You must have read a different post. In my post, I advocated for baseball, a thing that I would like to see actually occur when I go to the stadium to watch.
If you want to talk about love of the game, I’m not seeing the argument for what is secretly an excuse to sit out in the fresh air, drink some beer, talk with friends and family, and oh…every so often give a hoot if someone actually got on base. Frickin’ go to the park if you just want some time with friends and family.
I said nothing about “primary” or “only”. I said that the majority of the game is never seen.
I was watching a review of a board game recently (unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the game), but I guess it’s an economic game in space. You’re claiming territory, building stuff, and making money. But there’s no ability to fight and take over territory. Once you get it, you have it.
So the company that made the game releases an expansion. The expansion includes five pages of rules for battle. The original game’s entire ruleset was probably just as long. And you know what? The rules don’t actually allow for battle to ever happen. Like once in five games, the exact scenario which allows for a fight comes into place and the five pages of rules don’t really allow it to become something that self-propogates. It’s just a brief, inconsequential skirmish, with no major effect.
So what’s the purpose of even adding such a thing to the game? Either make it a viable option of play - You can go economic. You can go war. It’s up to the player, based on his sensibilities and strengths, which to focus on. - Or don’t put it in the game.
Baseball was not developed to be a franchise sport. It was developed as a fun activity for people to play. In that game, played by people who aren’t hardcore professionals that have devoted their life to mastery of the art, all of those extra rules in the game make sense. The players actually get out onto the bases. It’s a hard game for everyone in the field to keep those people from getting around the circle and the rules lay out a game for whiddling that number down at each progressive step.
Professional play breaks that.
Let’s take bowling and billiards for example.
If I go bowling, as a non-professional, my goal is to try and figure out where I need to hit and to actually try and get my ball to that place. Do I stand to the left? To the right? Should I go for a heavier ball or a lighter ball? There’s a reasonable amount of agonizing that goes into the play.
For a professional, the goal is to repeat the exact same movement - which produces a strike - every single time you get up to play. There’s no agonizing, no changes, no variety. The rules, which dictate the length of the lane, are too short for professional players to actually play the game as it was designed and intended. That’s the same thing with billiards. A professional player isn’t trying to make the shot, he’s just trying to not mess up for as long of a run as possible. Again, the geometry of the game has been dictated by non-professional use and it hasn’t been scaled to professional play. It’s so simple and easy for the players that the techniques they employ change these from games of skill to games of brute consistency.
Baseball isn’t as bad off as those games. But the professional game is definitely distorted away from what the rules of the game were built to accomplish. In bowling, you are not supposed to get a strike every single time, nor even the majority of the time that you get up. You should worry about going in the gutter every once in a while. In billiards, you are not supposed to run the table unless a freak miracle has occurred. You should care about what the rules are for scratching. And in baseball, a few people should get on base every inning. The players should be worried about more than the batter.
In all of these cases, we need to accept that the people playing the game are too good to play the game on the same field as non-professionals. For them, the field is too small for them to actually play out significant portions of the rules. You’ve just ended up with a bunch of games that lack all of the variety and interplay that was originally built into them.
I take it you’ve never heard of the Gipper (who is still very much part of Notre Dame lore)?
College football is steeped in tradition, and at football factories, old time icons are as revered as ever. Alabama has numerous black fans and players, and none seem to mind the way Bear Bryant is idolized. Ive seen how Texas running back Ricky Williams adored elderly Doak Walker, a fellow Heisman winner from the all-white era. I’ve seen how the young Eric Dickerson nearly fainted with awe when he met Otto Graham.
Even in the NFL, you see teams playing in nostalgic “throwback uniforms,” something baseball teams never do.
That’s just one reason I don’t buy the theory that blacks shun baseball because they’re uncomfortable with nostalgia.
:dubious:
It is well known that Bryant tried his utter hardest to integrate the team - the 1970 USC game is usually put forward as an example of that.
That’s wonder how individual players idolize older players, but how many fans know Doak Walker or Otto Graham? How many teams deliberately go back to that well? I will bet that it is very rare. It is nothing like how baseball discusses Babe Ruth or Ted Williams or Ty Cobb.
Heck, even living in Georgia, the fans like to talk wistfully of Hershel Walker (the UGA fans anyway), but not much of anything before that.
At Rutgers we liked to mention that we were the birthplace of college football, but people couldn’t tell you anyone’s name from back then. The traditions involved a cannon that was stolen back and forth between Rutgers and Princeton. And there was much excitement when a new stadium was created - which didn’t, at all, attempt to mimic what old stadiums looked like.
You don’t watch much baseball do you?
The NFL and College Football do nostalgia much differently. Stadiums aren’t built to purposely hark back to that era. People don’t speak often of “Golden Ages” that happened before integration. There appears to be a conscious effort to look forward as much, if not more, as looking back.
With respect, I do not believe you understand much about baseball. You’re describing something that happens** 25 times per game** as “never happens.” You have suggested turning it into a completely different sport. Your idea is precisely analogous to saying that you don’t like soccer because you want to see more soccer, and therefore want to turn it into basketball.
Someone who thinks “baseball” only occurs if 54 guys reach base per game - as opposed to 25 (at least, I’m deliberately estimating low) doesn’t know what baseball is.
The history of baseball is simply not consistent with what you are saying. This statement is just plainly false. The rules of the game were in fact intended to generate results fairly similar to what we have now, and adjustments to the rules of the game were made frequently, very early on in the game’s history as a professional enterprise, to keep the number of baserunners roughly where it is. The rate at which players have gotten on base has remained relatively stable since Ulysses S. Grant was the President of the United States.
There is a kernel of truth in what Sage Rat is saying. Baseball did evolve, during the later Nineteenth Century, to be a very different game than its founders intended.
Baseball was invented, in the mid-Nineteenth Century, as a recreational game to be played in gentleman’s clubs by men of average athletic ability. The pitcher’s primary job was to deliver a hittable pitch so that the players wouldn’t die of boredom, and then be one of nine fielders. The game was a contest between the batter (and runners) and the defense, more than the batter versus the pitcher.
Between 1850 and 1900 pitching became more and more important–not necessarily more dominant, but more important toward determining the outcome of the game. Pitchers threw overhand, and threw hard, and threw curveballs and other trick pitches. The ability of a single player (the pitcher) to control the game made the sport less attractive to recreational players, so they had to invent softball as a recreational alternative. Slow-pitch softball is closer to the mid-Nineteenth-Century roots of baseball than is modern baseball.
However, this evolution was mostly complete by 1900 (it continues to a small degree to the present, as there are more strikeouts and home runs than formerly). And, I am not sure what it has to do with the popularity of baseball. People seem to like strikeouts and home runs.
Holy crap…Rock was right. Look at the Baltimore game, there isn’t a single black guy in the stands!
You want to talk about a game that’s boring to watch, check out pro slow pitch softball. Single, single, single, home run, repeat.
At least USSSA used to try to make things interesting, allowing the pitcher to do darn well whatever he wants. I saw a guy pitch the ball and throw his glove toward the batter as a distraction and it was allowed. They let you do a fake pitch, flat pitch, you name it.
My guess is that only baseball was explictly and deliberately segregated during it’s Golden Age and peak of popularity
By comparison, football and basketball never had separate all black leagues, and were never as popular during the segregation days, and now those leagues are much more popular, and in the case of the NBA, have been dominated by black athletes for nearly 50 years.
There’s a lot less to be angry about when looking at the old NFL/NBA where it was just garden-variety segregation, versus looking at MLB, where the sport was deliberately segregated during the era when it was most popular, and the “legends” of the sport were played. I think there’s a feeling that baseball tacitly perpetuates those legends to the exclusion of the Negro League players, which likely seems like a continuation of the racism of that era.
But as I noted earlier, the University of Alabama’s football team was lily white for ages, and remained segregated long after other schools had accepted black players. Adolph Rupp kept the Kentucky basketball squad all-white long after Bill Russell had led teams to NCAA and NBA titles. Black players and fans don’t seem to hold an grudges against the Crimson Tide or the Wildcats, so why stay mad at baseball?
Pro Football and basketball desegregated right about the same time MLB did. Jackie Robinson integrated baseball in 1947. The NFL integrated in 1946, when the Rams signed Woody Strode and Kenny Washington (the rival AAFC signed Marion Motley the same year). The NBA didn’t have its first black player, Chuck Cooper, until 1950.
No major sport was notably more progressive or faster to integrate than baseball was.
Not quite what I’m saying- I’m not saying that baseball was slower to integrate, I’m saying that when baseball was at its most popular/in its golden age(1910-1920, black players were systematically excluded and relegated to black leagues.
I expect it’s pretty galling to see the lifetime batting averages and wonder why Josh Gibson (.358) isn’t listed as third, instead of Shoeless Joe Jackson (.356). The answer is ultimately racism. And considering how stat-intensive baseball is and how much reference to the past and the golden age there is, I can totally see why black people might find that somewhat distasteful.
Contrast this with say… college sports, where it’s likely that sports integration didn’t trail overall integration by more than a handful of years, and still probably was more timely than overall integration, barring a few symbolic admissions. I’d bet people are still frustrated about segregation, but don’t necessarily hold Alabama’s football program or Kentucky’s basketball programs especially culpable.
Pro football never had alternate leagues for black players, and the NBA was only segregated for about 4 years (it was founded in 1946 and integrated in 1950).
Well put, though I think the Golden Age (there are few in baseball history) you are speaking about is closer to 1920-1940. I mean all you really have to look at is a movie like “Field of Dreams” to see part of the problem - though at least they had one black dude who was into baseball in the film ;).
Movies like “42” indicate the struggle of men like Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, but it also reminds audiences that baseball at its most popular was dedicated to keeping blacks in a separate league so that they wouldn’t “taint” (as it were) the Major Leagues.
Baseball is at its most popular NOW. Attendance is at nearly all-time highs. The league has never been more diverse.
Baseball gives plenty of lip service to the Negro leagues. Visit KC sometime. Go to the Negro League HOF. Sit behind the Buck O’Neill seat in Kauffman.
They do? Every college game I’ve ever been to has been whiter than the Republican National Convention. You must be in the SEC footprint where there isn’t any competition from pro football. Two of the places I’ve watched college football don’t have many black residents (Colorado and Wisconsin,) but I’ve been to pro games in Denver and Green Bay, and there are 25X as many black fans there than in the college stadiums. I’ve also been to Maryland games right in the heart of D.C. and it was all white there as well.
Ultimately I think that most black people don’t watch baseball these days because their friends and neighbors don’t, and they don’t because their friends and neighbors don’t.
It’s like questioning why people don’t buy avocado colored refrigerators anymore, or why people are paying four figures to see the Grateful Dead at Soldier Field while the Allman Brothers are working the county fair circuit. Why did that one guy haul in thousands of dollars for his Kickstarter request to make potato salad, while hundreds of other joke appeals got ignored?
It’s easy to come up with all sorts of plausible pseudo-sociological explanations after the fact (or, if you are an ardent fanperson, to argue that the more popular thing is just objectively better), but in the end it’s just the mysterious workings of fashion.
ISidiqui: The idea that admiring a home run or playing with fun as Yasiel Puig does (as referenced in Rock’s message) is deserving of a ball in the ear has always struck me as a bit ridiculous. Let the players have a bit of fun.
What makes you think Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale didn’t enjoy themselves?