Going for the fences

Is the national pastime past its time?

DYSPEPSIANA | James Krohe Jr.

Woman of the Year, the 1942 movie starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn: Sportswriter Tracy invites the Hepburn character to her first baseball game, at Yankee Stadium. She arrives in the sixth inning or so; told that the score is 0-0, she says, “Good, I haven’t missed anything.”

What is wonderful about the moment is not that it is funny, but that you have to know something about baseball to think it’s funny, and that the writers of a Hollywood movie in 1942 could safely assume that their audience would know something about baseball.

I thought of the Hepburn character while I was reading “The Simple Technology That Accidentally Ruined Baseball” in The Atlantic. In it, Derek Murphy attempts to explain a doleful trend in the national pastime: Both home runs-per-game and runs-per-game are 20 percent lower than the record-setting pace of the early 2000s. Attendance and TV ratings are down in consequence.

Oh dear. What is wrong? Murphy thinks the reason is the cameras that now record every pitch. Beginning in 2009, the big leagues used the new technology to track missed calls. This gave baseball the league data to evaluate their umpires for accuracy. Under pressure to meet a higher standard, umps have called the strike zone more consistently and more accurately each year since 2007. And since more accurate means “smaller,” batters have been put at a disadvantage.

I think he’s mistaken – more on that, perhaps, over at my blog, Second Thoughts – but I here want to address Murphy’s complaint that baseball in which baseball’s own rules are enforced is boring. There’s little question that pitching is not interesting to the casual fan, meaning the fan who watches in the hope that some not-quite-big-enough-to-play-tight-end slugger will hit one outta here. But hell, baseball has always been boring to people who don’t like baseball. Chess is boring too, and so is George Eliot – if you know nothing about chess or care nothing about novels.

The home run does for a ball game what the atom bomb promised to do about war – it makes a speedy end to the tedious and slow business of winning one pitch at a time. Any moron can understand it. Unhappily for the game, morons compose the greater percentage of just about every audience for popular entertainments in this country, and the moguls who own the game have always been eager to please them. Among many other changes, in the early 1960s the owners were alarmed that home runs were being hit too often, and ordered the strike zone expanded. Then – duh – more batters started striking out, so they lowered the pitcher’s mounds.

Thompson’s evident affection is for a game that does not exist in the official rule book. I have no argument with his preference as a preference, and acknowledge that there are probably many more Thompsons out there than there are Krohes. And it’s silly to treat the game as inviolate. The balls have changed, the ballparks have changed, the playing surfaces have changed, the gloves have changed, the rules have changed, the bats have changed, the means of deciding champions have changed, the time the games are played has changed. I fully expect the masters of the game to tinker with it again to tip the offensive balance toward hitters.

Still, I rather like the version that I’ve grown up with, which is still played, more or less, in the National League, and would hate to see that game ruined. So I hope that this time they do the job right once and for all. Rather than ruin old-style baseball, I hope they offer a radically new-style baseball for those fans who don’t like the old one.

It’s been done. Rugby football used to be an amateur sport; teams that paid players formed their own league, devoted to a game that was played to amuse the fans rather than to glorify the athlete. Rugby League evolved into a different game, adopting rules intended to making matches faster and higher scoring.

Cricket offers an even more apt model.

That game’s international version – in which test matches spread over five days – was and is widely damned as boring. “Limited overs” cricket (don’t ask) was introduced in the 1960s and has evolved into something more like a game than a stately dance, complete with garish uniforms, night play and one-day matches. In 2003 cricket went even farther – too far, in the opinion of many – when it debuted, to cheers, a new version designed to complete matches within three hours or so.

There have been unfortunate attempts to do something similar in this country – think of team tennis, for example, or the NBA. Happily, we have a better model, already widely played, that would delight the children among us – which includes, apparently, most Americanborn males between 8 and 35. It’s tee-ball. Every ball is put into play, producing lots of base runners and, best of all, it requires no skill to hit the ball a long way, only brute strength. It’ll be a sure hit.

Contact James Krohe Jr. at KroJnr@gmail.com.

Editor’s note

Springfi eld Public Schools Superintendent Jennifer Gill is getting high marks for candor in the way she describes the dismal graduation rate, test scores and racial disparities of District 186. In her speech to the Springfi eld Citizens Club Sept. 26, the new schools chief demonstrated she understands the diffi culties facing this urban school system with 15,000 students, and she won’t be distracted by the relative lack of problems in the bedroom communities surrounding it. Her “data-driven” straightforward approach should take Springfi eld schools from being her problem to being “our” problem – so that citizens will eventually take action for change. Jennifer Gill’s address to the Citizens Club is available online at http://youtu.be/HVJMfbKvgt8. –Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher