If you were to take baseball and put it next to any of the other three major North American sports (four if you want to count soccer), it would, admittedly, come up way short.
It doesn’t match fútbol for sustained, consistently dull, pointless action, but even devotees of the game have to admit it’s not thrill-a-minute stuff.
But it’s not supposed to be.
Baseball is a leisurely game from a different era. Its origins stem from people playing on sandlots and town commons. They weren’t elite athletes, even if there are sporadic moments of real athletic action involved.
As baseball evolved, the skills to play it at a higher level evolved with it – but never to the point where players were too far separated from their fans. It was always an everyman’s game at heart.
There was never a time limit on games because baseball in the 1800s, when it began to evolve, was more of an activity. Nobody cared how long the games took, as long as it didn’t get too dark.
Baseball also had another element that other sports do not: a very real nostalgia factor.
For example, the 1961 season – when I was 7 – was taken up with the Mickey Mantle-Roger Maris home run race to eclipse Babe Ruth’s record of 60 homers in 1927. The record was considered so sacred that there was serious talk of disregarding it if Mantle or Maris couldn’t get No. 61 within the 1927 season limit of 154 games. The word “asterisk” became part of baseball’s vernacular.
I don’t see any corresponding “holiness” about any other sport’s records.
The fanfare surrounding the four players who have eclipsed 61 was enormous, too. Again, more so than any other sport.
Nostalgia wasn’t only bestowed on the greats, either. As a Red Sox fan in the early-to-mid 1960s, my formative years, really, life was a series of Chuck Schillings, Jim Gosgers, Gary Geigers, Eddie Bressouds and Bob Tillmans. They were ordinary ballplayers on terrible teams.
Mediocrity met its dubious match with a player named Mario Mendoza, a lifetime .215 hitter who was so inept with the stick that players who couldn’t hit at least .200 were said to be below the “Mendoza Line.”
Is there a “Hugh Millen” line in the NFL? Don’t think so.
Baseball has a continuum that you don’t see too often in other sports. Its grandfathers, fathers and sons bonding over Dick “Dr. Strangeglove” Stuart flubbing up on first base and then hitting a towering homer.
Also, summer in the ’50s and ’60s was not an endless parade of indoor hockey, organized park-league basketball, football captains’ practices in scorching heat and year-round soccer. Summer was baseball. If you wanted to go outside and run around, for the most part, you had baseball, baseball and more baseball.
I thought of all this while watching an exhibition game between the Red Sox and Tampa Bay in the Florida sunshine, with players I’ll probably never hear of again.
In other words, baseball as it ought to be. No ski masks. No trails of frozen breath. No one with winter jackets swinging bats in the on-deck circle. Just the old-fashioned summer game played in glorious weather by a bunch of ham ‘n’ eggers.
The game seems to have lost its luster because guys like me are aging out. People coming up behind have grown up with all those distractions we lacked. Where we didn’t have a choice, they have one and have already made it by the time they’re forced to watch 8 p.m. World Series games played in winter-like conditions.
What made baseball America’s Pastime can never be replicated, no matter how much they try to jazz it up. I don’t know what the answer is. You cannot bring that era back. All I know is that I feel as if I’m in a shrinking generation of torch-holders. And if that’s so, so be it. I wear the mantle proudly.
Play ball.
