This isn’t a GQ, or a GD; there’s no question here, and I don’t want to argue right or wrong. I just want to mourn the game I loved, and I’m mildly curious as to whether anyone else feels the same way. Hence the following.
It’s the beginning of another baseball season, and it’s finally gotten to the point where I’ve said: so what? After 35 years of being a baseball fan, it’s lost its appeal. Like I said up top, it’s the beginning of the season, but I miss the game.
What this is not about:
It’s not about the money. Yes, I think MLB players are seriously overpaid, and I’m tired of the owners jerking every ML city around for a stadium with luxury skyboxes and whatnot. But that’s not it.
It’s not about postseason games that take far too long, and end way too late, although it certainly wouldn’t hurt if baseball went with a more Masters-like approach to their crown jewels, with fewer but more expensive commercials. Football, basketball, and hockey have such frenetic action that a commercial break is a necessary breather. Baseball is the right pace to begin with (many would say too slow already, but I’m not one of those); put in too many too-long breaks, and you’ve got a snoozefest, particularly a MLB playoff game at 11:30 pm when the alarm goes off at six in the morning.
But the postseason is such a brief part of the arc of the season; that’s really not it, either.
It’s not the DH, or the extra layer of playoffs (although the first round is far too much baseball at once, IMO), or monkeying around with the divisions for (about to be) the third time in less than a decade, and having teams switch leagues for (soon to be) the second time in three years, after its having happened precisely never, until now. And it’s not interleague play, which I’m all for, actually. (I’m not exactly a hidebound traditionalist here.)
No, it’s none of that. It’s this: I miss pennant races.
We don’t have them anymore, at least, not for serious. And over the arc of a 162-game season, that’s what made the game compelling, that’s what made it matter. If you have a month of spring training, six months of regular season, and a month of postseason, what’s the heart of the game? The regular season. And what’s captivating about the season? Pennant races. Or that’s what used to be captivating, anyway.
Remember when the Red Sox led the Yankees by 14 in 1978, then blew it all to fall 3-1/2 behind, then somehow picked themselves off the floor to tie the Yankees on the last day of the season to force a 163rd game in Fenway the next day, with the season riding on the outcome - damn, that was hard. Or when the Braves (104-58) and the Giants (103-59) went down to the wire in 1993, the Last Pennant Race Ever.
What made those races so compelling? What about checking the results from some late ballgame out on the West Coast made me feel like a junkie getting his fix?
A very simple thing, IMHO: the fact that the winner kept on playing, while the loser went home.
This is what we didn’t have in 1996 or ‘97, for instance, when the Orioles and the Yankees were involved in two ersatz races in the AL East. If the team that led most of the way had fallen to second, what of it? They were still in the postseason. Nothin’ to it. Or similarly last year, when the Mets challenged the Braves.
I suppose the wildcard keeps the interest up amongst fans of second-tier teams, of those teams that won’t win 95 games in a season, but might well be able to win 87. And of course, MLB gets a few more bucks from postseason revenues, with the extra round of playoffs. But to me, what’s been lost has been the one thing that truly mattered, the quality of terrible beauty that a prolonged drama can have only if we know there is an inevitable resolution at the end. The regular season was that prolonged drama, but now it resolves little. Those 162 games don’t resolve anything; they’re just an extended weed-out-the-misfits round. They’re now just a series of entertainments, rather than an extended crucible. No team will ever again be tested in the manner that we saw the 1978 Yankees and Red Sox tested, or the 1969 Mets and Cubs, or the 1993 Braves and Giants. And I miss that, in a manner that words can’t convey.
I know it’s of no importance that I used to be a baseball fan, but am one no longer. Bud Selig won’t stop in his tracks and tell the owners that the wildcard experiment is over. It means more money for the owners, so I’m sure it’s here to stay. And whether baseball, as it is now, will do better or worse at attracting a new generation of fans than baseball before 1994, is anyone’s guess. But I feel like a guy whose wife left him years ago, and it’s only now settled in on him that she’s not coming back, and he can only now begin mourning her loss in earnest. Or like a junkie who was forced to go on methadone years ago, but knows every day that it isn’t quite the same thing.
The game may be better or worse with the wild card than without. Like I said, I don’t want to argue that; that’s why this isn’t in GD. But I miss pennant races terribly, and to me, at least, it just isn’t the same game without them.