Dear Sports Fan,
Could you please explain to me the appeal of baseball? Cricket is obviously a superior sport yet somehow has not caught on in the USA. Baseball being the slightly developmentally challenged cousin of cricket, do you think the game is simply too cerebral for American audiences (which i would disagree with since NFL football to me is one of the most cerebral sports and you concussively need to use your brain a lot). Did we just hate it because it was a British Sport and too much of an upper class Gentleman’s Game?
Thanks,
Jango
Dear Jango,
The attraction of baseball for the casual or non-fan is easy enough to explain: you could be at a baseball game, or watching a baseball game on TV, and never once feel like you’re actually at a sporting event. It’s essentially a four hour outdoor picnic with overpriced beer. Among the major sports, it is the one where fans are least engaged on a minute to minute basis. You could do anything while watching a baseball game – knit, iron, write the great American novel. It’s the most easily-casually watched sport there is.
For the die hard fans, the attractions are different. Some fans really do hang on every pitch, for the simple reason that something incredible could happen – though, to the casual fan, or non-fan, those things may not seem so incredible. Also, because the baseball season is so long (162) games, there’s essentially a 50 percent chance your team is playing on a given day. It gives you a long time to get to know the players – their quirks, their weaknesses, their interminable at-bat routines – and you’re therefore more invested in them each year, even if they’re not any good.
There is strategy in baseball, from the macro level down to every pitch. But its enduring popularity is based more on tradition and the special place the sport has in our (and other) countries’ sporting histories.
Finally, to fans there’s real beauty in a ball game – there’s nothing like the sound of a ball hit solidly by a wooden bat; or watching the mechanics of a smoothly turned double play, and the way incredibly skilled players make it look so effortless; or the one on one duel between pitcher and batter, or the sheer improbability of a human hitting a tiny orb moving at 95 miles an hour – let alone hitting it hundreds of feet.
So I know it seems slow, and games are too long, and it seems like nothing happens- but it’s a sport that can be seen and understood At many levels. Or – at worst – it can be an opportunity to drink overpriced beers outside for four hours. Is that really the worst thing?
Thanks for the question,
Dean Russell Bell
Dean Russell Bell