On Being a Baseball Fan

I was listening to Bill Simmons' recent podcast with Seth Meyers recently, and I realized that his entire analysis of baseball players boils down to "I am [terrified/supremely confident] when this guy is [hitting/pitching]." While I think that this is a fairly terrible way to evaluate actual player performance, I can understand the temptation to think this way. A baseball game that you care about is essentially a sequence of encounters in which you feel varying levels of comfort and trepidation, and the interaction of these sensations defines the dramatic arc of the game. There are also bursts of euphoria and horror that accompany the outcomes of these events, but these are short-lived, and they quickly give way to the feelings that arise from events to come rather than events that were.

Of course, all sports (or at least the sports events that you are emotionally invested in) manipulate the viewer in this same fashion, but I think that this dynamic supercedes all else in baseball to a greater extent than in other sports for a number of reasons. First of all, there are relatively few events in a baseball game as compared to other sports, and the periods of time between these events are much longer. Thus, you have more dead space to fill with foreboding or expectation, and there is little else to distract you (other than the inane musings of Tim McCarver or, especially when watching an HD broadcast, the number of pimples on Jonathan Papelbon's neck).

Second, the element of spectacle is relatively unimportant in a baseball game. There are some things -- like a really good slider that a batter misses by about two feet -- that awe you, but not nearly as many as in football or in basketball, where ferocious hits and incredible feats of athleticism occur frequently. In baseball, it's mostly a little white ball getting thrown back and forth over the same 70 feet of grass.

Third and perhaps most important, the things that cause events to unfold as they do in a game are generally either random or arcane. As a result, rational analysis of these events is much more difficult. If you know something about the sport, you know approximately how good the pitchers and batters are in general, but you don't really know fundamentally why each specific encounter ends the way it does. After all, bad pitchers get good hitters out very often (indeed, most of the time), even after long at-bats in which the batter looks to be very much in control. The reason is usually something like "hit very hard, but right at fielder" or "swung half an inch too low, popped up" or "pitcher gripped ball slightly harder," all of which are difficult to observe and liable to occur at any time. A home-run swing and a deep-fly-to-right-fielder-swing look pretty much the same; things happen as they happen for reasons unknown. In football and basketball, it's much easier to see what occured and analyze what went wrong or right (wicked crossover, blown coverage, etc.), largely because the differences between the players' actions on successful and disastrous plays are much greater, and the game-long trends are also much stronger and more obvious (superior blocking, post-ups leading to open threes, etc.). The result of this impenetrability is that the viewer is left with little more than emotional responses to the events taking place.

This ability to create tension but render other reactions moot is probably why baseball lends itself so well to literary writing but so poorly to traditional sports commentary. High-minded writers have much drama and narrative to suss out, but day-to-day analysts are left to blather about things like team heart and ability to handle pressure that have little to do with things on a plate-appearance-to-plate-appearance level. This aspect of the game is also probably why fans like Simmons would rather have a dominating closer than a very good starter, even though the very good starter is almost always more useful in getting a team wins; in a sport full of uncertainties, it feels nice to have a relatively sure thing happen every now and then (assuming that it's in your favor). On the other hand, the unpredictability can be comforting when your team is in dire straits, like the Sox are tonight. Why did the Indians beat us for three straight games after we looked so good in the previous four? Luck, mostly. And that can turn at any time.