Don’t you know how hard this all is?
Here is the fan baseball must cultivate today if the game hopes to preserve its special place in the American imagination into the 2040s. I will not speculate about later decades, when the game will be two centuries old. For all I know, the 2050s and 2060s will see a technological revolution as profound and destabilizing to established institutions as the digital revolution we are still navigating in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Let us say that our hypothetical postmillennial child is about twelve years old—the age when many boys and girls, unless they have displayed exceptional athletic ability, cut way back on their active involvement in sports.
This future baseball fan (or not) was born in 2006—a year that may one day be considered a turning point in the media drive for total penetration of the human market. In early 2006, the pretentious Baby Einstein series of videos aimed at toddlers whose parents were already grooming them for the Ivy League was joined by the first television channel, BabyFirstTV, aimed not at sophisticated two- and three-year-olds but at infants in the cradle. BabyFirst, now available on every type of screen, marketed itself as commercial-free, but the entire project might properly be described as a commercial for television itself (as well as for all types of screens). This commercial begins before the target audience is physically and mentally capable of turning the program off or making an advertisement disappear. So, our twelve-year-old may well have had a screen over his bed before he was weaned.* By age five, according to a report released in 2011 by Common Sense Media, half of all children in this age group had a television set in their bedrooms. And half of children under eight had access to a mobile device, such as an iPad or iPhone.1 From Day One, this child has been soothed, excited, and captivated by all of the products offered by the mass media.
Today our twelve-year-old middle school student spends roughly four and a half hours a day watching television—an increase of about forty minutes since 2004. This does not mean that he is watching programs specifically created for television but that he is sampling all of the wares that can now be streamed on any screen. He spends only thirty-eight minutes (give or take a few) reading each day—down five minutes between 2004 and 2009.† He also spends at least an hour and a quarter on video games, and another two and a half hours on music and audio programs (whether on the computer or the iPhone, we do not know). Time spent on video games more than doubled in the eight-to-eighteen age group between 2004 and 2009. The video game industry itself is a growing behemoth, earning more than $30.4 billion in revenue in the United States alone in 2016.2
*Throughout the rest of this chapter, I will use the generic “he,” as I have used the generic “she” in other parts of the book, for the sake of convenience. I have chosen the generic “he” in this instance because boys consume much more digital media than girls do.
† All of these statistics are from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s most recent report, published in 2010. No other studies of children’s media consumption are as comprehensive, although results from more recent surveys by the Pew Research Center, and from Nielsen, indicate that the time devoted to digital media consumption has only increased since 2010.
Twelve is also the age at which many children—especially boys—become fans of e-sports. E-sports are not to be confused with fantasy sports (their impact on baseball will be discussed later), whose participants form mythical sports teams and select their players based on the vast pool of readily available statistics in the era of digital sabermetrics. E-sports, by contrast, are simply elaborate video games, and 51 percent of boys (but only 20 percent of girls) ages twelve to nineteen report watching these competitions online or even streamed on big screens in sporting venues. A report by Project Play—an Aspen Institute–sponsored program designed to encourage children’s participation in active sports—contends that although e-sports are marketed as “sports,” they are not really sports because “there is little or no physical activity involved.”3 Thus e-sports—like the gross and all-too-real Nathan’s Famous annual hot dog eating contests held every Fourth of July at Coney Island—should properly be called competitions. In recent years, media companies and advertisers have participated in the branding of video game competitions as sports because so many young people are now watching.
The use of all types of media, according to the American Psychological Association, increases most dramatically among children from ages eleven to fourteen.4 Overall, total reported media use in the eight-to-eighteen age group rose by more than 18 percent between 2004 and 2010. For both children and young adults, total media consumption is the most relevant figure, and it has gone up substantially since 2010, even though young adults are viewing content more on mobile devices and less on traditional television sets. At the beginning of 2017, Nielsen reported that media consumption on smartphones had surpassed television for the first time among adults ages eighteen to thirty-four.5
These were the numbers on M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred’s mind when he talked about the wide array of choices available to young teenagers—soon to be young adults glued to their smartphones—who might have been faithful baseball fans a half-century ago (or even thirty years ago, before mobile devices and before most homes had personal computers). These are the young fans whom the players’ union head Tony Clark wants to educate about the game even though that education does not come as naturally today as it did in his generation, let alone for generations of fans now in their fifties and sixties.
I have concluded, after interviewing at least one hundred young adults in their late teens and twenties for this book, that all of the current statistics about media consumption by postmillennial children as well as by the millennial generation are vastly understated. (My selection of interviewees was not “scientific”; when I spoke at colleges during the past few years, I asked students who were willing to be interviewed about the subject to contact me. However, much of what they told me did support the conclusions of studies by professional polling organizations, such as the Pew Forum, on the subject of media use.) There is simply no way, given the adeptness of the young at multitasking by using various digital devices simultaneously, to measure the number of hours they really spend online—much less the impact on their attention spans. Most of the high school and college students I interviewed about this subject did not want me to use their real names. When I asked why, they would usually admit that they did not want their parents and teachers to know how much time they spent on social media (girls) or playing video games (boys). According to a Pew Research Center online survey, 24 percent of teens say they go online “almost constantly” on their smartphones, 56 percent “several times a day,” and 92 percent at least once a day.6 “They’re lying,” said a sixteen-year-old Manhattan high school junior whom I will call Meryl. “I don’t know what ‘constantly’ means, but my friends and I are on Facebook or Snapchat every ten minutes. The only time I’m not checking my phone that often is in class, where there are rules against it. And there are teachers who will see that your phone gets taken away for the rest of the day if you get caught.” Meryl, as it happens, considers herself a baseball fan (she follows the standings on her phone) and a Mets fan, but she accepts her parents’ invitations to go to the ballpark with them only twice a season. “It just takes too much time,” she said. I asked her whether she took her smartphone to the ballpark. “Oh, sure,” she replied, “but it makes my dad crazy, so a lot of the time I’ll get up and say I have to go to the bathroom so I can go and check my texts without getting hassled.” This is a succinct summation of the mindset of a casual young fan who might either lose interest in baseball altogether as she grows up or turn into a mother who encourages her children to play. Transforming a teenager like Meryl into an adult who continues to be interested in baseball and introduces her children to the game may be the most difficult task M.L.B. and the players face today. She is now a multimedia and multisports consumer rather than someone for whom baseball has an emotional meaning worth an extended investment of time. When she actually goes to a ballgame today, she is there but not all there.
Whatever the precise amount of time eight-to-eighteen-year-olds spend online, all surveys of children’s media consumption provide an important backdrop for Nielsen’s 2017 finding that fewer adults are “intensely interested” in one subject or pastime, while many more are apt to be “slightly interested” in several categories. The virtual world’s business is distraction. You may be annoyed when an advertisement for olive oil (you took a trip to Italy last year) pops up and blocks whatever you are trying to read online, but many consumers are delighted. Olive oil may well be more interesting than whatever you were trying to find out in the first place. Distraction leads naturally to dilution of interest, whether one is watching a sporting event, listening to music, or doing research for a homework paper.
I asked all of the teenagers I interviewed whether they would be more likely to pay attention to a game that lasted two instead of three hours. They all shook their heads and laughed. “I don’t do anything except homework for more than an hour at a time,” said Meryl’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend Josh (his name has also been changed). The percentage of a day spent on electronic media by teenagers is the elephant, or hopping kangaroo, in the room for both baseball and reading as “pastimes”—national or otherwise. If the studies are right, most teenagers spend roughly eight hours a day checking out one screen or another. School, if you are talking about a day that begins around eight with a trip in a bus or car and ends around three, takes up another seven hours. That leaves exactly nine hours for homework (of which there is a staggering amount in comparison with the homework assigned to previous generations), eating, seeing other people (including family) face to face, and sleeping. Not much time for reading or anything else. Weekends are a possibility, of course, but kids would have to want to make baseball (or reading, for that matter) a priority. Meryl and Josh, on their most recent Saturday night date, had spent the evening with friends binge-watching streamed episodes of season 2 of the American Movie Classics series Better Call Saul.
It is easy to understand why anyone who talks about the conflict between baseball’s traditional culture of concentration and a modern market that sells interruption could be accused of being as shortsighted as the baseball owners who feared radio in the 1920s and television in the early 1950s. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two earlier media shifts—the first to radio and the second to television—and the digital revolution (and not only with regard to baseball). Radio—with the exception of car radios—and television were not portable and available twenty-four hours a day. While these media offered new forms of entertainment, they did not easily or automatically supplant the old ones.
The owners who originally thought that radio would reduce attendance at major league games seemed oblivious to the fact that for most Americans working in cities in the 1920s, going to a game during the week was impossible. For Americans who did not live in or near major league cities, baseball at the highest level was simply out of reach at any time. People who lived in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia during the Depression, even in the unlikely event that they had access to an automobile, were not about to spend money on gas to drive to Washington, D.C., to see the Senators play. Yes, there were trains—but an ordinary visitor would have had to stay with family or friends, since paying for a hotel was an unthinkable luxury at the time. What radio did was bring ballgames into the homes and town public spaces of people who otherwise would not have been able to attend big-league games. The number of radios in homes increased from 12 million in 1929 to more than 28 million in 1939.7 One frequently overlooked aspect of the broadcasting of baseball on radio was that it attracted a new group of female fans, who were more likely than men to be at home during the day. Look at early-twentieth-century film of ballpark crowds in the 1994 Ken Burns series Baseball, first aired on the Public Broadcasting Service, and you see that the fans were nearly all men. Radio changed that. Women who might have seen baseball played only on the schoolyard or on the Fourth of July could imagine the professional game as announcers followed it play by play. My grandmother, who grew up in a poor family in Chicago in the first two decades of the twentieth century—when girls did not go to the ballpark even if they had the price of admission—became a real fan only when she started listening to the game on radio in the 1920s. There is no question that radio, rather than discouraging people from going to the ballpark, encouraged those who had never thought of seeing a game live before. “Your Gramps had already been to ballgames, both the White Sox and the Cubs,” my grandmother told me, “but I never thought of going. The first time I heard a game on the radio while I was doing my ironing, I asked him to take me the next time he went. He said, ‘Why, Min, I’m an idiot never to have taken you. You’ll love it.’ And I did. You could only go with your husband or father or brother, though. It wasn’t considered nice for women to go just with other girlfriends.” In the 1950s, when I was learning baseball while watching television in my grandfather’s bar, my grandmother would bring trays of sandwiches for everyone and spend the afternoon, as I did, watching the game with the men. We were not watching on television because we preferred the bar to the ballpark; we were simply following the game on a day when none of us would have gone out to the park anyway. The following Saturday, some of us might well watch a game not on television but from the stands of Comiskey Park or Wrigley Field.
Mobile devices, by contrast, are used by people who, like Meryl and her boyfriend, really do not want to devote hours to any sport (or, in many instances, to the other varied forms of entertainment available on iPhones and iPads). The media consumption habits of the millennial and postmillennial generations today are fundamentally at odds with the suspension of time that has always been part of baseball’s distinctive charm. After speaking with many teenagers who told me that watching the same game for two hours was as sluggish an experience as watching for three hours, I do not think M.L.B. can institute any rule changes that would make real inroads into the shortened attention span of the young without fundamentally altering the game. What if you did end every extra-inning game with a home run derby, or shorten at-bats by making a third foul ball a strikeout? (Manfred, I should emphasize, has made no such radical proposals.) Changing the foul ball rule—a suggestion that frequently pops up on sports Web sites—would change the rigor and exactitude of the game into something entirely different, but it would not shorten the game enough to make younger fans delight in watching baseball as it was meant to be played. In contrast to the reaction of owners in the early days of radio and television, M.L.B. has tended to take a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude toward digital technology—trying to treat it as an adjunct to the game rather than a competitor. Under Manfred, M.L.B. had upgraded its streaming capabilities, and the Disney Company was so impressed that in 2016, it announced the investment of $1 billion in baseball’s advanced technology unit. Baseball offers streaming packages on MLB.tv as well as its popular At Bat app, which provides scores, statistics, and the audio of games for only $2.99 a month.
Tony Clark also has ideas about using technology to attract younger fans. Asked how baseball can respond to the competition for young people’s attention that did not exist forty years ago, Clark replied, “I think one of the ways is to implement currently available technology to provide varied broadcast options.” As an example, he proposed that viewers might decide whether they want to listen to a broadcast dominated by coverage of pitching or hitting. “Presently your options are limited despite the great job that a number of broadcast outlets and play-by-play analysts do,” he says. “Whether you are a new fan to the game or a seasoned fan, there would seem to be a benefit to being able to further break down the finer points of the game to establish a foundation of understanding.”8 I was slightly appalled by this suggestion at first, because it seemed antithetical to the ideal experience of a baseball game as a unified entity. Was the great 1986 playoff game between the Mets and the Astros a hitter’s game or a pitcher’s game? Of course, it was both, and a good announcer is able to comment on both. On the other hand, one thing that makes an exceptional game exceptional, and an ordinary game ordinary, is that the exceptional game usually involves a continual tension-filled balance between pitching and hitting. In an ordinary game, assuming the presence of halfway decent pitchers on the mound, I am more interested in pitching than in hitting. I would probably like to try out a broadcast in which special emphasis is placed on pitching. But I’m not at all sure that this interest would be shared by a young fan who does not fully understand the game. I have visions of teenagers switching broadcasts constantly on their smartphones and trying to find wherever the action is. Whether that would be a bad, good, or neutral thing, it would satisfy the need for a continuous change of scenery and subject. You could create your own fantasy of baseball, with the audio equivalent of a split screen, instead of watching the game as it unfolds before you, at its own pace and beyond your control.
The relationship of fantasy baseball to real baseball is much more complicated than the straightforward competition for attention provided by other online activities. There are basically two groups of fantasy sports fans—those who join with friends, without any significant prizes or gambling, for the fun of pitting their wits and their fictional rosters against one another’s, and those involved in commercially sponsored leagues that encourage and make money from gambling. Commercial fantasy sports are not, at least in theory, for children; most states have laws forbidding anyone under eighteen from registering on the sites. But people under eighteen do play fantasy sports online, and, given the tenuous nature of authentication of identity for any activity on the Internet, that is hardly surprising. I met two high school students, both boys, who not only played both baseball and football online but frequently placed bets of more than $100 on their fantasy teams. (They were both from well-off families and had saved money from birthday presents to finance their habit.) Keeping knowledge of this activity from the parents was one reason they did not want to be identified when asked how much time they spent online. Regardless of whether young teenagers participate in fantasy sports themselves, they are being shaped by this now-digital business.
All fantasy sports today are heirs to what was once called Rotisserie Baseball, founded by the writer Daniel Okrent—whose subjects range from baseball to Prohibition—in 1980. The game was named for a restaurant, La Rotisserie Française, that used to be located on East 52nd Street in Manhattan. While having lunch at the restaurant in winter, Okrent and a group of friends worked out the rules for “drafting” players, based on statistics then available only in each day’s box scores in the newspapers. It should be said that a fantasy game of this kind is probably better suited to baseball than any other sport, if only because baseball has the longest history of record keeping. Also, most serious baseball fans are, in some sense, statistics nerds. Long before there were organized fantasy sports, many true baseball fans devoted a scandalous amount of time to thinking about how much better a job they could do of managing or owning a baseball team than the people who actually owned or managed teams. This syndrome, which I sometimes think belongs in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is particularly evident in fans of hard-luck teams. At the beginning of the 2017 season, for instance, I was convinced that the Mets were going nowhere because they were counting on young starting pitchers who had already been injured several times in their minor league and major league careers, several of whom had undergone major surgery or been on the disabled list the previous season. Sure enough, as I write in mid-June, four of the five young men who were supposed to be the top Mets’ starters are on the disabled list. I would have taken that into account if I were assembling a team for fantasy baseball. I would have assembled a better team by factoring the long-term impact of early injuries into my acquisitions last winter. Why didn’t the Mets’ general manager Sandy Alderson do so? I’ve always thought that Okrent’s status as a Cubs fan was one of the reasons he was able to dream up Rotisserie Baseball in 1980. At that time, the Cubs’ drought still had thirty-six years to go. In fantasy baseball, you can insert an element of your own skill—the knowledge acquired over decades of watching the game and studying the numbers—to achieve a winning outcome.
According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (the oxymoronic wackiness of this title is revealing), more than 57 million people—two-thirds of them men—played in some type of fantasy league in 2015. The association claims that more than half are college educated and have annual incomes over $75,000.9 What Okrent could not have anticipated when he and his friends casually set up their Rotisserie League in 1980 was the explosion of possibilities and interest that would be created by personal computers. In 1980, you either had to wait for the printed box scores to make your “management” decisions or, if you were a true addict and had access to a newspaper or television network office, you could skulk around a behemoth telex and get the latest results from cities three time zones away. What began as winter recreation for friendly baseball geeks (or geeky baseball friends) has now turned into a business in which gambling plays as important a role as interest in the game.
Nevertheless, there are still two different groups among fantasy baseball enthusiasts today—those for whom camaraderie and intellectual competition are paramount, and those who are, deep down, sports gamblers. In the first group, friends get together mainly to keep in touch with one another and with the game, in a competition that requires regular contact. Prizes are small and side bets are rarely more than $10. Thirty-year-old Daniel, an economist for a think tank in southern California (both his name and occupation have been changed), has played for five years in two leagues started by close friends—some of whom met in high school and others in graduate school. Daniel’s league does not play in the off season. He estimates that during the season, he and his friends play once a week in contests that last about an hour and a half. Before the “draft,” Daniel says he does four to eight hours of statistical research in order to select the players he wants for his team. “If you want to be a ‘statsy fan,’ it’s a lot easier now,” he says. “I think the fantasy today is more about being a general manager of a team rather than a manager, because it’s the general manager who gets to do trades. It’s a fantasy of control.”
Fantasy baseball is also a socially acceptable way for men to keep in touch with one another. “We underestimate the amount of time we spend on all of this,” says twenty-eight-year-old Bill, a New York advertising executive whose name and profession have also been changed. “There’s a lot of texting back and forth about trades that I don’t count when I say I only spend about two hours a week on it in the summer. It’s probably more like five. And that doesn’t count the fights I have with my girlfriend about the time I spend on it. She thinks it’s not teenage stuff, but, as she puts it, ‘middle school stuff.’ And truthfully, I have been playing fantasy baseball, just with friends and not for real money, since I was thirteen. We did a lot of talking about girls back then. My girlfriend says we should just go to a ballgame, but that’s different. Even if going to one game a week would take no more time than I now spend online, it feels longer. It’s hard to explain.”
If you want to know why fantasy players do not want to use their real names, the explanation may be no more complicated than fear that older bosses would have the same attitude toward fantasy sports as Bill’s girlfriend—that they’re somewhat childish. When I interviewed fantasy baseball players in their twenties and early thirties—all of them volunteers—I found that they were as reluctant to be identified in print as were teenagers scared that their parents would find out about their sports gambling. Brendan Dwyer, a researcher at the Center for Sport Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University (his real name and occupation), has described fantasy sports as “the male version of a book club.”10 Several of the men I interviewed used the same analogy, but all were players who did not do any high-stakes gambling. For some of these men, it is possible that being known as a participant in the male version of a book club would embarrass them more than being known as a gambler.
Although the Fantasy Sports Trade Association claims that a third of all players are women, that proportion is probably much smaller in fantasy baseball leagues. Most of the men I interviewed said that their leagues had had female players at various times, but the women tended to drop out. This may reflect baseball’s relatively smaller female fan base in the real, as distinct from the virtual, world. It may also mean simply that baseball-loving women between ages eighteen and thirty-four (the age group with the largest number of fantasy sports participants) are far too busy—especially if they have children—to spend time texting each other about what a just-reported thumb injury to a starting pitcher means to their prospects.
For the group of non–book club fantasy sports players interested mainly in gambling (or as much in gambling as they are in sport), the stakes are obviously different. To enter leagues and compete with fictitious rosters, participants pay an entry fee to companies, such as FanDuel and DraftKings, which pay out millions in weekly cash prizes. This is not the statsy fan pastime envisaged by the group at La Rotisserie Française, and it does not represent the sort of low-stakes conviviality that characterizes Daniel’s and Bill’s leagues. It’s big business, and professional sports, including M.L.B., are heavily invested in it. The reason: fantasy sports players, particularly those who play nearly every day on commercial sites like FanDuel, watch 40 percent more games on television and other screens once they start participating in the virtual world of sports.11 People who bet significant sums on fantasy sports are obviously more likely than others to watch a televised game, and watch it to the end, because if a player on a fictional fantasy team does well in the real game, the fantasy player has a better chance of winning and taking home a money prize. (Remember: in fantasy sports, statistical performance, and therefore winning or losing, is based on the shifting statistics of athletes on real playing fields.)
Let us say that the faux “general manager” of a fantasy baseball team lives in Kansas City. He is not rooting for the Kansas City Royals to beat the New York Yankees in reality on a given day, but for “his” players to do well in the real world so that the faux general manager can win in the virtual world. If the fantasy general manager picked the Yankees’ spectacular rookie Aaron Judge for his team before the beginning of the 2017 season, he was probably on a high during the early part of that spring. In 2015, M.L.B. signed a partnership agreement with DraftKings, the chief rival of FanDuel, making the former the “Official Daily Fantasy Game” of Major League Baseball. Funny, I always thought that the daily fantasy game of baseball was what was going on in my head.
One particularly tawdry aspect of the relationship between sports and commercial fantasy enterprises is the pretense that somehow, fantasy sports really have nothing to do with gambling and are pure games of skill. In 2016, the New York State Legislature passed a bill rejecting the opinion of State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who found that fantasy sports were games of chance and therefore illegal under New York state law. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law with a pious statement about providing supervision and protection for participants. Prizes awarded by DraftKings and FanDuel would, of course, bring the state new tax revenue. State Assemblyman J. Gary Pretlow, unlike Cuomo, was blunt about the motivation. “Fantasy sports are more than online games,” he said. “They have the potential to generate millions of dollars in revenue for New York State.”12 Sandra Rayme, a vice president of the American Gaming Association, described Daily Fantasy Sports as “the gift that keeps on giving—it’s mainstreamed our business.”13 She said this with pride, not shame.
The role of gambling in commercially sponsored fantasy sports is underlined for me by my interviews with off-the-grid fantasy players like Bill and Daniel, who generally shun games on television and who have a somewhat superior attitude toward those who do watch. Most of these men told me they go weeks at a time without ever turning on a game on television or any other screen. Sports, either real or virtual, are not their entire life, and baseball is not apt to make any money from them by investing in fantasy sports. They haven’t placed any large bets on their imaginary teams, so they have no reason to turn on the television and keep up, minute by minute, with the performance of “their” players. There are exceptions to this general rule; the fantasy sports world is filled with people who write, read, and breathe sports for a variety of reasons that seem to have nothing to do with gambling or with the desire for the equivalent of book club buddies. The Web site Rotowire.com offers invaluable insights into the minds of the obsessed fan. Renee Miller, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester and the author of a 2013 e-book titled Cognitive Bias in Fantasy Sports: Is Your Brain Sabotaging Your Team?, plays fantasy football, basketball, and baseball—and she watches all three sports on television as well. Miller is a serious scientist, but her thoughts about the “greater variability” of outcomes in baseball than in football or basketball are comical to read. In a passage that evokes some of the same responses in a reader as postmodernist philosophy does in most college freshmen, she writes:
Baseball DFS [daily fantasy sports] turned me on to a level of sports variability that I had never experienced before. I’ve written about it here so many times. The range of outcomes for even the best players just blows me away.… A baseball DFS lineup is just as likely to withstand four Ks from Mike Trout and cash, as have Anthony Rizzo hit two home runs and not cash, while the difference between Kevin Durant scoring 40 or 60 FPTs will almost certainly affect the outcome of your N.B.A. cash games. N.F.L. falls somewhere in the middle, with a wider range of outcomes than M.L.B., but each one mattering a lot like N.B.A. It makes it fun for me that there isn’t one “solution” to DFS strategy.14
It’s hard to understand why anyone would be “blown away” by the ability of a good lineup to overcome a bad performance by a great individual player. (By the way, “cash” is just fantasy sports jargon for winning in a particular kind of fantasy baseball game. For the fine points, see www.rotowire.com or any other fantasy sports Web site with a glossary of technical terminology.) The greater variability, or unpredictability, of baseball outcomes is inevitable when every batter is entitled to three strikes and every team must get three outs in an inning. Of course Mike Trout, the star center fielder (in real baseball) for the Los Angeles Angels, can strike out four times and his team can still come away with a win. Of course the same would be true of a fantasy team that included Trout. There are eight other hitters who all get their three swings. And of course if Kevin Durant, the great forward for the Golden State Warriors, scores 60 points in a real N.B.A. game, it will be hard to beat the Warriors unless no one else on their team does any scoring. In a fantasy game, the same would be true. When players can never sit on their hands and wait for the buzzer to end the game, bad individual performances can be overcome.
There is little doubt, from reading commentary by devout fantasy players, that participants in the current commercial iteration of Rotisserie ball are more likely to consume more sports on various media. The long-term effects on baseball cannot be predicted at this point. Although the business of fantasy baseball is very much at ease with the business of baseball, it may be very much at odds with baseball as a game. There is something distasteful about trying to attract younger fans—remember, today’s twelve-year-olds will be old enough to legally deal themselves into online sports in 2024—by something other than the real game.
Okrent, by the way, gave up fantasy baseball in 2009. (Full disclosure: we met and have both worked in the Allen Room, a haven for nonfiction writers in the New York Public Library.) Since then, he says, he has become a more active fan, taking joy in the game itself, rooting for the Cubs, and finally being rewarded in 2016. Could there be any greater fulfillment of a fan’s fantasy?
Returning to those twelve-year-olds, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that M.L.B. is making a real attempt to address the most serious obstacle to the development of young fans—the fact that fewer children and teenagers play baseball or softball than in the past. The best that can be said about expanding M.L.B.’s digital scope is that kids will be able to check in on baseball, if they are so inclined, as they access snippets of other sports, concerts, and video games. But there is no reliable evidence—zilch, nada, bupkes—that online activities, including forays into fantasy baseball at an early age, can create a real fan who goes to the ballpark and follows the game and its star athletes for the sheer fun of it.
Because there is considerable evidence that adult fans are formed in childhood, by playing or being exposed to some form of baseball or softball, it is especially disturbing that all youth sports—and physical activity in general—have been in decline in the United States for at least two decades. One of Manfred’s most interesting interviews since becoming M.L.B. commissioner was conducted not by a grizzled sportswriter but by a teenage reporter, Amiri Tulloch, for Sports Illustrated Kids. Tulloch asked Manfred an astute question: “Are you interested in getting kids to play baseball or just watch it?” Manfred replied, “Both. It is important for our sport that kids play because that gets them interested in the game and they’re more likely to be fans. But it’s also important to get them in the ballpark. Our ballpark experience is a family-friendly experience that the sooner a young person engages in it, the more likely he is to be a fan for his whole life.” Indeed, M.L.B.’s research indicates that the age a child was when a parent first took him to the ballpark is almost as important in creating adult fans as having played ball as a child.15
The play does not have to be highly organized, highly competitive, or driven by adult pressure to occupy an important role in the psyches of children. I’m proof of that. I was—I did not want to admit this in the first chapter—always the proverbial last kid chosen. Yes, the other girls as well as the boys were better, particularly in the field, than I was. I was afraid of every ball hit sharply (even by grade school standards) toward me. One might think I would have hated the game because of my own ineptitude, but playing had the opposite effect: what I learned was how much skill and training it must take to accomplish as simple-appearing a professional baseball move as catching a grounder to shortstop and throwing it to first base in time to get the runner out. I’m not sure if I hadn’t had the experience of playing baseball at play that my baseball education in my grandfather’s bar would have embedded itself so thoroughly in my memory.
In any case, both semisupervised play at recess and unsupervised play outdoors have almost disappeared from American life, and there is no bringing old-fashioned childhood back. In a security-conscious world, many parents are happy (despite the many dangers on the Internet) to have their kids staring at iPad or iPhone screens in their bedrooms. They know where their kids are; they just don’t know where their kids’ minds are. As for public education, the emphasis on frequent and early standardized testing since 2000 has led many schools to cut back on or eliminate recess time altogether. State budget cuts—and, again, the immense stress surrounding standardized testing—have persuaded some school districts to eliminate physical education in high school altogether. In 2016, SHAPE America (the Society of Health and Physical Educators) released a survey indicating that schools receive an average of $764 a year (not per pupil but per school) for exercise programs. The $764 does not include teacher salaries—only unimportant things like equipment, from volleyballs to baseball bats, and maintenance for safety purposes. Just one state—Oregon—and the District of Columbia offer physical education programs that meet guidelines set by the American Heart Association.16
Therein lies the importance of the Play Ball youth initiative, sponsored by M.L.B. and USA Baseball (the governing body of amateur baseball). Play Ball is attempting to draw more kids into enjoying games with balls and sticks—whether as part of an organized league or as the brainchild of a parent who simply wants his or her children and their friends to get more exercise. On the Play Ball Web site, parents and children can find a variety of resources, including the free Play Ball mobile coaching app for Android devices. M.L.B. has invested more than $30 million to introduce Play Ball in 140 cities. “It’s great to see that they’re emphasizing cheaper alternatives for kids to play,” said Nancy Maxwell, a coach in the Bronx.17
“Cheaper” is the key word here. Today’s twelve-year-old is only one year away from the point at which 70 percent of American children drop out of organized sports altogether, according to the National Alliance for Sports. The cost of sports to kids who do continue with organized play after middle school—and to their parents—can be staggering. In baseball, a minimum of $2,000 for travel costs, equipment, and specialized coaching is the rule rather than the exception. Many middle-class parents, whatever their race, have no choice but to say no. Given the cost of college, what sensible parent would not want to save that money to reduce his or her child’s future student loan debt? The 2016 Project Play report provides stark evidence of just how well off a family has to be to enter the elite, semiprofessionalized world of elite teenage sports. In 2015, only 38 percent of teens from families with an income of $25,000 or less played team sports, compared with 67 percent of those from homes with more than $100,000 in household income.18 Given that the median income of American families is around $51,000, that statistic tells you all you need to know about why so many teens drop out of sports.
The cost of specialized training at an early age affects all sports, but baseball is particularly vulnerable because of the length of time needed to acquire the game’s most sophisticated skills. When I was growing up, Little League—while its participants were the best players from local schools—was not costly. It was always sponsored by some small local business, and “traveling” meant, at most, driving forty-five minutes to an adjacent county. The coach was usually someone you knew—perhaps a high school phys ed teacher or a middle-aged neighbor who, it was rumored, had once played in the low minor leagues. The pressure and expense associated with baseball for teenagers is sadly congruent with the income inequality that is the defining political issue in the United States today. That M.L.B. has recognized the problem and is trying to put some of the “play” back in “play ball” is to its credit. The problem, inseparable from economic and class inequality, is both bigger than and an integral part of baseball.