Baseball Tranquility

 It’s a cold and windy night game in September at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. Sitting in a nosebleed seat along the third-base line twice as expensive as the one I’d paid for beyond right field, I’m branded in the Nationals’ cherry-blossom themed alternate colors, wearing entirely gray (anthracite, they call it) and pink. Each piece of clothing has a story.

I bought the hat at a rain-delayed game in April, where I played cultural ambassador for friends from Australia, Lebanon, and Canada who had never been to a baseball game. One of them asked me if batters were allowed to go back to home and try again if they weren’t happy with the quality of a hit.

The shirt commemorates July’s Grateful Dead Night, with a ceaselessly grinning skeleton swinging a bat. I’m a sucker for games where prizes are given for attendance, just tonight I’ve received a bobblehead of Nationals catcher Keibert Ruiz.

I bought the sweatshirt today to keep warm. The first-day-of-fall wind asserts itself, keeping home runs inside the park and carrying the foam off beers. Because of that wind, I missed a moment in history. Tonight, Ronald Acuña Jr. became the fifth person ever to hit forty home runs and steal forty bases in a single season. He hit that fortieth home run while I was in the team store, buying the extra layer of warmth.

Aside from that missed milestone, this game is meaningless. The season ends in a week. The Nationals were eliminated from the postseason weeks ago around the same time that Acuña’s Braves clinched their playoff berth. Still, thirty-six thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven people are here, taking this last chance to catch a ballgame before the fall and winter set in, and I’m one of them.

Six months ago, this is not where I expected to be. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace warns us to “choose our temples of fanaticism with great care”, but I don’t think I chose this temple. To briefly illustrate how far out of left field this conversion was, understand a bit about me. I have never been a baseball fan. At the start of spring I could hardly name one modern ballplayer and I didn’t know who won the World Series the previous fall. Beyond the fundamentals of the game that every kid learns growing up, I was ignorant and neutral about baseball. On top of that, I’m afflicted with what Michael Pollan called the “modern malady” of information overload. As a software engineer and writer in my twenties, I practically live off the blue light from my screens. When confronted by even a moment of downtime, waiting for an elevator or for my coffee order to be ready, I pull out my phone.

We live in an attention economy, algorithmically tailored entertainment served up on platters wherever we turn. Streaming services, social media, video games; ubiquitous binge-able pastimes that are easy to get lost in. You don’t need to learn anything before starting a show on Netflix or taking your first swipe through TikTok, but to enjoy baseball takes patiences, learning, and a bit of madness. So why does America’s pastime still compel us? What drew me and 36,926 others to a futile game on a cold night? A year ago, I would have chosen to pass an evening with video games and YouTube, but now here I am among the nosebleeds where old men keep their own score of the game and shake their heads when the official score disagrees with them, baseball’s equivalent of the blue-haired old ladies at daily Mass. I’m wearing the colors, singing the songs. I am at peace. How did this happen?

Baseball is a contradictory game. It inspires fervent devotion in some and a shockingly potent vitriol in others. As I began immersing myself in the game, many people asked why? Why follow such an old, slow, boring sport? Perception makes all the difference. For each of those so-called flaws, there is another angle to consider. 

I

Baseball can certainly seem like an antique sport. Today’s game would be recognizable to a veteran of the Civil War, a claim other major sports can hardly make. Many of the most well-known names in baseball are historical. Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig.

The invention of baseball is credited to a man named Abner Doubleday, who supposedly invented the game in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. He would go on to become a Major General in the U.S. Army, fire the first shot at Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War, and eventually patent the San Francisco cable car. All of that is true. Except for the part about baseball. That was an utterly fictitious claim made fifteen years after his death. Primordial forms of baseball were being played as early as 1774. A soldier at Valley Forge recorded playing a game of “base” in 1778. The year he supposedly invented the game, Abner Doubleday was hundreds of miles south of Cooperstown, attending West Point. Still, the Hall of Fame remains in Cooperstown, and even if its original importance was forged, mythic importance has set in over time.

Major League Baseball does not shy away from history, instead embracing the past far more than any other professional sport. Outside of the actual schedule of competition, the most important day of the year in professional football, basketball, or hockey is Draft Day, when the new generation of talent begin their careers. Struggling teams get the best new prospects and their fortunes change. In baseball, the most important non-competitive day is the Hall of Fame induction, when the best players of the past are immortalized in Cooperstown, New York.

Where other sports look forwards, baseball looks back. When Acuña hit that fortieth home run, the significance of the 40/40 line came from the historical implications of the achievement. His individual accomplishment put him into rarefied company. Another line written in the book of baseball.

Baseball has the gift of time, the histories are thicker and richer than most sports, interwoven with the last one hundred and fifty years of world history in a remarkable way. The sport was spread by soldiers in the Civil War. The integrity of the game was thrown into question by the gambling Chicago Black Socks of the Prohibition Era. Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, but the many legendary players whose careers were limited to the Negro Leagues remind us just how recently legal segregation ended. Josh Gibson, for example, played at the same time as Babe Ruth and hit so well that some called Ruth “the white Josh Gibson”. His single-season batting average from 1943 (.466) is the second highest in history, but it was only recognized by Major League Baseball three years ago. Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech as ALS ended his career, one of the greatest in modern oratory, not just sports. History is worked into the fabric of baseball, and it captures the tragedies and oddities inevitable in such a long-lived sport.

Take Dave Stieb, who pitched for the Toronto Blue Jays in the eighties and nineties. Where a batter like Acuña reaches history by putting up massive numbers, immortality for pitchers lies at zero. A complete no-hitter is one of the greatest achievements for a pitcher. That means throwing nine full innings without allowing even one batter to successfully make contact. Keep in mind: today, the average starting pitcher throws about half of a game. Throwing a no-hitter means pushing past that limit and, as fatigue settles in, still producing enough speed and control to stymie batters.

Most pitchers never get close to this milestone, because a single slip or moment of bad luck is enough to end an attempt. Stieb came astronomically close four times, each attempt sustained into the ninth inning before being foiled. Two of those games were back to back starts, meaning he came agonizingly within reach before falling short two times in a single week. Eventually he did reach the mountaintop, on September 2^nd, 1990, and remains the only player to ever throw one for the Blue Jays.

This is one story among thousands, a shining pebble in the mountain range of the game’s history. Tragedy and triumph can be found just about everywhere in baseball once you know where to start looking. Each specific game is a chapter in a dozen stories, dramatic arcs developing over seasons, careers, and eras.

Baseball is a tribal practice. Fans as a whole form the super-tribe, and lines within that conglomerate are drawn based on team-allegiance. To begin, choose a couple of teams to follow. This is a contentious recommendation, because many believe that you should only cheer for one team.  You can only have one favorite, after all. But this is a large planet, and unless your teams play one another, you just have more options to enjoy. Choose your teams however you like, but here are my suggestions:

If you have a team near your home, cheer for them. They will be your first port of call for in-person games, and it’s important to have hometown pride. When I moved to Washington, D.C. after college, I started cheering for the Washington Nationals. They are my primary team, and no matter who or when they are playing, they are my first port of call if I’m in the mood for a game. I’m assuming that your options are Major League teams, but minor league and international teams are, of course, fair game.

Otherwise, historical merit, a player’s appeal, or the team colors are all valid paths to selection. My secondary team is the Seattle Mariners for the following reasons: When I started learning more about baseball, I was in the early weeks of dating my partner who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and my first time visiting her family in that region was the week before the Mariners hosted the All-Star Game on my birthday. Teams only host once every thirty years, so that seemed a fortuitous omen. Also, their team colors are green and blue, my favorite colors. Finally, the Mariners have one of the best histories in Major League Baseball.

They have had legendary players like Ichiro Suzuki, the greatest hitter in the history of the game, and Ken Griffey Jr., whose swing is proof that poetry can exist in motion, but they’ve never won a World Series. They’re also not the first Major League team to play in Seattle, the Seattle Pilots played a single season in 1969 before moving to Milwaukee and becoming the Brewers. My favorite piece of Mariners history is this: when they held a mail-in contest to name the team, a man from Bellevue named Roger Szmodis suggested the name, writing “I’ve selected the Mariners because of the natural association between the sea and Seattle and the people, who have been challenged and rewarded by it.” What a sentiment! For winning the contest, he was supposed to win season tickets, but he has never come forward to claim them, adding a little mystery at franchise’s inception. All these factors makes them one of my favorite teams, and since they play on a different coast and in a different division from the Nationals, I almost never have to choose between them.

Do not worry about current performance when selecting your teams to root for, except if the teams you choose are currently doing quite well. If you suddenly start rooting for an excellent team, you should have a good reason, otherwise people might call you a bandwagon fan. It’s far easier to choose a team that is struggling, for then you can enjoy the fertile common ground of failure, discussing their mistakes and flaws with hands thrown up in irate but loving frustration.

Regardless of selection criteria, once you have a team to cheer for, there are a few basic pieces of information worth understanding about them. Know the team’s core lineup, at least well enough to recognize star players, and the big names in their pitching rotation. Do they have an ace starting pitcher? Is there a great hitter on the team? It’s equally important to know the manager’s name, so that in post-game conversation you can say things like “So-and-so didn’t know what he was doing keeping that guy on the mound for the fifth inning”. Essentially, a rough familiarity with the cast of characters is all you need to get started with a team, and your relationship will blossom from there. 

II

Baseball is slow. Too slow, many people think. It’s the biggest criticism I’ve heard, and there’s some validity to it. The average duration of a Major League game crept up steadily over the last several decades as pitchers paused longer between throws and batters developed complex rituals to perform between each swing. In the eighties you could sip a couple of New Cokes and take in a game in about two hours and forty minutes, in 2022, you’d need an extra Coke Zero Sugar to make it through all three hours and six minutes.

Major League Baseball agreed that this was a problem, which is why this year the league introduced the biggest rule changes in decades. There is now a pitch clock forcing balls into play more rapidly, and now batters aren’t allowed to step out of the box so frequently. By adding these small measurements of time to the sport, games have sped back up. In the 2023 regular season, the average game-duration dropped down to two hours and thirty-nine minutes. Forty years of accumulated temporal cruft, all those little delays and interstitial moments, gone just like that.

But these temporal improvements aren’t the only form of sloth some people find in the game. “Baseball is too slow” also means “It takes too long for action to happen”. Where the first problem was objective, easily charted, this one is subjective.

When baseball is compared with the rest of the “big four” sports (basketball, football and hockey), the differences are dramatic. In all of the others, the ball remains in constant motion, momentum ebbing and flowing as it approaches either goal. Either teams could score at any time. Offense shift to defense in an instant. There’s also at least one clock ticking down at all times, that persistent temporality adding another level of urgency to the play.

There is no such thing as a buzzer beater in baseball. The new pitch clock does not corral baseball within a temporal boundary, it merely compels the game forward. Instead of time, progression through a game of baseball is defined by defense. Three outs are the only way to end a period and move on. Where in time-based sports, the window of opportunity narrows proportionally to the number remaining on the clock, actual events change the amount of potential in a game in baseball. Action defines the limits of the game, not abstract time.

Because of this timeless, action-ruled format, a fantastic offense could theoretically continue to score forever, so long as three outs aren’t racked up. However, most innings actually end without any score. In 2023, the average number of runs scored per half-inning was only ¼^[1]. On top of this, only a minority of balls pitched even turn into plays. If the spectator’s expectations for action in baseball are set relative to the amount of action in other sports, then of course this will seem slow.

Baseball must be considered on its own terms. Consider the pitcher’s job. From sixty feet and six inches away, they must throw a ball into a rectangle less than two feet across with enough speed and control to stymie a series of batters who have studied each of their pitches and practiced against similar ones. Any weakness they show will be exploited by the offensive lineup.  On the flip side, for all that preparation and training, a batter is considered truly great if they get one hit in every three attempts, regardless of whether or not those hits convert into runs scored. For the pitcher, the slightest error can tumble into disaster, but for the batter, failure is expected most of the time. The tension between these conflicting systems are the crucial dynamic of baseball, around which everything else is built.

Although this rate of play may seem slothlike when compared with those of other sports, it actually serves as a narrative device. Stillness is not inactivity, it’s a state of pending action sitting over the field like a thin-frozen lake. Any step could shatter it, plunging a team into trouble. Every ball that makes it into play can have significant ramifications for the outcome of the game. Could the same be said about basketball, for example, where teams typically spend three quarters handing the lead back and forth as numbers climb on the scoreboard, and only the final quarter is critical to deciding the outcome?

One strategy I recommend for developing a sense of baseball time is going to a game alone. This may seem radical, but solitude forces true spectation. For maximum effect, buy a cheap seat along either the first or third baseline, so that your angle relative to the pitcher-batter line is acute, letting pitches and (good) hits travel across your field of view, rather than into or out of it. Sit in the shade with a cold drink and some salty food and watch a little galaxy spin below you. For a reference point through the game, pick up a scoring sheet and keep your own record of the goings on the field.

This is another contradiction of the game: every play can be codified by a combination of acronyms and numbers, but not every play has an objectively correct code. For example, a sharp hit bounces fast through the inflamed, barely skims the shortstop’s glove and they can’t get a hand on it until the runner has safely reached first base. Is that a successful single (1B) or an error (E6)? It depends on the scorer’s judgement, and so long as your answer adequately describes the outcome, your answer is just as valid as the official one.

Whether or not you keep score, observe the goings-on closely. Watch the movements of the defensive fielders with each batter, adjusting their positions across the massive plane to preemptively compensate for the likely swings. When a hit goes foul, watch the ball veer towards the populace and create a frenzy where it lands.

If time feels like it’s dragging by, consider the difference between an interstitial moment and an intentional one. An interstitial moment is a nuisant gap, an interruption between two more important events. Commercial breaks,  traffic jams, long-buffering videos. The journey between A and B is inconvenienced and in turn, this causes a yearning for distraction. The world is full of options to lighten this so-called burden.

An intentional moment is the same thing. Or at least, it can be. Perception decides whether the same number of seconds feel like inconveniences, or simply seconds passing by. The spaces between innings, between batters, between pitches can all feel like interstitial moments. If they do, an impatient itch may very well build up and the game will feel like a mosaic of frustrations. But seen another way, they are simply moments to enjoy in another, more fundamental way. Take a breath. Sip a drink. Pick someone out of the crowd and ponder their life story. Simply be. It’s an under-appreciated skill nowadays.

III

Is baseball boring? I don’t think it is, when the stillness of the game sets the stage for great starbursts of actions, when each game carries weight for so many different stories: the career performance of each player on the field, both team’s standings in their leagues, and the most central story of baseball: the played game itself.

In the Enlightenment, there were two fundamental archetypes of story: the War and the Journey. Iliad and Odyssey. Those two archetypes still sit deeply in our communal consciousness. When we crave story, those types are the first, most accessible and satisfying options. Both can be easily found in baseball. There is war in each game and series, each at bat a duel between pitcher and batter. There are journeys in each season, Major League Baseball teams criss-crossing the continent, and personal: new players trying to improve and earn their spots on the roster, injured players trying to recover and reach success once more. There are two Ithacas in professional baseball: October, the World Series, is the short term goal; and Cooperstown, the Hall of Fame, is the loftiest goal of a lifetime in baseball.

These stories develop over the top of the game itself, that beautiful dance of offense and defense, balls thrown, caught, hit and missed. To take in a single game of baseball is to sit among the pages of a great unseen book, and once you know that, it’s hard to forget. I think it’s impossible to see the game as boring after that

But just because there is potential for this great entertainment in baseball doesn’t mean that it will come easily. It takes concentrated time to appreciate and understand the game, and there’s not a finish line to cross beyond which you’ll perfectly understand all the nuance and history underneath baseball. Even for a baseline understanding of the game, a fair amount of effort must be put in. Working for entertainment can seem counterintuitive, even off-putting in the modern era. When there are just so many pastimes available to us, most of them without such extensive prerequisites, why is baseball worth such rigamarole?

The same question could be asked of countless efforts: learning a language, reading Russian literature, practicing meditation, the list goes on. In the face of easy options, why choose harder ones? Effort deepens the reward of experience. When it takes time simply to be capable of understanding something well enough to enjoy it, then the enjoyment comes from a deeper, more thorough sort and it sticks around longer.

Compare the satisfaction of finishing a good book, an activity that requires active participation, imagination, and mental presence, with setting down your phone after watching ten minutes’ worth of TikTok videos, that most passive of activities. The former leaves you sated in a comprehensive way, the mental equivalent of eating a delicious meal you cooked yourself. The latter leaves a greasy feeling in the mind, an uncomfortable combination of passed time without much to show for it. The pastimes of least resistance offer the least reward.

Once you have the foundational knowledge for baseball, taking in a game rewards more fully. Time is passed, of course, but it is passed with a level of enrichment across psychic levels. It stimulates the brain. There are tactics to track, scores to keep, balls and strikes to count, all while leaving plenty of time for interstitial contemplation between plays. That mental exercise sits in the beauty of a ballpark in the spring and summer months.

Baseball bursts with primal satisfaction: played on an Edenic vast greenery, the best moments involve balls hurled at the edge of human capacity for speed, clubbed into the stratosphere. Take away strategy, take away close competition, and even the dullest blowout of a game is still two and a half hours outside. That’s never a bad way to spend an afternoon.

Back in the nosebleeds on that windy September night. After the seventh inning, the Braves seem sure to win out. Marcell Ozuna cracked a home run to right field, bringing in two other runners to raise the score to 9-4. He stretched his arms out like wings as he rounded third, the right one glowing with a neon-green compression sleeve. It began to rain.

Rain is remarkably common at Nationals games, D.C. sees more inches of rain per year than Seattle. More than half of the games I attended this year were delayed or rescheduled by rain, but this is late September and by God, it must be played out. Besides, it’s only a hissing rain, enough to justify a raised hood. Most of the crowd sticks around.

The Nationals pick up a couple runs in the eighth, bringing the game within 3 runs, and maintained that gap into the bottom of the ninth. Picture it with me. A fine-shredded rain glitters in the floodlights when you look up to check, but you can’t see it over the field until it gathers on seats and pools on the batters’ helmets. As the night grows late and damp, the better, uncovered seats have emptied out. The bottom of the ninth, when home advantage crystalizes. The Nationals need three runs to force extra innings, and four to win out.

The phone buzzes, it’s my partner asking when I’ll leave the game. I can’t provide a satisfactory answer, because three outs could take a long while and what happens in between will decide a great many things.

Joey Meneses strikes out on the fourth pitch he sees, a fastball high over the zone. First baseman Dominic Smith hits a single. So does catcher Keibert Ruiz, his plasticine likeness bobbling back at him ten thousand times over across the park. Garcia strikes out swinging. The proper way. Two outs, runners on first and second, the tying run at the plate. Ildemaro Vargas steps up.

The thirty-two year old shortstop faces the thirty-three year old right handed Raisel Iglesias. He uses his changeup often. A changeup looks like a fastball when it leaves the pitcher’s hand, but it’s far slower. The count works up to 2-2, changeups thrown for three of the four pitches, two of them balls outside. One wrong swing and the game is done. Two wide pitches and the bases are loaded, the winning run holding a bat. Iglesias throws another changeup. It spins at a rate of two thousand and two revolutions per minute, travels eighty-nine point one miles an hour. The ball curves a bit, arcing right and up before drifting down into the bottom left corner of the strike zone. Vargas gets his bat on it. Hits it hard. The ball leaves his bat seven miles per hour faster than it came in, but he hit it downward. The ball skips once, twice, three times through the infield before Braves second baseman Ozzie Albies steps in front of it, gloves it up easily and flips it to first base. Ball game.

The ice shattered, Nationals lose. I gather my things and take one last look at the Park before the long walk down to ground level. The illusion of time rushes back into place now that the game is done. Suddenly, I’m late. In the two minutes down ramp after ramp, the rain has increased from spectator-friendly mist to defeated, depressive downpour. There’s no turning back, but I’ve got my new anthracite hoodie for protection. As I start walking away from the bright lights, part of the laminar flow from stadium to reality, the rain picks up even more. I run down Half Street towards the Metro stop. The train is crowded with baseball fans wearing every variation of team color for both of tonight’s teams, and a few others besides. I’m once more submerged in the linear flow of time.

In this age of easily-produced, easily-accessed entertainment, beginning a new interest can lead to an overwhelming amount of content. There are a million opinions on how to approach the subject. It can feel like disarming a bomb when starting out in something where the fans are incredibly passionate, especially sports, but there is no wrong way to enjoy baseball.

Find the aspects of the game that interest you. Seek them out. Let them be your point of entry into the game. Does moneyball resonate with you? The economics of baseball are intricate but often counterintuitive. There is no limit on how much a team can spend to acquire talent, but in 2023, the three franchises with the highest payrolls did not even get close to the playoffs.

Or perhaps the bizarre side of baseball is your thing. Weirdness abounds in this sport: every baseball stadium in the Major Leagues is a different size. Pitcher Randy Johnson once threw a pitch just as a pigeon flew through the strike zone. It was instantly blown into a cloud of feathers. A man was once killed in a game of baseball, struck in the head while he stood at the plate, and players didn’t have to wear helmets for another thirty years.

What about the heart of the game? Roberto Clemente, one of the greatest right-fielders to ever play the game, spent his off-seasons doing charity work and died flying a plane full of supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame the next year, the first Latin American player in Cooperstown, and each year Baseball gives out an award named after him to a player with outstanding charitable impact on his community.

There are plenty of stories to learn and tell, plenty of ways to enjoy the game. Regardless of your point of entry, your niche area of interest, the core of baseball is what we all love. That stadium-wide depletion of oxygen as ten thousand people inhale before a 3-2 pitch, the exhilaration of a home run for the home team, the undeniable satisfied sigh of a sunny day with a cold drink or a warm evening under bright lights. Baseball is a children’s game, but grownups hold onto it all the same. Baseball can metaphorize almost any aspect of existence, wrestling an indifferent and chaotic world into a manageable shape, but the poetry of the game itself is impossible to pin down onto a page. The best I can do is draw lines around the beauty of the game, outlining it so that you know where to look.

[1]. Approximately, based on 4,860 games played and 22,432 runs scored across Major League Baseball, and an assumption that the average game goes nine innings. When factoring in extra innings, the number continues to drop.