Stromata Blog

A Sunny Note for Opening Day

At a time when true baseball fans are cranky, Tevi Troy scatters sunbeams in “Welcome to Baseball’s Golden Age”. The decline in his favorite sport’s popularity relative to its rivals doesn’t faze him, for he looks at the horizon rather than the immediate vicinity.

Other sports have taken up much of the national attention that baseball used to dominate. The NFL is far more popular than MLB now, and my 15-year-old prefers the NBA. Mike Trout, the best player on the planet these days, is much less of a national celebrity than Tom Brady or LeBron James. . . .

As the recognition discrepancy suggests, baseball faces some problems. That said, on this opening day, I think reports of its slow demise are hugely exaggerated. In fact, in many ways, the game we see today is faster, better, and more exciting than ever before, even as it retains links to the past that will always give it more resonance than its competitors.

He credits the higher quality of play to three factors: physical conditioning, analytics and the steady influx of players from around the world.

Today’s players don’t show up at spring training having put on 30 pounds while selling insurance in the offseason, needing the summer to sweat out the winter’s beer. They presumably have lots of fun on their own time, but on the field they’re some of the most well-trained and ruthlessly focused professionals in the world. . . .

Another huge improvement is the rise of analytics, which is now used in nearly every sport but began in baseball. By employing statistics geeks and data analysts to figure out how teams can improve lineup construction, pitching, shifts, and offensive strategy (and drop questionably effective tactics like bunting and base stealing), the analytics revolution has broadened baseball from the preserve of jocks into a beautiful marriage between jocks, nerds, and weirdos. . . .

Analytics has also reduced the importance of money in baseball. If the net worth of owners used to determine who could buy championships, analytics has created a more level playing field. Despite the fact that teams like the Red Sox, the New York franchises, and the Dodgers routinely outspend their rivals (often by orders of magnitude), no team this century has won consecutive World Series. Because the average player is so much better, and brains now matter at least as much as brawn, there’s far more balance among the teams. No longer do we face a decade like the 1950s, when only one manager not named Casey Stengel won a pennant in the American League. . . .

Another sign of MLB’s strength is its international presence and appeal. Baseball has long been played in Japan, Cuba, and Korea, of course, and MLB has had big fan bases abroad for decades. But now, generations of those foreign fans have grown up to become some of the best players in the world, and the world still sends its best to America.

It’s very likely true that the great nines of a century, or even half a century, ago would look like minor leaguers if they took the field against even the lowliest of today’s MLB teams, but Mr. Troy’s optimism about the future of baseball rests less on the quality of play than on the quality of memories. “No sport can match baseball when it comes to stories, in part because of its long history, but also because the sheer number of games provides a stage for more characters, plot lines, twists, and shocks than any other American sport can muster.” One reason why the stories retain their interest is baseball’s extraordinary continuity.

The combination of changes to the game with a persistent reverence for its history is why baseball will long be with us. And it will continue to look much the same as it always has. Watch a professional football game from the 1950s, and it’s played between the tackles – not in the air. Watch an NBA game from the 1960s, and nobody dunks or shoots beyond the free throw line – today it’s only around the basket or beyond the three-point line.

But the iconic moments in baseball – Willie Mays’ over the shoulder catch, Bobby Thompson’s Shot Heard Round the World, Bill Mazeroski’s World Series-winning home run, Ruth’s called shot – all happen at roughly the same frame rate you still see today. When the fans of 2122 look back at the games from 2022, and at the ones from 1922, I believe they’ll see a single continuum, and have no problem relating to any of it. It’s in the nature of the sport itself.

Incidentally, Mr. Troy recounts a few baseball stories along the way. My favorite among his tidbits is an incident from 1950. Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto received a warning that he would suffer death or grievous bodily harm if he showed up in Boston for a series against the Red Sox. Yankee manager Casey Stengel suggested (maybe as a joke, maybe not) exchanging uniform numbers with Billy Martin, a notorious tough guy. Rizzuto refused, saying he would be less in danger if the Boston fans thought he was himself than if the Boston players thought he was Billy.

America would be a better land, no doubt, if baseball were still the premier the National Pastime, but de gustibus non disputandum est. Mr. Troy exhorts us to look back to baseball’s memorable past and forward to a bountiful future that will generate yet more memories. Play Ball!

Quote of the Day: Opening Day Approaches

From Alexandra DeSanctis of National Review Online:

Tomorrow is Opening Day for America’s greatest sport. Most years, I’m more excited than I am this time around. In fact, a few years ago, I wrote one of my favorite NR pieces in honor of MLB’s Opening Day. But as I’ve also written, I’m frustrated with MLB. I’m irritated by the totally unnecessary delay to the regular season. I’m sick of the nonsensical blackouts on MLB TV that work out in favor of everyone other than fans. I’m sick of Rob Manfred politicizing the sport. I’m sick of endless rule changes that take baseball further and further away from the sport I grew up watching in the name of “speeding up” what is meant to be timeless. I’ll probably always watch baseball, but I find that, at least these days, I don’t feel the same way about it anymore.

My sentiment almost exactly. I’ll merely add that Commissioner Manfred makes Bowie Kuhn look like Kennesaw Mountain Landis.

A Brief Comment on Yesterday’s Most Earth-Shattering Event

For missing my regularly scheduled Sunday posting, I have an excellent excuse: I was traumatized by the news that Will Smith had assaulted someone at a large public event. Just what Major League Baseball needs at a time like this, I thought glumly. How badly will Rob Manfred mishandle this embarrassment? Moreover, my wife is a Dodgers fan and will be upset if the team loses its starting catcher for some large part of the season.

I could easily imagine how it happened. Sunday was the day before Will’s 27th birthday. Probably a big birthday bash, too many drinks, the inevitable sequel.

The trauma dissipated when I learned that the assailant wasn’t the Dodgers’ Will Smith or even Atlanta’s, but just some actor. By then, though, I couldn’t face a keyboard, so I went to bed and awoke to a new trauma in the morning when one of our dogs suffered a spell of diarrhea and vomiting. Perhaps he watched the Academy Awards. (The vet gave him medication and expensive dog food but says that there’s nothing seriously amiss.)

So that is why this blog fell silent. At least, it’s my story, and it’s as good as any that Joe Biden tells.

A Touch of Orwell

Out of the Park Baseball is one of the elite computer baseball games. Among its outstanding features is the breadth and depth of its attention to baseball history. Its Major League database goes back to 1871, and it has Negro league and minor league coverage starting in the early part of the 20th Century. You can – and some players do – begin with the debut year of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players and create an alternative history of the game that extends to the present and as far into the future as you like.

But that will change when the newest version of the game is released. The company that produces OOTP (headquartered, interestingly, in Germany, where there is a small but vigorous baseball fan base, and now owned by a South Korean parent) has a license from Major League Baseball that enables it to include team logos and other proprietary intellectual property in the game. This year MLB imposed a condition for license renewal: The Cleveland Indians must become the Cleveland Guardians; and not just starting in 2022, the first season under the new name. No, “Indians” must be deleted from the database wherever it occurs.

The team that won the World Series in 1920 and 1948, that was swept by the underdog New York Giants in 1954, that includes Bob Feller, Tris Speaker, Lou Boudreau, Frank Robinson, Joe Sewell, Herb Score and Satchel Paige in its Hall of Fame, that signed the American League’s first black player, and that is memorable for the colorful tenure of owner Bill Veeck (“as in wreck”) (1946-49) will now appear in OOTP exclusively as the “Cleveland Guardians”. 

Somewhere, having learned to love Big Brother Rob Manfred, Winston Smith is smiling.

What Does It Mean for a Sport to Decline?

William Voegeli, a political scientist and senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, has penned an essay for that publication punningly titled and subtitled “Thrown Out at Home: America moves on from baseball”. Evidently a fan himself, Mr Voegeli captures the mood of many of his fellow followers of the National Pastime, the feeling that baseball is a declining sport, ineluctably fated to follow the paths of boxing and horse racing, once massively popular, now niche entertainments. Do you know the name of the current holder of the world middleweight title? Can you name three champion race horses? A century ago, any half-aware American male could do both. In another century, will the winner of the World Series be a similar trivia topic?

According to the most recent Gallup survey to ask “What is your favorite sport to watch?”, baseball (9%) was far behind football (37%), narrowly behind basketball (11%) and not much ahead of metric football (a/k/a “soccer”) (7%).

Evidence apart from public opinion surveys shows a pastime becoming an afterthought. From 2015 to 2019, attendance at major league baseball (MLB) games declined by 7.1%. Television viewership for the World Series, baseball’s showcase, fell from 44.2 million per game in 1978 to 9.8 million in 2020. Ratings for local broadcasts, thought to be the baseball industry’s last line of defense, are in decline. And neither the sport nor its fans have time on their side. In 2016, the average viewer of nationally televised MLB games was 57 years old, up from 52 in 2000. Just 7% of these viewers were under the age of 18.

The essay probes the many explanations that have been offered for baseball’s evanescence. It omits Major League Baseball’s recent embrace of wokeness – quite justifiably, as the downward trend long antedates the rise of the new anti-humanist cult. Mr. Voegeli’s discussion is careful and thorough, though the hypothesis that he seems to favor, lack of competitive balance, has trouble explaining why baseball was dominant in the popular culture until roughly the 1960’s. He acknowledges that fact:

In fact, the decades of baseball’s greatest popularity coincided with it having the most powerful dynasty in athletic history. In the 44 seasons from 1921, when Babe Ruth transformed the New York Yankees and baseball itself, through 1964, when it became clear that baseball was being eclipsed by professional football, the Yankees played in 29 World Series, winning 20 of them. There were 16 MLB teams for all but the final three seasons of this era, which means that the Yankees overperformed by, roughly, a factor of seven.

During baseball’s golden age there were also franchises as forlorn as the Yankees were dominant. From 1902 to 1953 the St. Louis Browns had only 11 seasons when they won more games than they lost, compared to ten last-place finishes. In 1954 they relocated and finally found success as the Baltimore Orioles. The Senators of Washington – “first in War, first in Peace, last in the American League” – were nearly as inept, and also had to relocate to become competitive, playing since 1961 as the Minnesota Twins.

To suggest, as Mr. Voegeli goes on to imply, that baseball owed its “golden age” simply the absence of a competing summer team sport seems rather lame. There is no inherent reason why football, basketball or even ice hockey can’t be played in warm months. Their expansion into what used to be baseball’s monopoly seasonal slot is the consequence of the latter’s weakening position rather than a cause. Other sports moved in when they saw that baseball did not prevent them from drawing crowds from April through September.

There is also one omission from the essay. It never mentions baseball outside the United States. In 2019, the last year before panicdemic disruptions, Japan’s National Professional Baseball, its counterpart to MLB, set a new league attendance record and drew more fans per game than MLB. The NPB does, however, face a rising challenge from soccer, and its margin of superiority has been shrinking. The story is similar in Korea, baseball’s other Asian bastion, and in the Republic of China. That four countries in which baseball differs significantly both on the field and in the business office seem to be on similar trajectories suggests that factors peculiar to the United States are not fully explanatory.

I have no better theory than anybody else, but I do have an observation.

Sports thrive on competition. Even the essentially solitaire endeavors of bowling and golf and driving fast cars have tournaments and championships. It’s natural for sports fans to carry their habit of “rooting for the home team” over to comparisons between sports, but those comparisons have no real meaning. The fact that hundreds of millions of misguided souls watch soccer matches doesn’t diminish baseball one whit, just as baseball hasn’t diminished cricket or cricket, hurling. De gustibus non disputandum est. There’s room enough in the world for a plethora of sports. If baseball isn’t the sport that 91 percent of Americans most like to watch, we in the other nine percent should not fret but should joyfully shout, “Play ball!”

Further Reading: Daniel A. Métraux, “Baseball in Japan and the US: History, Culture, and Future Prospects”

The Morning After

Before the psephology, let me ask the most important question about November 2nd: Why did Brian Snitker pull Max Fried at the end of six innings? He had given up no runs, four hits, no walks, and had thrown only 74 pitches (50 strikes). The Braves were leading 6-0. Has the notion that pitching must be an ensemble enterprise become so deeply ingrained in contemporary managers that deviation is unthinkable? It would have been great to have the World Series topped off with a complete game, and the bullpen remained available if Fried faltered.

As for the election returns, present performance is no guarantee of future results. In November 2008, Democrats looked forward to endless domination of Congress, including a filibuster-proof Senate. In November 2010, Republicans were sure that Barack Obama would be a one-term President. Nonetheless, the swings to the Right in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere (Colorado, Long Island, Minneapolis!) are hopeful signs. Even here in Washington State, there were a few signs of sanity. Seattle elected a fairly conservative Republican as city attorney, the candidates for Port of Tacoma commissioner endorsed by the Progressive Voters Guide all lost, and an advisory vote on the newly enacted capital gains tax split nearly two-to-one in favor of repeal (not that the legislature will listen to the voters’ advice).

Matt Taibbi has a good description of the progressive Democratic reaction to the Virginia results:

McAuliffe’s collapse, and the corresponding underdog win by private equity titan Glenn Youngkin, is already being caricatured nationally using the language of 1980s politics. We’re meant to understand that the Loudoun County story – which is too complex to summarize easily but involves furious disputes between local parents and the school board over a variety of issues, including a pair of sexual assaults – was cooked up by Republicans as a cynical dog-whistle campaign.

“The GOP ran a master class on race-based identity politics,” wrote CNN’s Bakari Sellers. “The return of the Lee Atwater playbook. Pretty grim,” is how former Harry Reid chief of staff Adam Jentleson put it. “Hats off to the depraved cynicism and villainy and race baiting. It worked in Virginia,” seethed Wajahat Ali of The Daily Beast. Van Jones last night called Youngkin the “Delta variant of Trumpism.”

Just as McAuliffe had no message apart from trying to tie Youngkin to Trump, these commentators seem helpless to do anything but fall back on a cookie-cutter formula for responding to Republican electoral victories in the Trump era.

I can’t help but think that the Dems’ steady drumbeat of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” was a great boon to Republican candidates. Going into the campaign, many of them must have feared that they would face an irreconcilable dilemma: If they avoided vocal support of the former President, the blue collar voters whom he brought into the GOP, feeling abandoned, would stay home or revert to voting for Democrats. But if they didn’t keep a long distance from The Donald, they would have no hope of winning in Trump-phobic suburbs. Terry McAuliffe and his ilk rescued them by insisting relentlessly that Glenn Youngkin and his running mates were Trump’s favorite politicians. Trump voters believed them. Voters who cared little about Trump’s opinions formed their judgments on the basis of what the Republican office seekers actually said. What’s more, the effort that the Dems devoted to wooing the Trump-obsessed distracted them from delivering a coherent message to the Trump-indifferent.

Donald Trump will undoubtedly be an unsettling presence on the national scene for the next several years, but portraying him as the new Emmanuel Goldstein may not work as well as progressives expect.

Further Reading: Sean Trende, “Three Takeaways from Virginia and New Jersey”
Zaid Jilani, “Youngkin’s Formula for Success” 
Paul Mirengoff, “One More Footnote to Last Night”