The truth of the matter is ... baseball just isn't that important anymore.
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| Constant rain during the World Series doesn't do baseball any favors. (Getty Images) |
But the truth is, baseball just isn't that important anymore in this country, and there's no going back. I'm not sure how many people, other than the purists and the owners and (maybe) the players, even want to go back. We like baseball where it is, behind football and ahead of soccer and log-jammed in there with basketball, golf, auto racing and combat sports.
Baseball is OK, but it's not fun. Not in its entirety. Unless the conditions are perfect -- nice weather, nice action -- a baseball game is an impossible thing to sit through for nine innings. If it's hot, it's too hot for three hours. If it's cold ... same thing. Too cold for three hours. If the teams aren't scoring enough, it's boring. If they're scoring too much, this game's going to last four hours, which brings us back to the temperature.
Baseball isn't the fairy tale it used to be, and if it is, it's the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. The porridge is too hot. The bed is too soft. Nothing is just right.
But still, the 2008 World Series has kick-started a whole new wave of finger-pointing and brainstorming, with most fingers pointed at Selig and most of the potential solutions aimed into outer space.
No less an authority than Peter Gammons, the Hall of Fame baseball writer, has forwarded the idea that the World Series be played at a neutral site, presumably at a warm-weather location in California or, unless he was kidding, Mexico. Sorry, Peter. I can never tell when you're kidding. My solution is to giggle every time you open your mouth.
A neutral-site World Series is patently absurd. Baseball isn't football. Local baseball fans with no rooting interest in the two World Series teams aren't about to shell out $1,000 for a ticket to watch, say, Game 2. Only in football are tens of thousands of fans willing to spend a small fortune to traipse across the country to watch one winner-take-all game. Football is passionate. Football is fun.
Baseball? It's an intellectual exercise rooted in tradition and contemplation, and tens of thousands of people don't spend small fortunes to traipse across the country for a traditional, contemplative intellectual exercise.
Another solution is shortening the season. Correct me if I'm wrong, but no major professional sport has ever shortened its season. Not the NFL, not the NBA, not anybody. College football is longer than it used to be. College basketball has more games than it used to have. Everything in sports is bigger than it was, and stodgy baseball isn't going to be the first to buck that trend. And who would want that anyway?
The process of a baseball season is a lot like the process of writing a book: It's most enjoyable when it's over. With baseball, that means wrapping up the 162nd game and then looking back and studying the statistics, seeing which players got better or worse (or, like Adam Dunn, both). If the season becomes 154 games or 148 games or whatever pie-in-the-sky length being floated by this baseball writer or that one, the process will be ruined. We can't enjoy the season because it's baseball, and now we can't enjoy its conclusion because it's not baseball. Sort of like what steroids did to the game a few years ago.
Another solution, and I'm providing the link so you don't think I'm making this up, is to shorten the actual games in the World Series from nine inning to seven. Apparently that bastardized, rain-interrupted Game 5, which started on a Monday and ended with a three-inning shootout on a Wednesday, wasn't a travesty. It was the future. Or something like that. Look, click the link. I can't make sense of it, and it hurts my head just to try.
What's kind of nice is that there are still people who think baseball is worth saving. Some pitchers make $500,000 for a single start, even the starts that don't make it out of the second inning, and Scott Boras is about to get Manny Ramirez a contract worth $50,000 per plate appearance, even the at-bats when he's not trying. Tickets are too expensive, parking is too expensive and ballpark concourses are too much like the local mall, only with a much more expensive food court.
But still people -- people who go to the ballpark for free, it must be pointed out -- want to save baseball. That's sweet.
Me, I say baseball can't be saved. Blame Bud or Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire or whatever scapegoat you want, but just admit what is clear. Baseball is no longer our national pastime. It's now a niche sport. The baseball media would disagree, but as the steroid scandal showed us, the baseball media is always the last to know.
