Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
Somehow, the summer seems to slip by faster with each passing year. (Though this summer of extreme heat may prove to be an anomaly to this trend) Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio--not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television--and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. (Click HERE to listen to a small sample from Vin Scully, the greatest announcer, in my opinion, in baseball history).
Yet, once again, baseball, our best invention to stay change, initiates change in a major way.
Baseball in the past decade has became a boom or bust game. It pivots on home runs (because stringing hits together is too hard) and strikeouts. It is checkers more than chess. Rallies shrink. Strategy wanes. Maverick managers go extinct. And we as fans wait longer than ever to see a ball put in play. The past two seasons are the only ones in history with more strikeouts than hits.
These are the three biggest increases in how baseball changed this decade:
1. Home runs went up 46% to an all-time record. That’s a bigger increase than through the steroid-addled 1990s (44%).
2. Swings and misses went up 34%. Pitching is crazy good. Baseball set aside oral history (“Throw down and away, son. Get on top of the ball. You can’t teach an arm like that.”) in favor of data-based, tech-savvy teaching. We now know we can increase velocity and shape the spin and look of pitches in pitching labs.
3. Time between balls in play went up 31%.
What we are seeing is the inevitable dance between the advances in technology and the advantages that grants to both the pitcher and the hitter. The pitcher has, and will always, hold the upper hand, because they control the timing, initiative, and movement of the ball as it advances to the hitter. Hitters must react to those constantly changing set of variables.
Moreover, against more velocity and spin, a hitter’s job becomes even more difficult with every strike. Batters hit .154 against two-strike breaking balls last year, for instance. Strikeouts on breaking balls went up 28% this decade.
You might argue for hitters to concede and simply “put the ball in play” but hitters have done the math. They hit .236 when they hit a groundball with two strikes. Defense has improved, especially as data pinpoints the best place for fielders to take away hits from each batter. With two strikes, batters hit one home run for every two groundball singles. A similar risk-reward equation helps explain why three-point attempts in the NBA have gone up 87% this decade.
As baseball better defined risk it became more risk averse. Stolen bases hit a 48-year low. Sacrifice hits fell to an all-time low. The hit-and-run play virtually died. The past decade also saw the implementation of the Utley Rule at second base, which banned aggressive slides, the Posey Rule at home plate, which banned most collisions, and expanded replay, which essentially eliminated all on-field arguments but for balls and strikes.
That is why the game of baseball breaks my heart, because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised. And yet what we are promised and what is delivered are two very different things.
Of course, there are those who learn after their first disappointments. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that change is constant. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.
