Well hell. We’ve all seen Bull Durham. "I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.”
"You can look it up. " Attritubed to Walt Whitman. Too bad he didn’t write it
He didn’t write it, and I, for one, am glad. I am so tired of writers trying to turn baseball into some metaphor for American life. George Will has done it, Plimpton*, many others.
I don’t like Joe Buck, calling baseball or football. But there was a game he was calling and for some reason he responded to fans criticism of him. They were saying he was biased against a certain team, and he responded “It’s all just good fun”. And I am sure he got vitrolic emails about it the next day.
But that is all it is, good fun. Baseball is not life nor a metaphor for life. So why do we care? Why was I so happy last night with the Miracle Mets comeback and looking so farward to tonight’s game? The best explanation I’ve heard is from Crow on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 - “We’ve attached our egos to you”
*Plimton wrote a book about the NFL, Mad Ducks and Bears. Highly recommeded. It is hysterical, it has passages where I laughed harder than I have ever laughed reading a book, but there is a chapter where John Gordy, an offensive tackle for the Detroit Lions, described walking off the field after a loss - the “fans” screaming at him, calling him every name you can think of. Vitriolic hatred. Doctors and lawyers and such. About a ******* football game played by people they don’t know.
Now I don’t do that, I can’t imagine hurling insults at a player - “Nice game pretty boy” - but I have done it watching on TV. A reliever comes in, gives up a game losing HR and I am saying “You bum!” I have felt anger at a fellow huuman being out there doing his best. Why? It’s a ******* game played by people we don’t know.
Why do I care? Because I’ve played some sports. Nothing at anything other than neighborhood or playlot levels (other than racing) but I have done some. It makes me appreciate those who are really good at it. Put music down in the same category for me.
Favorite sports book? “A Pennant for the Kremlin” by Paul Molloy. OK - it’s totally fiction and barely about baseball. But I love that book!
We’re pack animals. Sport gives us a chance to express our tribalistic nature against clearly defined others in ritual combat for dominance. Those others even dress themselves in a clearly different way. Many fans show their tribal affiliation by dressing similarly. The metaphors around a sport can also serve as a tribalistic bonding device. We may root for different teams but we’re bonded into some super-tribal organization by our love of that sport. There are far worse ways to express that deep primal urge.
As much as we try to pretend we’re strictly rational in many ways we are all like Zaphod’s name for Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker’s Guide - monkey man.
A big part of the enjoyment from watching (or playing) sports comes from pretending that it matters who wins.
If it really did matter who won, that would make all of the action and the striving and the choices made by the players and coaches interesting and important.
So, analogous to how enjoying a fictional narrative involves a willing suspension of disbelief, enjoying a ball game involves a willing suspension of disinterestedness.
There are been many studies into what happens to people neurologically when they watch sports. Without getting into too much detail when we watch sports parts of our brain react as if we were actually participating. This is pronounced if we actually have some experience playing the sport. Also various chemicals are released in the brain while watching sports such as dopamine which affects the brains reward and pleasure centers. Testosterone levels rise when a fan’s team is doing well and the stress hormone cortisol rises during close games. Other scientists have discovered similarities to the way the brain acts when watching sports to how it acts when hunting prey.
We watch sports because we get a real, measurable high from it and it’s cheaper than heroin.
There’s something about humans and ball games. Whatever it is, I don’t have it, and I don’t understand it; but I can see that it exists.
I’m also curious about why it exists; but am not really expecting an answer.
As far as watching competitive sports in general: I wonder whether this isn’t a ritualized way to deal with the competitiveness urge: to channel it specifically into something that in many ways doesn’t matter. For this to work, people have to be mostly convinced on some level that it does matter; but it has to not affect most people’s lives outside of the structure of the game itself. I’m not sure whether it actually works as a defusing mechanism, though.
I’m getting old; I care about sports maybe half or even less than half as much as I used to. I can’t afford to be a sports fanatic anymore since the games come on too late in the East and since sports TV packages cost an arm and a leg.
I miss the West Coast: early start/finish times and surprisingly cheap beer, which they tax the shit out of in many parts East of the Mississip
Sports are the original reality show, except (mostly) not scripted. Plus, the sports I follow, I know how hard it is to do, and I can see how it looks when it is done well.
The Chinese term “kung-fu” doesn’t specifically refer to martial arts - it applies to all kinds of physical expertise. A good chef has kung-fu, when he chops expertly.
My dad was a veterinary surgeon, and I used to like to watch him work. I was assisting him once doing a spay on a pregnant bitch. He was talking on the phone via headset to a client about a completely different matter, and the hands just went by themselves - clip clip clip slice ligate ligate ligate snip snip and he tossed the gravid uterus off to the side without even glancing, and it landed in the exact center of the slop bucket.
“Geez, dad, did you see what you did?”
“What - did I miss?”
“No, you hit dead center.”
“Well - it’s not the first time I’ve done this.”
He popularized a procedure for chronic urinary infections in male cats, where you castrate the animal, amputate the penis, and then reroute the ureter so the cat pees out his butt. I asked him how he learned to do it - he said he read about it in his journals, recognized all the surgical techniques, and practiced a bit on dead cats and then started doing it, with a record of pretty much unbroken success.
My dad had kung fu, as much as Bruce Lee or any pro quarterback.
As I get older I definitely care less and less. But, I do still care to a degree. For some people I suppose there is a sense of community. Getting to be part of the pack, rooting for a common interest. For me, it’s the competition. I love to compete and I love to watch others compete. Going any deeper than that I start to wonder why we care about anything at all.
What DinoR said. Sports is a peaceful form of warfare. It allows us to get our natural, ingrained, us-vs-them out of our system in a (mostly) harmless way. India and Pakistan may hate each other, but much better that they vent it on the cricket field than with nukes.
It all boils down to the fact that humans are predators/hunters. Sports, video games, action movies, etc are all outlets for that insatiable drive in all of us.
I bet on sports. I wouldn’t watch them if I didn’t - well, I’d still probably watch Formula 1 and the World Series, but that’s it. Having money on a game adds a level of personal involvement that massively magnifies the drama and suspense, and also incentivizes studying the strategies used in the competition and paying close attention to what happens.
I think that’s the point. Humans naturally glom onto things that “matter” to us. We like to focus all our passion and energy into those things, especially when we do so with large groups of like-minded people. Sporting events give people something to care about with the same level of passion we usually reserve for stuff like going to war with our annoying neighbors, hating politicians, or attacking people who look or act different from us. And unlike movies or theater, it’s real life competition.
What I mean to say is ehe results of the game don’t “matter” in any real meaningful sense (i.e., we don’t put all Boston fans to death when the Sox lose the world series, economies don’t collapse, national boundaries don’t change, etc.) Maybe the worst thing that happens is some minor celebratory rioting or Giselle tells Tom Brady no more sex until he wins another Super Bowl ring. But because they don’t matter, it’s safe for people to act like it is the most important thing in the world.
Not here to kibbitz or threadshit or anything. I mostly don’t care about sports. It occurs to me that this thread in the Game Room is going to result in self-selection by people who do. Would my participation make a useful contribution?
I suspect that sports are a diversion from things that are important but which we don’t have sufficient control over or input into; they engage emotions that we’d like to have connected to outcomes of things that matter, but we mostly don’t get to have that. And then as a consequence of that we care about the outcome of specific sports events because of the resulting emotional investment. So it’s a type of surrogacy, I think.
But it **does **matter in a very real sense. Stock markets have actually been known to go up or down based off of sports performance. Entire national psyches can be affected. The movie *Invictus *is about how South African rugby managed to unite a nation with deep racial divides. The performance of a sports team can affect political elections. There is also a huge economic impact from sports because of the billions of dollars that flow here and there. It is most definitely not just “someone holding a stick hitting a ball,” there is a very real tangible effect.