It’s hard to believe that one-tenth of the Major League Baseball season has already slipped into the past. Fans pay almost no attention to the standings until around Memorial Day. Baseball plays the longest season of any major sport, and is, for that reason, an excellent counterpoint to the gotta-know-right-now bustle of our world. To take baseball seriously, you have to slow down.
The first weeks of the baseball season are completely ridiculous and completely delightful. There’s always some surprise hitter tearing up the early pitching. Some pre-season championship favorite will dwell in the cellar for the first month or so and never really begin to play well (get untracked, as sportswriters mysteriously call it) until July.
None of it means anything. Baseball, as John Updike once wrote, “is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging out.” Baseball’s long season carries lessons. The schedule is patient and forgiving, and the measured, almost gentle changes in the standings match the murmuring and reflective character of democracy at its best.
And the very long season, in the words of Roger Angell, “perfectly matches the slow, tension-building pace of the game on the field.” The long byplay as pitcher and catcher agree on what to throw next, the cautious duel with the batter, the gradual build-up of the game’s momentum, the true direction of which is often not apparent until late innings: All of these call upon reserves of patience, in player and fan alike.
Basketball and hockey are constant blurs of motion, and football is a series of violent clashes. Only in baseball is the crowd forced by the nature of the game to wait . . . and wait . . . and wait. We should celebrate this as one of the sport’s virtues. In my youth, when few ballparks ever seemed more than half full, you could sit in the bleachers for an hour or two in near solitude, even as the game unfolded below. Alas, the owners believe the national character has changed for the worse, and no modern stadium is complete without a scoreboard that explodes with images, blaring commercials and the general plastic noisiness intended to make an evening at the game no different from any other event in our cacophonous lives.
My ideal baseball game is played in a half-empty stadium on a lazy afternoon (even though nowadays the games are almost all at night), clouds scudding across an eggshell sky, the sun dipping low as the final batter works the count full, and the potential tying runner takes his lead off second, the potential winning runner takes his lead off first, and the entire ballpark manages, in that way only a baseball crowd can,to cheer its collective lungs out and, at the same time, hold its collective breath, as the pitcher’s arm comes up and the ball streaks toward the plate and the bat whips around in a mighty arc-
And that’s baseball, the most beautiful sport in the world.
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Stephen L. Carter, a Bloomberg News columnist, is a law professor at Yale University.
Editorial, Pages 10 on 04/21/2014