Why is baseball considered the "thinking man's sport"?

Whereas football players do whatever they want on the field.

Obviously not.

I suppose the point is that, per the OP, the “thinking man” of baseball generally isn’t on the field.

Could you explain this?

Whereas, in cricket, it is.

A cricket captain has no-one to make the calls or work it out for them. They plan the game play-to-play, hour after hour.

Based on the newspaper headlines I read so often, I can assure you that the NFL most definitely has its share of nitwits.

Hard to explain beyond that it is the only one of the 4 major sports that has no time limit (yeah, I know, there’s sudden death in all three other sports in certain situations, but baseball is not a timed game).

I can only say that of all 4 major sports, Ive seen many more unpredictable and unprecedented scenarios occur during a game than the other three.

Yes TMS is very hard to explain to anyone but a joy to listen to

Without comparing to other major sports, baseball has a lot of similarities to a game like chess. Even through the course of a game, plans are set in motion that conclude innings later. Quite often the intended outcome of a plan is not the optimal outcome, for example sacrifices are a major part of baseball. Same for intentional walks. This kind of strategy is not absent from other sports.

What is different is that in baseball, the defense controls the ball. Almost every other ball sport revolves around the offense trying to advance across a playing field and score on the opponent’s goal. This, I think, relates to the comment above about other sports using brute force.

Also, with other sports, if a player leaves the game - say, due to injury - that player can return to the game, assuming that he is medically cleared to do so. Players can be swapped in and out regularly (in basketball, you sometimes hear that a team is going with their “small” lineup. In football, an onside kick may put the “hands” team on the field). Not in baseball, though. There are only 25 players eligible to participate in a game. Once a player is removed from the field for any reason, he’s ineligible to return to play the rest of that game. So there’s more strategy in how a coach will utilize his players.

Most other sports are about action. Baseball is about suspense.

Pro football definitely requires thinking; an NFL QB has to know dozens of plays and be able to scan the defense to see if the play will work, or if the other team is ready for it in a split second. It’s so complicated that QBs don’t call the plays any more; they just execute them.

But all that takes place in a few seconds. Baseball has the delight of giving the fans and players time to think about the next pitch. The defense had to adjust to the pitch and the batter has to react.

Further baseball has statistics on every player. You can talk about who’s the best shortstop and give number to back yourself; trying to determine the best offensive guard is just opinion with nothing to back it up.

The strategy in football is running the plays or reacting to them, and teams can use whoever seems best in the situation. In baseball, you’re stuck with the same nine players for most of the game. So the strategy is more complex.

Doesn’t this make it the non-thinking man’s sport, in that a suitably programmed robot could coach a baseball side? Or we could stop actually playing the games, make a magic the gathering-style deck of baseball players, and just have the two managers play the cards out for the same result?

In other words it seems like an extremely homogenous sport, with a very restricted opportunity for strategic flair. In other sports, a player can be a superstar under one style of play, and a total failure in an other - can this happen in baseball? Do styles make fights in baseball? Obviously you can have personality conflicts etc between different regimes, but in terms of roles it seems very interchangeable.

That’s only true in soccer if no one comes in as substitute. Soccer has even more limited substitutions than baseball: no more than 3 substitutions for the entire match.

One way of thinking about it:

Suppose you took a video of the event and extracted a single frame once per minute, blurring out indicators like the timer and score. Shuffle the resulting frames.

For any game, how difficult would it be to reassemble the frames back into the proper order?

For chess, you could do this almost perfectly. The state of the board now strongly constrains the state of the board in the future. An early bad move stays with a player for the rest of the game.

In contrast, you could do almost nothing with games like basketball or soccer. You could infer a few things based on the presence of certain players, but overall, the state of the field has very little minute-to-minute correlation.

In the middle are games like baseball. The state of the field is important–in particular, the players on base. And batting order I guess? It might be hard to put the innings in order, but within each inning you wouldn’t do too badly.

Football would also be somewhere in the middle–the position of the line of scrimmage provides a certain statefulness to the field.

Of course there could be other metrics for what counts as a “thinking man’s” game, but this is certainly one where chess scores quite high and baseball does better than basketball.

Its a fun game which is fast enough to keep your interest while slow enough to let you discuss it with your friends next to you while the players play. Baseball is a game best watched with a group of friends (possibly with some tailgating in the parking lot before the start of the game).
Its this social aspect that makes it fun for me*.
Assumes that its not a nasty grudge match game between teams/fans that Hate each other. In the words of Dan Aykroyd: “Fuck That Noise.”

I agree with this.

The actual game play of baseball doesn’t require an external decision maker. It doesn’t require as much pre planned coordination as football. You could easily play a good game just by telling the players to go out and do their best.

Style of play? I don’t really know if baseball has style of play the same way as football or soccer does. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball, you run for the base. How good or badly you do any of those things at the right time will affect the game but I don’t think there’s such thing as style of play, not in the sense that you could be watching a completely different game from one match to the next. It’s still throwing, catching, hitting, and running.

All sports can be thought-of this way. People using the term “thinking man’s sport” are doing so to aggrandize their sport so they can look down on the others. You never hear someone who hates <insert sport> referring to it that way.

The pace of a baseball game allows a fan to pretend to be the manager. To strategize in real time. To say to his buddy, “I would do this right now…” Most other major sports are too fast-paced to allow that conversation, at least extending the course of a game. Sadly, I believe it’s that same slow pace that is causing the sport to lose the new generations of fans it desperately needs.

And if you think really, really hard, you might be able to see a point in it.

Oh, I disagree. Billy (Martin) Ball is very different from Billy (Beane) ball. The Cuban game is very different from the Japanese game.

That doesn’t always follow, however. I’m not a boxing fan, but I can certainly understand why it’s known as the “sweet science.”

I believe it was Bucky Katt - in Get Fuzzy - who commented that, in baseball, you can drift off in front of the TV, wake up an hour later, and nothing has changed.