In a professional baseball game, the team that holds a lead of at least four runs after the sixth inning has more than a 95 percent chance of winning.
The ruinous decline of standards in the United States is nowhere more evident than in the fact that I found the above statistic in a quick Internet search starting with the words “leaving a baseball game early.”
A few hundred years from now, when social scientists and historians dissect the fall of our once-great nation, they will land upon this bit and have all the information they need.
I’ve been to a few professional baseball games this year. I’m not too proud to admit I’m just another middle-aged guy gone looking for his youth on the major league ball diamonds that once represented his dreams. Hey, hardball haunts better men than I.
What was startling in returning to a professional baseball stadium after 40 years was the number of fans leaving after the sixth inning. Like they had something better going at home. The Late Show? A half-eaten dinner? Flossing?
What the hell could beat sitting in a stadium, watching your team, or anyone’s team, for that matter, on a summer evening or afternoon?
On the Internet, fans have written lists of circumstances under which it’s okay to leave early, couched in such precise terms that the same allowances might also apply for leaving a baby in a burning building. There are surprisingly many posts, all written around the flimsy premise that baseball games can take a long time.
That’s an average 3 hours, five minutes.
That’s supposed to be a 3 hour, 5-minute break from the rest of your life. You’re supposed to enjoy it. You’re supposed to talk to your companions, or grab a hot dog and beer, maybe chat up the other fans around you, or get funky during the seventh-inning stretch. Or fill out a scorecard. Or listen to the game on your transistor radio. Or zoom in on the action with binoculars.
The point of baseball is the same as the point of summer: To stretch it out and savor it. The sport is the nation’s pastime, for crying out loud.
The secret of life, they say, is enjoying the passage of time, and baseball provides so much time to enjoy, between innings, between plays, hell, even between pitches. The whole point of baseball is that it is slow to being almost languorous, punctuated by moments of excitement. Kind of like life itself.
Growing up, our family could rarely afford a stadium game. Mom would listen to Phillies games on the radio, and later, watch on the fuzzy UHF TV station where the players always looked stuck in blizzard, maybe in a game against the Montreal Expos.
Our neighbor Mr. Dusik, who worked on his lawn and cars constantly, lugged a radio along for his projects. When the Phillies announcers piped up, we’d shout over to him, “What happened?” We’d ask the same of strangers listening to the game at the beach. Baseball allows you to get on with your life while you’re listening.
Play is slow enough that announcers can banter on about statistics, or upcoming games, or a player’s injury, or something going on in the stands, and still not miss a bit of action. In Philly, Richie Ashburn and Harry Kalas called the games of my youth. During a slow inning or a pitching change, they’d dive into a story more entertaining than the action on the field and make you feel like you were in the press box alongside them, yukking it up.
So why are people leaving early? Is it the decline of earning power since the 1970s and the pressures on families that didn’t exist 40 years ago? Is it the growing popularity of faster sports with shorter games, like basketball and hockey? Is it the general decline of conversation as entertainment?
To my way of thinking, what’s wrecking the game is the big damn TVs that hang in every stadium that show plays and replays and zoom in on unsuspecting fans and generally suck all of the oxygen out of the place.
A ball game is a live show, a performance by players for an audience in the stands. Sometimes it’s an experience between fans in the stands. Sometimes it’s an experience between fans and cups of beer. But it was never intended to be a three-way experience between a fan, the game, and a giant TV screen.
TV is too big, too loud, too domineering to be at a child’s game played on grass. The so-called Jumbotrons no doubt were added to boost fan stimulation, but they distract from the experience by overwhelming it. And they distract fans from the actual game, and from each other.
Further, games feel longer because they’re like sitting through a three-hour performance AND a three-hour simulcast of the same show, with commercials.
That’s too much.
Baseball improved by returning to the smaller, more intimate stadiums of its youth. The next logical step is returning the fans’ attention to the show by removing the big TVs.