top of page
Search

The loss of baseball

Friday 5/17/24

A prediction: A lot of players will soon start getting into baseball's Hall of Fame with fairly slight career totals, at least as pertains to (former) Hall of Fame standards. This will be especially the case with pitchers, but it'll happen as well even with first basemen, a power position where beefy totals are important. Freddie Freeman, for instance, will be a first ballot Hall of Famer, and he won't have much more than 400 homers--if he gets there--and about 1400 RBI and a batting average under .300. One result of this is that there will be a great many players who were better players, with better "rate stats," from before this era, whose exclusion will look all the more glaring and unfair. An example: Dick Allen. Another: Albert Belle. That Carlos Delgado isn't a Hall of Famer is going to seem ludicrous. It's going to be tough to right those wrongs, though. Those other players may end up--or, rather, continue to be--SOL, victims of bad timing.


Baseball is a mysterious game. Sheer away that mystery--or the possibility of mystery--and the mystery of the individual--and you make it all but impossible for the true heart of baseball to beat. The ways in which a player may have success are many, and there may be one way--and only one way--which works for a certain player who has found that way. But this is not what baseball is anymore. Players don't play baseball now; they play numbers. (And every team plays the same way because teams play numbers. The style of baseball now is that there are no styles.) The numbers say you should swing this way, at this rate, so the play alters their game to get to numbers.


Achieving those numbers of technique--a certain mph for bat speed, a certain angle for the swing--becomes the endgame. Do that, you'll get these others numbers, and you'll receive these dollar amounts. If you love baseball, I don't know how you can like this very much. Lovers of baseball, I suspect, follow the current game, insofar as they do, for a proverbial whiff of the former game of baseball, which this resembles--to a degree--but also is not. For a reminder. Something vestigial that is not yet gone entirely. I think it's awful and sad. Football and hockey change because of injuries, but injuries aren't a factor in baseball as they are in those sports. Players get hurt, yes, but that's more to do with the body than the dangerous nature of the game. In football and hockey, players are bigger and faster than at previous times, and always getting bigger and faster, which means more injuries without alterations to the game. Rules meant for safety and protection.


A baseball game, though, poses no more threat to its participants in 2024 than in 1884. The game has been destroyed--I don't think that's too severe a word--by people who did not play it, who don't care about it. The Yale graduate who saw a way to turn the game into something like a computer program. Basketball is also not the game it once was because of analytics, though not to as dramatic a degree as with baseball. Athleticism always asserts itself with basketball, no matter the changes in approach. Someone will have to go to the hoop at some point, they'll double-pump, and kiss the ball off the backboard. But slashing, cutting, back-door passing, pick-and-rolling, ball movement, is so much more pleasing--and more purely the game--than the raining down of threes because the person from Yale says that's how the number crunching says to do it.


What is going to be so dispiriting and feel so hollow and lackluster--and up baseball's "blah-ness" quotient--is when starting pitchers with career win totals of 120 start going into the Hall of Fame. You won't remember them. You won't think of their big moments. They went five or six innings--sometimes--and had a high ERA+--some years--and won a Cy Young with 13 victories. They won't be legends of the postseason, because for a pitcher to be a postseason legend, he must go deep into games. But there will have to be starting pitchers and all eras are represented. I mourn the loss of baseball. I think it's a real American loss.



Commentaires


Les commentaires ont été désactivés.
bottom of page