MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
What is baseball?
Ken Burns wrote in “Baseball,” his masterpiece documentary, “It is played everywhere. In parks and playgrounds and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers’ fields. By small children and old men. Raw amateurs and millionaire professionals.
“It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game in which the defense has the ball.
“It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime, and ending with the hard facts of autumn.
“Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years. While they conquered a continent, warred with one another and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights, and the meaning of freedom.
“It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before.
“Most of all, it is about time and timelessness. Speed and grace. Failure and loss. Imperishable hope. And coming home.”
Baseball is our best game. Baseball is a better game than football, at least the football we see on Thursday nights, Sunday afternoons and Monday nights. There is more action in baseball, there is more drama and suspense, and there is more intrigue.
Until a team runs out of outs, baseball never stops once the first pitch is thrown – not on the field, not between pitches, not in our minds and, certainly, not in our hearts.
The NFL? It’s a television show. It says so on the FCC license. Not news, not sports – “entertainment.”
As Geoffrey Norman reported several years ago in his poorly-titled, but otherwise factual analysis, “The NFL Is in Decline,” in The Weekly Standard, “There were so many commercials, for one thing. The NFL and the networks have crafted a way to squeeze the maximum number of ads into the broadcast of a single game, causing viewers to lose interest even as they watch. According to some studies, the average football game, during which the clock runs for precisely 60 minutes, consists of a mere 11 minutes of action. And this is stretched out over almost four hours of broadcast time. The networks are wearing down the stamina of their viewers.”
Baseball remedied all of that with the pitch clock.
George Will said at the height of the NFL’s popularity, no less, “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”
Unfortunately, though, for the football fans who believe the violence of the game to be the best part of the game, the violence they once knew from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s has been legislated out, as the NFL continues to take every preventive measure against liability that it can. Then again, what makes the NFL different from any other corporation?
Oh, wait. There is no liability in baseball. There’s no liability. As George Carlin said, “In baseball, the object is to go home and to be safe. I hope I’ll be safe at home … Safe at home.”
In the process of getting the runners home safely or preventing the runners from getting home safely, baseball has something of everything. It is high drama at its most unreachable peak. It is fresh, it is exhilarating, it is painful and excruciating. It is the far reach for unrealized joy, and it is pure mystery seasoned with unthinkable misery.
And when you have grasped the brass ring in the end, a sense of melancholy surrounds you, because the journey of your great project has been completed.
Baseball is every day. And during every game you play or watch, you see something that you have never seen before.
Baseball in October is baseball in its finest hour. It’s not so bad in March or April, either.
At the end of every baseball season, we turn to the “The Green Fields of the Mind,” and the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, who wrote, “It 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 …”
Guess what? It starts again tomorrow. Sure, the regular season already began last week in Japan, but beginning tomorrow, like the Nixon White House, everyone is involved, and sunshine and high skies will be the order of every day for as long as we want them to be; or at least until late October and November.
This is the greatest time of the year. And while March Madness helps, it is the greatest time because it’s time for the greatest game – baseball.
Let’s play two.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT