My friend Brian is a pretty knowledgeable guy, and considers himself a casual sports fan. He's not a die-hard by any means, but he can still sit down with you and have a conversation about sports ranging from football and basketball to soccer and golf.
One sports that he absolutely doesn't care for, though, is baseball. He doesn't watch it, doesn't read about it, and can't really talk about it. His main reasoning, aside from the game's pace, is that he doesn't understand it; that it's too complicated.
As I was talking with Brian about this the other day, I had a thought: "When did baseball become a complicated sport?"
In reality, it isn't, but to outsiders it only seems that way because of the influx of too much unneeded, complicated statistics.
You know what I'm talking about. It's the current baseball mindset that every single moment and situation needs to be expressed and anylized statistically. It's regular statistics, advanced statistics, and sabermetric statistics, and every time a baseball player so much as sneezes, there's a statistic for that.
OBP, OPS, RISP.
WHIP, Runs created, Balls in play average.
Average with a 2-2 count. Average with a full count. Average with a 1-1 count with no outs on the road after the 6th inning.
It's every single possible moment, instance and situation being described by numbers. It's a push from baseball to have the entire game and any possible outcome to be expressed as a stat.
In basketball, a player can be described as being so much better when his teammates are involved, or a football player can be thought to be more effective in a certain formation, but in those sports commments like these are just speculation, even if they are perceived as accurate. In baseball, it's as if the only way you can think about a player's value is through the numbers.
"I like our starting pitcher, he seems to pitch better in tight games."
"Oh yeah? Well according to his ERA-per-27-innings-in-games-within-2-runs, he's actually in the bottom half of the league."
It just takes the fun out of it, and turns it into math class.
Statistics are a valuable tool in any sport, but in baseball its seemed to have gone overboard. For some, like Oakland's Billy Beane, baseball is a math equation where everything can be expressed or predicted numerically. But that concept takes away most of what makes sports so fun and unpredictible: things like gut instincts, hunches, hot streaks, and risky moves. In my mind, statistics are great and can be very useful, but the influx of unnecessary sabermetric statistics can never fully replace player or coach judgement and insight.
But unfortunately, baseball seems to be entrenched with this current mindset that statistics are needed to create something more out of a simple game.
David Halberstam once wrote that with the rise of televised sports, fans flocked to the more up-tempo, fast-paced games like basketball and football because it was more exciting to watch. Baseball, he said, then turned to countless new statistics - every situation and tendency broken down into stats - to try to make up for the fact that its pace was slightly slower than the other games on TV. He said that the soul of the game was pushed aside because an unnecessary need to have the statistics make baseball seem like more than it really is.
Some stats may be very accurate, others may be completely bogus, but baseball doesn't need to have everything measured with numbers in order to makes things more interesting. It's the simplicity of the game that is interesting.
Fans watch basketball because it's easy to understand. They watch football because, at its essence, its fun and straightforward. Baseball needs to understand that the majority of its fans feel the same way. Fans don't like a better because his OPS is out of this world, they like him because he's a good hitter. They don't like a pitcher because he's the league leader in WHIP, they like him because he can strike guys out.
And fans do like statistics, too. They love seeing a pitcher's ERA, or who leads the league in hits. But for fans, baseball should still be left as a game, instead of an equation. Not everything needs to be analyzed from all angles.
Instead, leave the advanced statistics to the eggheads who use them while running a team. If they think that it's useful to learn a player's RC27 (runs created per 27 innings) or ISOP (Isolated power), then let them go nuts. It's their team.
(And let's face it, sabermetrics doesn't always yield big results. The Oakland A's, for all their years of "Moneyball" tactics, aren't exactly a powerhouse.)
Baseball is a simple game, and that's where the fun lies. Fans have loved it for over a hundred years because of its players, its games, and its stories. Like any other sport, it's about the feeling you get from being there, from watching it, from taking it all in. You can measure things in statistics all you want, but in the end, fans will always care more about the fun and the entertainment of baseball.
You don't need a calculator to figure that out.
Showing posts with label baseball. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baseball. Show all posts
Friday, August 21, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The moment you move from baseball to softball, you know you're not a kid anymore
My friends and I were like a lot of other kids growing up. During the summer, we played baseball.
Every week, we'd all get together at the little field at the park down the street from my house and play ball. Our crew usually wasn't big enough to field an official nine-on-nine game, but that didn't matter to us. We'd pick sides, install a permanent pitcher or DH, play double-or-nothing if we had to, and end up having a blast playing six-on-six baseball.
There were no catchers or catcher's gear. No batting helmets. We shared our gloves, used only two aluminum bats (one had a crack in it), and had maybe seven baseballs that we reused every game. If a ball rolled into a bush, you had to find it, or else risk ending the game early.
It was always a modest setting, but we loved it like the seventh game of the World Series.
Baseball always meant more to us during those summers than other sports like football or basketball, because of the effort it took to get a game together. It took more players, more equipment, more planning, and therefore we cared more about winning the game. To us, those our days on the baseball field were more than games, they were events, spectacles, and gatherings of friends.
And that's the way it's supposed to be. When you're a kid, you play baseball.
But as you grow older, it becomes harder to get the old gang back together for a game. School, work, growing apart, all of these things get in the way. Friends move out of town, responsibilities come up, and suddenly, before you realize it, high school is over and you hadn't had a baseball game in years. And by then, it's too late.
Something that meant so much during those summers of our youth is relegated to nostalgia, just a memory.
Because when you grow up, it seems like you're not allowed to play baseball anymore. In its place is softball, and it's not the same.
The same elements are there: you hit, run, field, and pitch (to a certain degree). It's played on a field very similar to a baseball diamond, and much of the same equipment is used. But again, it's not the same.
As kids, we played baseball spontaneously and to have fun. Games were competitive but only because that's how they should be played, and it never got out of hand. Softball for adults, however, is rigid, scheduled, and lacks the heart that came from a session of six-on-six, double-or-nothing.
Softball isn't played with your closest group of friends just trying to get a game together, it's played with coworkers, extended family, or members of an organization. And unlike your friends, who wanted to win while keeping it in perspective, softball is populated by people who don't care at all or care way too much. In a softball game you could be teamed with the lady in accounting who doesn't know how to swing a bat or throw a ball, and you wonder if she's even heard of the game. Or you'll be teamed with the over-competitive jackass ("Softball Guy" as Jim Rome calls him) who will yell at that same lady for not knowing how to play, while arguing calls and throwing his bat after each pop-out.
Gone is the spontaneous sense of "quick, call all your friends for baseball and get to the field" from pickup baseball. It's replaced with something like "ladies and gentlemen, this saturday we'll meet in the office parking lot and go to the field ... or else" in softball.
We weren't softball players when we were kids; that game wasn't the same. The ball was too big and bulky, and you couldn't throw it or hit it as far. There were never those crazy hoppers to short that would leave you with a shiner if not properly fielded.
In our games of baseball, we used the same equipment as our childhood heroes, and emulated them on those hot days of summer. We felt like ball players, because we were playing the same sport, and playing it right.
But you don't play that as an adult; you're expected to play softball. Unless you're getting paid to play it professionally, baseball is considered a kid's game.
And at first, all of this is hard to take for someone who was raised playing baseball. But then slowly, you start to make rationalizations about softball. No, it's not the exact same as baseball, but it's rules do make it easier for people to play, especially as they climb up in the years. It evens the playing field. It limits injuries that could've occurred with a hard baseball rocketing off an aluminum bat. Sure, certain people may ruin the game, but if that's the case, just play with a different group of people.
And as these reasons pile up, you eventually settle into the fact that softball will the the closest thing to a baseball game you will ever play again.
It doesn't seem normal; to go from being a kid playing the real game of baseball to being an adult playing the easier version of it. While other sports like pickup basketball or football can be put together easily by kids and adults alike, pickup baseball just doesn't seem to work anymore after you reach a certain age. But that's where baseball/softball is different: no other sport makes you face your own maturation as obviously. The transition makes you realize that you can't play the same game the same way you did as a kid.
It's a sobering moment when you make that realization. But it comes to everyone. Most people move on easily, leaving the kid stuff in the past and accepting the fact that things will always be different. At that point, you go play softball and enjoy it, while looking back on playing baseball as a short-lived, memorable experience, one that made your childhood fun.
Every week, we'd all get together at the little field at the park down the street from my house and play ball. Our crew usually wasn't big enough to field an official nine-on-nine game, but that didn't matter to us. We'd pick sides, install a permanent pitcher or DH, play double-or-nothing if we had to, and end up having a blast playing six-on-six baseball.
There were no catchers or catcher's gear. No batting helmets. We shared our gloves, used only two aluminum bats (one had a crack in it), and had maybe seven baseballs that we reused every game. If a ball rolled into a bush, you had to find it, or else risk ending the game early.
It was always a modest setting, but we loved it like the seventh game of the World Series.
Baseball always meant more to us during those summers than other sports like football or basketball, because of the effort it took to get a game together. It took more players, more equipment, more planning, and therefore we cared more about winning the game. To us, those our days on the baseball field were more than games, they were events, spectacles, and gatherings of friends.
And that's the way it's supposed to be. When you're a kid, you play baseball.
But as you grow older, it becomes harder to get the old gang back together for a game. School, work, growing apart, all of these things get in the way. Friends move out of town, responsibilities come up, and suddenly, before you realize it, high school is over and you hadn't had a baseball game in years. And by then, it's too late.
Something that meant so much during those summers of our youth is relegated to nostalgia, just a memory.
Because when you grow up, it seems like you're not allowed to play baseball anymore. In its place is softball, and it's not the same.
The same elements are there: you hit, run, field, and pitch (to a certain degree). It's played on a field very similar to a baseball diamond, and much of the same equipment is used. But again, it's not the same.
As kids, we played baseball spontaneously and to have fun. Games were competitive but only because that's how they should be played, and it never got out of hand. Softball for adults, however, is rigid, scheduled, and lacks the heart that came from a session of six-on-six, double-or-nothing.
Softball isn't played with your closest group of friends just trying to get a game together, it's played with coworkers, extended family, or members of an organization. And unlike your friends, who wanted to win while keeping it in perspective, softball is populated by people who don't care at all or care way too much. In a softball game you could be teamed with the lady in accounting who doesn't know how to swing a bat or throw a ball, and you wonder if she's even heard of the game. Or you'll be teamed with the over-competitive jackass ("Softball Guy" as Jim Rome calls him) who will yell at that same lady for not knowing how to play, while arguing calls and throwing his bat after each pop-out.
Gone is the spontaneous sense of "quick, call all your friends for baseball and get to the field" from pickup baseball. It's replaced with something like "ladies and gentlemen, this saturday we'll meet in the office parking lot and go to the field ... or else" in softball.
We weren't softball players when we were kids; that game wasn't the same. The ball was too big and bulky, and you couldn't throw it or hit it as far. There were never those crazy hoppers to short that would leave you with a shiner if not properly fielded.
In our games of baseball, we used the same equipment as our childhood heroes, and emulated them on those hot days of summer. We felt like ball players, because we were playing the same sport, and playing it right.
But you don't play that as an adult; you're expected to play softball. Unless you're getting paid to play it professionally, baseball is considered a kid's game.
And at first, all of this is hard to take for someone who was raised playing baseball. But then slowly, you start to make rationalizations about softball. No, it's not the exact same as baseball, but it's rules do make it easier for people to play, especially as they climb up in the years. It evens the playing field. It limits injuries that could've occurred with a hard baseball rocketing off an aluminum bat. Sure, certain people may ruin the game, but if that's the case, just play with a different group of people.
And as these reasons pile up, you eventually settle into the fact that softball will the the closest thing to a baseball game you will ever play again.
It doesn't seem normal; to go from being a kid playing the real game of baseball to being an adult playing the easier version of it. While other sports like pickup basketball or football can be put together easily by kids and adults alike, pickup baseball just doesn't seem to work anymore after you reach a certain age. But that's where baseball/softball is different: no other sport makes you face your own maturation as obviously. The transition makes you realize that you can't play the same game the same way you did as a kid.
It's a sobering moment when you make that realization. But it comes to everyone. Most people move on easily, leaving the kid stuff in the past and accepting the fact that things will always be different. At that point, you go play softball and enjoy it, while looking back on playing baseball as a short-lived, memorable experience, one that made your childhood fun.
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