for boys who focus on baseball in their early teens is completely different. The Dominican Republic, which has produced so many of the game’s sparkling players since the 1960s (and where baseball has been popular since the last two decades of the nineteenth century) is a poor country with few job opportunities offering an escape from poverty. In 1983, Juan Marichal, who spent most of his career with the San Francisco Giants and won more games than any other major league pitcher during the 1960s, became the first Dominican-born player elected to the Hall of Fame. Pedro Martínez became the second Dominican elevated to Cooperstown in 2015. There are certain to be more Dominicans elected in the future. During the past three decades, M.L.B. has invested in youth leagues and first-class training for young Dominicans—and has been able to underwrite that training at a much lower cost than in the United States. Alan Klein, an historian of Latin American baseball, notes that the young hopefuls in the Dominican Republic have signed professional contracts but are not yet ready even for the rookie level of the minors in the United States. “The academies… offer the young players a world of plenty,” Klein writes, “the likes of which they have never seen: as much food as they want, living conditions about which many could only have dreamed. They play with equipment that is second to none. With the material bonanza, however, comes a demand they not only comply as they never have before but also perform at ever increasing levels of baseball excellence.… They will be expected to learn new things and function in ways they cannot fully grasp to get to the United States, and no player gets to the United States without going through the academies.”²⁰

Under the leadership of Rob Manfred, commissioner since 2014, baseball is making a serious effort to bring more young African-American players back to the game—which would presumably attract more African-American fans. M.L.B. now operates a dozen urban academies in cities with predominantly black populations—programs that subsidize the elite level training that more affluent parents underwrite themselves. Such programs are not, of course, open only to African Americans, but they are concentrated in areas, like Compton, California, that used to produce more major league players at a time when expensive instruction for teens had not become a key element in player development. I have not been able to find any studies focusing on the proportion of current M.L.B. players born into poor white families, but it is reasonable to assume that working-class whites are no better able than working-class blacks to come up with the money for teenagers to spend their summers in traveling youth leagues instead of contributing to the family budget by working in fast-food restaurants.

The specialization of youth sports after middle school is the work of a society in which the culture of anyone playing catch with anyone seems as remote as the culture of my grandfather’s bar. The umpire may still say “Play ball,” but the message of adolescent specialization is “Work ball.” Baseball is trying to address that problem too. In 2015, M.L.B. began a nationwide program called “Play Ball,” which subsidizes informal baseball- and softball-related games like wiffle ball and stickball, for both boys and girls.

The inclusion of girls in these programs offers a nod to yet another of baseball’s demographic problems—the relatively small presence of female fans. Many more women watch regular-season, nationally televised football than baseball (an average of 6.2 million versus 141,000 for each game day in 2015, according to Nielsen).²¹

Manfred, in an interview with me in the summer of 2016, emphasized that baseball remains the sport played by the largest number of children under twelve. “The real challenge is to keep kids interested after that, with all of the competition for their attention,” he said. One of M.L.B.’s answers is its popular At Bat app, which, according to Manfred, is opened eight million times a day. The average age of users is under thirty. The question is whether snippets of games and baseball statistics are complementary to or competitive with the real thing. A few days after interviewing Manfred, I found myself in a New York City subway car next to a teenager who was using the At Bat app and wearing the cap of my beloved Mets. I asked if he had seen forty-three-year-old Bartolo Colón’s outstanding 4–1 outing on the mound for the Mets the night before. He hadn’t, he said, because he got bored when there was no scoring in the first three innings. He had, however, checked the final score before going to bed. This young man was certainly a fan—but a very different kind of fan from old folks who wouldn’t dream of turning off a scoreless game after three innings. Obviously, anyone who uses the At Bat app, which enables viewers to access highlights from all major league games without actually watching an entire game, understands the mechanics and rules of baseball. And anyone who checks the score of his favorite team at night before going to bed has a rooting interest in the game. What this young man lacked was patience and the ability to concentrate at a time when balls weren’t being hit out of the park. He wasn’t interested enough to spend an hour (roughly the length of the three innings) watching Colón’s fascinating and mysterious ability to control the movement of an 88-mile-per-hour fastball with the pressure of his fingertips. There was no scoring at the beginning and—this being baseball—there was no guarantee that there would be any scoring in the next three or six innings. Manfred sees the three-hour-plus length of the average baseball game as a major problem for young fans. But most proposals to shorten games (such as the silly elimination of actually throwing pitches to the plate for an intentional walk, which went into effect in 2017) shave only minutes off the game. It is difficult to make a case that my companion on the subway would have watched Colón’s outing if the game had turned out to last two hours and forty-five minutes rather than three hours: both are unacceptable if you’re looking for continuous action.*

Baseball is a game, to borrow a phrase from the writer Grace Paley, of “enormous changes at the last minute.” The dramatic winning home run is less surprising if the hitter has been taking “hard swings” throughout the game and “just missing the pitch,” as sportscasters like to say.

*Colón won fifteen games—more than any other pitcher for the Mets in 2016. He was twenty years older than his nearest competitor, Noah Syndergaard, who won fourteen. Despite the pudgy middle-aged pitcher’s winning ways and enormous popularity with fans, Mets management traded him to the Atlanta Braves, for whom he had a rocky start in 2017. In August, however, he turned up on the Minnesota Twins at age forty-four and became the oldest major league pitcher to throw a complete game since Jamie Moyer of the Phillies did it in 2010. After a standing ovation from the hometown crowd in Minneapolis—a familiar phenomenon for Colón—he said, “That was awesome.” Whether he was referring to himself or the crowd was unclear.

It is counterintuitive to say that a sport can be an enormous financial success while losing the attention of younger fans who are the future of any sport—both as a business and as an American tradition. Yet it is difficult not to see trouble ahead in baseball’s current television demographics. Nielsen, the arbiter of television ratings for generations, is now measuring viewing on mobile devices, but it is extremely difficult to determine how much of the game—as distinct from occasionally checking in—an individual is watching on an iPhone or iPad. Given what all of us, whatever our age, know about our truncated viewing habits on mobile platforms, it seems unlikely that the digitally distracted are watching a game with anything like the concentration of previous generations—whether raised on radio or on television. In theory, the ideal fan would be someone who watches some games on television and goes to the ballpark, if there is one within driving distance, several times a year. I am not talking about people who watch 162 games of a 162-game season. There is another name for this sort of fan—addict. Americans who plop themselves in front of the TV set and watch any sport for several hours every day are as addicted as those who spend hours on social media, playing video games, or engaging in “fantasy” sports on computers many hours a day.

The short and frequently interrupted concentration span of many Americans, so at odds with the traditions of baseball, is not a problem that can be solved in a direct, practical way—as the steroid crisis was dealt with through testing or the soulless artificial turf ballparks were fixed by laying down grass on new fields. Neither nostalgia for an innocence that never existed nor abandonment of the traditions that give the game its unique appeal will work. Those who own the game and play the game on the field must now face up to the tough job of thinking long-term in a society captivated by technologies that reward short-term thinking.