Baseball is essentially a 19th-century sport that is no longer congruent with American cultural dynamics and therefore seems slow and boring to many people.
—ARTHUR ASA BERGER, Media Analysis Techniques
Anybody who knows the sport understands that the ninth inning is as valid as the first inning—that’s why real fans always stay to the end of a game.
—ROY EISENHARDT, FORMER PRESIDENT, OAKLAND ATHLETICS
May 5, 2017, was a typical, slow baseball day and night for most of three-plus hours in Wrigley Field, where the Cubs met the Yankees, and at Citi Field in New York, where the Mets were playing the Miami Marlins. At Wrigley, where the afternoon game began at 1:20 p.m. Central Daylight Time, there were only two runs scored—by the Cubs—before the ninth inning. Boring nineteenth-century stuff, some might say. At Citi Field that night, the Mets found themselves down by six runs in the first half of the fourth inning. Although the Mets did score two runs in their half of the same inning, there was no more real action until the seventh inning. Boring. That is, if you are in sync with “American cultural dynamics,” which assume the impossibility of waiting ten minutes, much less ninety minutes, for something to happen. Furthermore, whatever is happening must be so obvious that no prior knowledge of the subject is required. Arthur Berger, professor emeritus in broadcast and electronic communications arts at San Francisco State University, is quite right in his assertion—if, by cultural dynamics, one means the exaltation of inattention. (Here I cannot resist saying that communications arts—in spite of the fact that I am a graduate of the College of Communications Arts of Michigan State University—has always seemed to me a loathsome specimen of twentieth-century American academic jargon. With apologies to Georges Clemenceau, communications arts are to the arts as military music and justice are to music and justice.)
But, to give Berger his due, I certainly would not have been watching the afternoon Cubs-Yankees game on a twenty-first-century Friday had I not been confined to my apartment with a cracked kneecap. This provided both the opportunity and an extra incentive to watch a lot of baseball on that May day. The big nonsports news story, left over from the day before, was passage by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives of a health care bill aimed at repealing the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare). For nearly twenty-four hours, there had been dispiriting nonstop news coverage speculating about how many people with preexisting conditions would lose their health care if the bill ever became law, about higher premiums for Americans over fifty, about the loss of funding for contraception and abortion, about children who would lose Medicaid coverage. If escapism and fairness are partly responsible for the complicated appeal of sports, both seemed particularly appealing on such a day.
There is a nineteenth-centuryish feeling (or perhaps a general out-of-time feeling) attached to spending energy and attention on anything but work during the day. That (and the commercial revenue derived from the grasp of electronic communications arts on baseball and every other sport) is why M.L.B. plays nearly all of its games—too many—at night. There is no reason, apart from greed for more revenue from television commercials, for baseball to be played at night on Saturdays and Sundays. On the contrary: these are two days when most people can go to the ballpark and be reasonably certain of getting home at a reasonable hour, or watch a game on television without worrying about getting the kids to bed because tomorrow is a school day. To be fair, I must acknowledge that there are players who gripe about the heavy burden of having to play a day game after a night game, and there are some statistics to support the idea that teams fare worse on those days. To the griping players and the sabermetricians, I say: boohoo!
Although May 5 was a weekday, the Cubs-Yankees game took place in the afternoon because there are still many more day games played in Wrigley than in other major league ballparks. Wrigley, which opened as Weeghman Park in 1914, did not have lights for night games until 1988. The story of the political fight to bring lights to Wrigley makes for hilarious reading. Primarily because of objections by neighborhood residents who did not want their streets flooded by light from Wrigley (however much they liked being associated with this landmark), the Illinois General Assembly and Chicago City Council passed laws banning night games in Chicago. The legislation included a grandfather clause that exempted Comiskey Park, where the White Sox had been playing night games under lights since 1939.1
As it happened, both the Cubs-Yankees afternoon game and the evening Mets-Marlins contest offered near perfect illustrations of the combination of boredom and enormous changes at the last minute (or the last inning) that make the game so frustrating for those with a short attention span and so rewarding for the patient fan. “It takes a long time to understand baseball,” says Michael Haupert. “One of the main reasons there’s a slow learning curve is fairly obvious: the game is difficult, and failure is more common than success. If my students get a third of the answers right on their tests, they flunk. If a ballplayer gets a hit a third of the time, he’s one of the high-level players in the game.”2 Glance at an N.B.A. game for more than ten seconds, and you’re likely to see a ball fall through the hoop. Glance at a baseball game for the same amount of time, and you’re more likely to see a foul ball or nothing at all, as the pitcher prepares for his windup or the hitter steps out of the batter’s box.
As the first inning began at Wrigley, no one who grew up following baseball in Chicago would have been surprised to hear from the announcers what could be seen clearly on television—that the storied park, located less than a mile west of Lake Michigan, was a cave of the winds. Wrigley is a legendary hitters’ park in midsummer, when the stifling Chicago heat and the wind blowing out toward the lake turn line-drive singles hitters into home run champions for a day. But in April and early May (and often in September), the wind holds up what would be sure home runs in July or August. The gusts blowing in off the lake also bedevil fielders, and routine pop-ups can become adventures that turn into runners who come around to score. It should be noted here that the wind at Wrigley—for both the home team and visitors—does not have a definitive impact over the course of an entire season. Mathematics geeks love to cite figures like a statistic indicating that 23 percent of the fly balls at Wrigley are deposited beyond the lush, ivy-covered center-field wall when the wind is blowing out, while only 13 percent leave the park when the wind is blowing in. But as David Kagan, professor of physics at California State University, notes, “the daily winds tend to cancel each other out over the course of a season.”3 The same would presumably be true of other cities with higher-than-average winds, which include New York, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and somewhat surprisingly (to me), Kansas City. Wrigley presumably gets more attention because of its iconic status—comparable to that of Fenway Park in Boston—and because of Chicago’s nickname, “the Windy City.”
On this day in May, however, Wrigley would live up to every mile per hour of its reputation. With the wind blowing in at around twenty-five miles per hour—and gusts up to forty—plenty of normally harmless fly balls would be lost in the wind. And every run would be hard earned.
No one was expecting many, if any, home runs, but the Cubs deposited one in the right-field stands in their half of the first inning. The only other scoring, until the ninth inning, was a second Cubs line-drive homer to right field. Both homers were low enough and hit sharply enough—just in the right place—to avoid the full force of the wind blowing in from center field. Nothing much was happening, but the necessity to keep my knee propped up on a mound of ice focused my attention on fielding plays in the first and sixth innings that made the solo home runs more meaningful. In the Yankees’ half of the first, the Cubs’ Gold Glove right fielder Jason Heyward made a sliding catch of what looked like a sure sinking base hit by Yankee Starlin Castro. There was a Yankees runner straying from second base, and Heyward was able to throw him out easily for a double play. With the bases loaded and one out in the sixth inning, Heyward and the wind rescued the Cubs with yet another double play. Both home runs by the Cubs, in the first and sixth innings, followed outstanding plays in the field in the Yankees’ half of the inning. (A good many fans believe that a stellar defensive inning is often followed by a stellar offensive inning, but there is little evidence in the ever-burgeoning world of baseball statistics to support this notion. What seems more likely is that difficult defensive plays are better remembered throughout the game if they were followed by an immediate burst of offense in the next half of the inning.)
For a fan paying attention, the game was never anything less than tense, given the thinness of a two-run lead and the lurking presence of a powerful Yankees offense. For fans who understand the inside game, there was another factor contributing to the suspense of inning after inning in which, to the uninformed, nothing much seemed to be happening. The Cubs would be unable to use their closer, Wade Davis, who had pitched in three straight games. Yet there was also the sense that the Cubs would probably win, given the obvious frustration of the Yankees at the windy conditions affecting so many plays. After the game, Yankees third baseman Chase Headley whined, “It was just a mess. It’s really not baseball, to be perfectly honest.… The game’s not close to what it’s supposed to be played like.… I’m glad we don’t have to play in those conditions very often because it just changes everything.”4
I beg to differ. It absolutely is baseball—if by “it,” one means variable weather conditions, park dimensions, and other unique features (such as the ivy-covered outfield wall at Wrigley) that affect both play on the field and the perceptions of fans. The weather, whatever it may bring, is part of the game. Headley is paid to play.* Baseball’s playing conditions are not uniform—another factor distinguishing the game from many other professional sports, notably N.B.A. basketball and N.H.L. hockey.
Headley’s comment was especially ungracious in view of the fact that the Yankees’ change of fortune in the ninth inning—in which Headley himself played an important role—had nothing at all to do with the wind or the 45-degree temperature. With one out in the ninth, Headley nudged a single to left field. Then, with two out, pinch hitter Jacoby Ellsbury drew a walk. Two out, two on, with his team trailing 2–0, and the Yankees left fielder Brett Gardner stepped up to the plate. The second-best Cubs closer, the right-handed Héctor Rondón (remember, their best closer was unavailable), could not put away the left-handed Gardner. With the Yankees down to their last strike, Gardner caught a hanging slider and hit it 409 feet—a home run on any day, windy or not. In fact, the right-field wall at Wrigley is only 353 feet away from home plate. The result of the at-bat was not a total surprise, because Gardner had already seen six fastballs from Rondón. The hanging slider he finally hit over the fence must have looked very, very big. If there had been no one on base, the homer would have meant nothing. And neither Headley’s nor Ellsbury’s presence on base had anything to do with the wind. Yes, Chase Headley, that is baseball. It is a real pleasure to see a game in which players are required to summon up extra skill to battle nature as well as the opposing team. Final score: Yankees 3, Cubs 2.
*I am using the term “paid to play” in its literal sense, not in the gross metaphorical sense in which the phrase is now used in political jargon.
On to the Mets-Marlins night game, which I probably would have watched even with a healthy knee. The Mets are my team. Nearly everyone in New York expected the Mets to cancel the game in advance. Heavy rain was predicted at some point in the evening, and the team’s injury roster was already mounting and casting an ominous shadow over the rest of the season. For much of the night, Mets fans had every reason to wish that the game had been canceled.
The mood at Citi Field was grim before the game started, as the mediocre Rafael Montero took the mound in place of a badly injured Noah Syndergaard, known as Thor to the Mets faithful. With his flowing blond locks, the six-foot, six-inch pitcher did resemble a mythical image of a Norse god when he threw his best fastball up to 100 miles per hour. But the backstory to this game revealed that Syndergaard, who turned twenty-five in August 2017, was all too human—as are the baseball managers and executives who accede to the ridiculous notion that testosterone-fueled athletes in their early twenties are the best judges of how to maintain the health of their bodies. On May 1, Syndergaard had been placed on the disabled list after a magnetic resonance imagery test revealed a partial tear of his latissimus dorsi—a serious injury that would keep him on the disabled list for at least two months and, in a worst-case scenario, for the rest of the season. It is always a sickening sight to see a young athlete walk off the field in obvious pain; Syndergaard had left the mound, clutching his underarm, on April 30 in the second inning of what would turn into a 23–5 Mets loss to the Washington Nationals. The worst part of the story: Syndergaard had been complaining for at least a week about a sore biceps in his throwing arm, but he refused the request of Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson that he have an MRI at that point. Yes, a twenty-four-year-old baseball god who thinks he is immortal (as all twenty-four-year-olds—even those who cannot throw a fastball 100 miles per hour—tend to think) surely needs no advice from an older and wiser head about whether to undergo a noninvasive medical test that may tell him something he does not want to hear! Alderson’s response was a classic: “I can’t tie him down and throw him in the tube.” True, and the contract between the Major League Baseball Players Association and M.L.B. also fails to require polio vaccinations or flu shots. But as one New York baseball writer wrote, it was clear “that Alderson should have been the grownup in this situation, [and] informed Syndergaard: ‘It’s the MRI tube or the disabled list. Take your choice.’”5 Syndergaard might have wound up on the disabled list even if he had accepted the club’s recommendation that he have an earlier MRI, but he would surely not have had the opportunity to sustain an injury so obviously painful that no one needed to be a doctor to recognize that horrible medical news was in the offing. Hence, Montero (with a 5.84 ERA as I write) took the mound on May 5. In three and two-thirds innings, Montero gave up five earned runs—and took ninety pitches to put his team at what looked like an insurmountable disadvantage. This was the sort of game you were certain your team was going to lose. In fact, I was paying very little attention by the fourth inning, when shortstop José Reyes failed to keep a soft dribbler in the infield—a mistake that led to six runs and chased Montero from the game. To add insult to injury, these were all two-out runs. In the Mets’ half, center fielder Curtis Granderson hit a two-run homer that did not seem terribly important at the time but, in retrospect, kept his team in the game in spite of Montero’s hapless performance.
During the game, I was reading an old essay about Bob Gibson, the great pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s and 1970s, and I was wishing that Gibson could magically appear on the mound to rescue the Mets.6 For those not old enough to have seen Gibson at work, one need only recall that 1968, one of the most tumultuous political years in American history, was known in baseball as “the Year of the Pitcher.” Gibson had a record of 22–9 and an earned run average of 1.12—a combination milestone that will probably never be reached in the future because starters no longer pitch nine innings. (Whole books could be, and have been, written about this subject.)7 Gibson’s dominating record is often cited as the reason for M.L.B.’s decision to lower the mound in 1969.8 There was, of course, no one resembling Gibson on the mound for either team on this night in 2017.
In spite of the fact that accounts of forty-year-old games seemed more interesting than the game before me, I did note that the Marlins failed to tack on runs in the fifth and sixth innings, when they had a runner on second with no one out and failed to score. The failure to “add on” when you already have a substantial lead is a cardinal sin in baseball, but you have to have watched a great many games, over a fair number of years, to understand this. After the game, Marlins manager Don Mattingly said, “You talk about adding on. The guys swung the bats well, but we let a couple of chances get away there late. Today, it came back to haunt us. You never know how many [runs] you’re going to need.”9
And so it came to pass that in the seventh inning, the Mets—down by only four runs instead of the six- or seven-run deficit they would have faced if the Marlins had added on those extra runs earlier in the game—came back with six straight hits to take an 8–7 lead. The star of the night was catcher T. J. Rivera, who hit a two-run double to tie the game. Wilmer Flores then walked home with the bases loaded for what turned out to be the winning run. Final score: Mets 8, Marlins 7.
Both baseball statistics and the ordinary experience of being a fan over a lifetime reveal how unusual it is for a team to come back from a four-run deficit after the sixth inning. According to an analysis of major league statistics encompassing all games played from 1957 through 2015, a visiting team going into the seventh inning with a four-run lead has a 95.08 percent chance of winning. Had the Marlins led by two more runs, the odds of their beating the Mets at Citi Field would have gone up to more than 98 percent.10 Win expectancy calculations, provided by many analysts and used by millions of participants in fantasy sports, can vary considerably according to the variety of factors included. These specific statistics are based on average performance over a long period. They would obviously be somewhat different, for example, if one team had its best relief pitchers available while the other was forced to use the worst relievers in its bullpen. However, one need not be a sabermetrician to know that four-run comebacks late in the game are relatively rare. Roy Eisenhardt, the astute former owner of the Oakland Athletics, was right in theory but not in practice when he said the ninth inning matters as much as the first. If a team produces the unusual multiple-run comeback late in the game, of course the last inning matters as much as the first. But baseball is, as has often been said, a “game of firsts.” A visiting team with a four-run lead in the first inning wins 83.44 percent of the time—which means that while the odds of a comeback are much better for the home team than they are if the visiting team maintains its lead into the seventh, they are still not good.11 A statistic that may be even more surprising to all but the most dedicated fans tells us that in a majority of games, the winning team scores more runs in one inning than the losing team does in the entire game.
What keeps a true fan watching a seemingly lopsided game is not just hope but the memory of the unusual, thrilling comebacks that do occur. As many psychological studies have demonstrated, our personal memories are biased in favor of the unusual—including both good and bad events. In a fascinating study on nostalgic memories, one Boston University scholar notes that fans, “predicting their enjoyment of a football game they are about to watch… tend to recall the best game they can remember and base their predictions on their [recalled] enjoyment of that particularly good game.”12
The same observation could surely be applied to baseball. I still recall in vivid detail every minute of the Mets’ comeback against the Boston Red Sox in the tenth inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series. Losing by two runs, with no one on base, the Mets were down to their last out when Gary Carter nudged a single to left field. They tied the game not the way one would have expected—with a two-run homer—but in the most improbable way imaginable, with three consecutive singles and, as every Mets fan recalls, with a runner on third making it home after a wild pitch was dodged by the catlike Mookie Wilson. The Mets won after Wilson’s ground ball found its way through the legs of the battered veteran Boston first baseman Bill Buckner, who was hobbled by two ankle surgeries dating from the middle of the 1970s. Sometimes when I am having an insomniac night, I put myself to sleep by replaying this half-inning. (Don’t ask me why this works; I didn’t get to sleep until 4 a.m. after the actual game.)
The rational part of me—the part that pays attention to statistics—doesn’t believe for a minute that I will ever see a replay of such a gripping comeback. Like many games in the 1986 postseason, this one was, as a Mets pitcher (usually thought to be the eloquent Ron Darling) observed, simply “too fairy-tail-ish.”13 But that is why I remember it so well. After the game, some scribe went over his scorecard and discovered that there were thirteen two-strike pitches, most of them fouled off, that could have been turned into the last Mets strike and last out of the Series.14 And that is why I watch and never quite accept that a game is hopeless—even though my own experience, as well as baseball statistics, tell me otherwise.
Rooting interest is the other vital, unquantifiable factor infusing sports memory. There is no real explanation for an adult’s investment of emotion in what is—even the most besotted fan must admit this—essentially a commercial enterprise designed to separate the rooting public from as much money as possible. The abolition of the reserve clause, which denies most fans the pleasure of seeing a favorite player stick with one team for an entire career, has probably eroded fan loyalty to some extent—though fairness to the players is more important than stoking sentimentality based on servitude. For me, the one sorrowful note in the Cubs’ shining 2016 World Series victory was the fact that Ernie Banks, “Mr. Cub,” did not live to see it. No active player today is likely to be identified for decades, as Banks was both before and after his playing days, as the iconic representative of his team and his city.* “Mr. Met” is a mascot distinguished, appropriately enough, by his inflated baseball head. Yet I am a fan of the Mets, for reasons that do not bear too much logical scrutiny but are nonetheless real. First, I could never live in New York and root for the Yankees, because they were the fiercest enemies of my Chicago White Sox throughout the 1950s. Second, I am now a National League fan, because the league has resisted all appeals to adopt the designated-hitter rule. Third, my adult baseball memories are as firmly anchored in forty years of watching the Mets, in good times and bad, as my childhood memories are anchored in my grandfather’s bar. That the Mets have not built as consistently excellent a franchise as the Yankees—that the former are not the best-known brand in American sports—is probably one of the reasons I love the team with the swell-headed mascot. Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for JPMorgan Chase; the Mets feel more like my small neighborhood bank, which I still use for all routine financial transactions.
*Derek Jeter, who played his entire twenty-year career for the Yankees, may prove to be an exception. It’s too soon to tell, because he retired from baseball only in 2014. Whether he will remain involved and identified with New York City, as Banks did with Chicago for the rest of his life, is an unanswerable question at this point.
There is a bright, cherished thread of friendship and fun that binds baseball memory with rooting interest. Throughout the early 1980s, the Mets were rebuilding… slowly, slowly, in 1983 and 1984, then swiftly in 1985 with the emergence of young stars including Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, and Darling—and the experience of mature stars like Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez. I shared a season ticket with four people, and I looked forward to seeing them as much as I did to seeing Hernandez’s perfect positioning at first base or “Doctor K” blowing away hitters before cocaine took its toll on his young career and life. And I didn’t only like my fellow season ticket holders: I loved them in a fashion possible only when people share a secret virtue rather than a secret vice. We all knew that we could talk only to one another about our passion for baseball—that many of our nonbaseball friends could not comprehend how we could actually care about something that was, after all, just a game. There is nothing duller than being forced to hear a play-by-play account of a game belonging to a sport in which you have no interest—unless it is being forced to hear about a romance between two people you don’t know.
In 1985—a year I remember with even more fondness than the championship 1986 season—fate placed me in London on a business trip when the Mets were playing the St. Louis Cardinals in a series, beginning October 1, that would determine whether the Mets had a chance to win the National League East championship. Since this was the era before personal computers, I woke up in my London hotel on October 2 not knowing whether the Mets had won the first essential game in St. Louis. The phone rang, and it was one of my fellow season ticket holders, who refused to reveal the outcome at the beginning of our conversation and teased me through ten innings of what had been a scoreless duel in St. Louis, in which Darling pitched the game of his life against the Cardinals’ starter John Tudor. Only after a long, agonizing recap—beginning with Darling issuing an ominous walk to the leadoff hitter in the first inning—did my friend reveal that Strawberry, in the eleventh inning, had hit a line-drive home run with a hang time of only 1.5 seconds. The Mets’ ace reliever Jesse Orosco stifled the Cards in the bottom of the inning, and the final score was 1–0. I whooped with joy and jumped up and down on the bed so vigorously that I spilled my morning tea on the Westbury Hotel’s pristine sheets. That the Mets ultimately failed to win the league championship does not make the memory of that phone call less vivid or less pleasurable. Part of rooting interest is the special love of baseball friends who share irrational devotion to the same team—to the point of making transatlantic phone calls that, in 1985, were both expensive and the sole way of putting the absent baseball companion out of her misery in a chic quarter of London, so far from the Mets’ anxious crowd.
Contrary to what many lukewarm baseball fans (and sports commentators) suggest, there is no one “right” way to watch a baseball game. Whether a fan is absorbing a game at the park, on television, or on a radio (the latter, these days, usually in a car), the current action coexists with what Roger Angell, in his classic 1972 book The Summer Game, called “the interior stadium.” When the nineteen-year-old Gooden came up to the Mets in 1984, and began displaying the kind of control and fastball I had never seen in person, I began attending more games at Shea Stadium. It was possible then—before Gooden became a celebrity—to take the number 7 train out to Queens, walk up to the box office on game day, and, for less than $40, acquire an excellent seat in the mezzanine behind home plate. His nickname was “Doc,” or “Doctor K,” and enraptured fans put up a new “K” card in the corner every time he registered another strikeout. We all knew that we were seeing something special from this prodigy whose work combined the eagerness of an adorable puppy with an artist’s image of a young god. The interior stadium, fortunately, does not allow its occupants to see the future. That year, I saw Gooden pitch in person several times and on television broadcasts many more times. Each had its advantages. On television, there was a close-up view of the pitcher’s face and delivery that even the good seats in the park failed to deliver. At Shea, the interior stadium came into view in ways that it seldom did in my living room (or on radio, when commercial breaks are just as intrusive as they are on television).
I started thinking about Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the great pitcher who spent nearly all of his career in the Negro Leagues and who made his first major league baseball start, at age forty-two, for the Cleveland Indians in 1948. I was only three years old; of course I never saw him pitch. I thought about what it must have been like for a pitcher like Paige to have been deprived of the opportunity to display his full powers before American baseball’s full audience. Even the most straightforward facts about Paige’s life—like his age and birth date—were difficult to trace because of the invisibility of black Americans in many official records in the early 1900s. Larry Tye, author of Paige’s definitive biography, notes that “in the post-Reconstruction Confederacy, it was easier to track the bloodline of a packhorse than of a Negro citizen.”15 Paige was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1906, and descendants of slaves had not even been included in the Mobile census until 1902. Young Gooden, I thought frequently, would never be deprived of the attention that obscured the full achievements of older generations of African-American players—even the greatest of them. I wasn’t at the ballpark, though, when I wrote a poem about this subject; I was watching Gooden pitch on television and took time during a commercial to dash off “To Dwight Gooden.” I had just been thinking about Paige’s frequently quoted admonition, “Don’t look back. Something might may be gaining on you.”16 So I ended the poem with the lines “Tip your hat, Dr. K. / Nothing’s gaining on you.”
Although this is hardly a poem fit for anthologies of great English-language verse, it is an example of what goes on in the interior stadium regardless of whether one is paying attention in a ballpark, in front of the television set, or within range of a radio. I watched a great young black pitcher who seemed (before drugs entered the picture) destined for the Hall of Fame, and I began thinking about a black pitcher I had never seen—and whose race in Jim Crow America meant that there would be little archival footage of his performances for future fans. This interior dialogue between past and present, whether personal or social, is what goes on at times when nothing much seems to be happening, and that is why baseball cannot be appreciated fully by clicking on a tiny image on an app for two minutes.
The best writers about sports, like Angell, Frank Deford, Thomas Boswell, Daniel Okrent, and Wilfrid Sheed (to name only a few), used to be able to convey this interior dialogue. Today, even people who write about sports for a living have been infected by our impatient culture to the point where they often present baseball’s great advantage as a liability. An unusually candid example of this genre is Jay Caspian Kang’s confession in the New York Times Magazine that he had vowed to watch more baseball in the spring of 2017 because he was “trying to bring some routine to my life as a new father.”17 So far, so good. It sounds as if Kang was trying to do what I was doing in an attempt to assuage the pain of a cracked kneecap. Infants do have one thing in common with wounded knees: they require the caretaker to spend a good deal of time around the house. But then Kang found his attention flagging—much more, he said, than during a football or basketball game. He blamed his wandering attention, in part, on the “informational clutter” that pervades television broadcasts and leaves little room for the imagination. But wait. Kang went on to recall the “silent spaces in baseball that used to be filled in by novelists and filmmakers.” Films like Major League (1989) and Eight Men Out (1988) “gave us thoughts of the batters as they dug into the box, the catcher’s mantras and occasional trash talk, the umpire’s endless exasperation. And while all that may have been a fantasy, it convinced you that what you couldn’t hear or see while watching a baseball game could be translated directly into cornfed American English.” Of course, Kang also references the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, in which an Iowa farmer, hearing voices murmuring, “If you build it, he will come,” is impelled to construct a baseball diamond in his cornfield. “He” is Shoeless Joe Jackson, the most famous star involved in the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal. When the central character, Ray, does build his diamond, not only Shoeless Joe but the rest of the Black Sox turn up. The movie was based on the 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, by W. P. Kinsella, which also dealt with a son’s troubled relationship with his dead father. Field of Dreams was a box office hit, but I really, really hated this movie. It bears the same relationship to baseball—a game played not by ghosts in the middle of farmland but by real people on real grass and dirt, mostly in the environs of real cities—as faux biblical movies of the 1950s, like Ben-Hur and The Robe, do to the birth of Christianity and real relations between Romans and Jews in first-century Palestine. What is truly awful, though, is a preference for movies that supply dialogue supposedly going on inside a pitcher’s, a hitter’s, or a fielder’s head. That is what fans are supposed to supply in their interior stadium. The fun of watching a ballgame lies not in being supplied with scenarios by a screenwriter but in trying to figure out what the pitcher might be going to throw and why, and what the batter might be expecting and why.
Field of Dreams was not the worst movie of the 1980s in its dedication to sentimentality and unjustified nostalgia. That distinction goes to The Natural, the film adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel. The novel is a bleak meditation on human talent undone by human psychological fallibility and on an America in which no achievement is ever quite enough (a work remarkably attuned to the class antagonisms that have helped fuel our current divisive politics). At the end of the book, the main character, Roy Hobbs, takes a payoff from gamblers to throw a critical game. In the movie, however, Hobbs affirms his own essential goodness (and, of course, the goodness of the game) by refusing the bribe and hitting a home run. Hobbs was played in the movie by the golden-haired, still young-looking forty-six-year-old Robert Redford, and that should have been the tipoff. If a director is looking for someone to cast as a brilliant athlete who betrays his talent, his sport, and, by extension, his country, he probably shouldn’t be looking for someone whose physical presence, in youth and midlife, was the embodiment of everyone’s image of an all-American.* The casting of Redford was all wrong, precisely because he still looked so young and shining in 1982. The character of Hobbs, by contrast, is in his thirties and somewhat frayed around the edges. Picking an actor like Redford to play Hobbs was essential to the falseness of the movie: no one could imagine a player as adorable-looking as Redford throwing a game.
*Redford was cast in the role of another kind of “natural” compromising himself in the 1972 movie The Candidate, which many critics consider one of the best political movies ever made. It could be argued that politics, then and now, is better suited than baseball as a cinematic background for a hero whose performance doesn’t live up to either his outward appearance or his best ideals. In any case, Redford was the right age in 1972 to portray a young politician on the make.
The 1980s—especially the latter half of the decade—were, as more than one scholar of baseball has observed, particularly well suited to smarmy nostalgia about the game. The older baby boomers, who came of age in the dissent-filled late 1960s and early 1970s, were settling into jobs and families. As Jules Tygiel notes, the adult fans of the 1980s were raised in the 1950s—“the last era in which professional baseball would reign as the nation’s undisputed favorite sport.”18 Tygiel goes too far when he suggests that “many former protestors staged a symbolic homecoming through baseball.”19 There were a great many civil rights workers, antiwar protestors, and yes, feminists who never needed to stage a “symbolic” homecoming because they never left baseball in the first place. One important factor in the resurgence of interest in baseball in the late 1980s was that enough time had lapsed since the end of the reserve clause for boomers to get over their envy of the money being made by superstars (and even average baseball players). Many members of the boomer generation were doing well financially by the 1980s and were no longer shocked to hear that some guy playing a kid’s game was making millions a year. That does not, however, explain the particular vulnerability to nostalgia embodied in so many of the films made about baseball in the closing years of the decade.*
Nostalgia is always a double-edged sword, whether the object is the history of the world or sports. In sports, the nostalgia engendered by baseball is particularly powerful because baseball has a more extensive statistical record and visual archive than any other sport. On the one hand, nostalgia for one’s youth—the time when a child begins to understand the game and become a fan—is a powerful motivator for remaining or becoming a fan as an adult. On the other hand, nostalgia can become an aspiration in itself, as suggested by Kang’s desire for cinematic dialogue to replace the game unfolding before him. This sentiment, from a new parent who knows a great deal about sports, demonstrates to perfection why baseball, in spite of its financial success, has a serious demographic problem. Numbers can lie, but the way people behave on a daily basis does not.
*For other views on this subject, see Michael L. Butterworth, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity during the War on Terror (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2010), and Vivian Sobchak, “Baseball in the Post-American Cinema, or Life in the Minor Leagues,” in Out of Bounds: Sports, Media, and the Politics of Identity, ed. Aaron Baker and Todd Boyd (Bloomington, Ind., 1977).