The Truth about Baseball

It’s still a beautiful game…if you pay attention…

Near the end of the 2013 baseball season, my friend – the always overly-honest Jason Kendall – made a comment about the Kansas City Royals and said they had a shot at the postseason and needed to start playing team baseball.

A comment which took me by surprise because I was under the impression Big League ballplayers played team baseball all season until it became clear they had no shot at the playoffs and then did what they could to protect their individual numbers.

Unfortunately for my standing as a grown-up, semi-mature adult, I voiced that opinion out loud and Jason looked at me like I had just expressed a firm belief in the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Then Jason decided to set me straight.

Just in case you don’t know

“Team” baseball is putting the team first and doing things like hitting a ground ball to the right side with nobody out and a runner on second base, which will move the runner to third base and allow him to score on sacrifice fly or another groundout and if a hitter moves the runner over he’ll get high fives when he gets back to the dugout and a big fat “0-for-1” in the scorebook.

As Jason explained in the same tone of voice you might use to inform a slow-developing child that storks do not actually deliver babies:

Players get paid for the numbers they put up and they better produce those numbers or they might not be on the team the following year. But if they see a legitimate chance to make the postseason, players need to forget their individual numbers and start doing what’s best for the team because a chance to play in the postseason doesn’t come around that often.

Generally speaking, this is not an attitude that gets expressed out loud because it sounds cold and mercenary (which is exactly the kind of business players are in and they know it) so when the media turns on the cameras and microphones, players talk about not caring what kind of night they had as long as the team wins.

While in most cases it’s not really true because a player really can’t afford too many crappy performances, saying the most important thing is the team winning definitely sounds better.

Don’t misunderstand: players are incredibly competitive and really want to win, but not at the cost of their careers. Teams will encourage players to put the team first and then when it comes time to sign a contract, punish players that actually do it.

But players and teams can’t say any of that out loud.

Baseball has an image to protect and they sell that image to the public even though it’s not all that accurate and baseball isn’t the only business that does it. I mean, when’s the last time you got a burger from a fast food restaurant that looked anything like the burger they show in their ads?

So that’s the truth about how players see the game: make sure you cover your own ass, but if you get a chance to win it all, do the right thing.

What about the owners?

So the Houston Astros got caught cheating and when Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred was asked about taking away their 2017 World Series trophy, Manfred called that trophy just a “piece of metal.”

So baseball tells the world how important it is to win the World Series and players spend a lifetime trying to earn the right to lift a World Series trophy over their heads while simultaneously getting sprayed by cheap champagne (in the postseason celebrations I was privileged to attend, they had cheap champagne for spraying and expensive champagne for drinking) and then when a team gets caught cheating trying to win a World Series that you told them was important, you then say it’s not that big a deal and who really gives a shit what team winds up with a meaningless “piece of metal.”

As you might have expected, Manfred’s overly-honest assessment of how the people who run baseball actually view the World Series did not go over all that great and Manfred tried to walk that quote back later by saying this:

"In an effort to make a rhetorical point I referred to the World Series trophy in a disrespectful way. It was a mistake to say what I said."

You can’t help but notice that Manfred didn’t say his assessment of the World Series trophy’s value was wrong; he said it was a mistake to say it out loud. Now here’s another overly-revealing quote from Manfred when he was still trying to justify not doing anything about the Astros cheating:

“Once you go down that road of changing what happens on the field, I just don’t know how you decide where you stop.”

Even though I’m not the Commissioner of Baseball or play one on TV, off the top of my head I can think of where you decide to stop:

You don’t do anything to the teams and players that don’t get caught cheating.

But even that simple standard is difficult to apply because baseball has always tolerated a certain amount of cheating, like turning a blind eye to steroids and really turning a blind eye to amphetamine use and once you go down that road, you don’t want to call attention to all the cheating you’ve implicitly condoned by electing someone like Barry Bonds to the Hall of Fame or taking away the Houston Astros 2017 World Series trophy because the minute you do either of those things a lot of people are going to say what about all the other bullshit you guys have ignored as long as you were making money?

And if you have any doubts about how little the owners care about the “integrity of the game” and those who cheat, Astros manager A.J. Hinch and bench coach Alex Cora – two guys that got suspended for cheating – were rehired once their suspensions were up and if you ask people in baseball why that happened they’ll tell you it’s because Hinch and Cora have shown they’ll do whatever a team wants them to do.

Guys who are willing to tell their bosses to go fuck themselves are not in high demand.

So players are trying to protect their numbers and careers while owners would let Joseph Goebbels play shortstop if having him on the team would make them more money.

So why should we care about baseball?

As a former Big League player and manager once said to me:

“Baseball must be a great game because it’s survived everything we’ve done to ruin it.”

Despite scandals, work stoppages and analytics (and analytics are hard at work making the game unwatchable) baseball is still a beautiful game, but to appreciate that beauty you have to pay attention.

Which is one of baseball’s problems because our attention spans have been intentionally shortened by the entertainment industry and if you don’t believe me, next time you go to the movies (which is becoming a thing again since the pandemic seems to be slowing down) watch how many cuts the average movie trailer makes during those Coming Attractions because Hollywood doesn’t think we can remain focused for anything over three seconds…and Hollywood just might have a point.

Anyway…

There are hundreds of things to watch during a ballgame and I’ll give you just one.

First pitch

In 2021 the team with the highest batting average in baseball was the Houston Astros with a .268 team average. (In 2017 – the year they were cheating – they hit .282 which shows what breaking the rules can do for you.)

If the 2021 Astros put the first pitch in play, they hit .344. If they took the first pitch and it was a strike, after that they hit .241. If they took the first pitch and it was a ball, after that they hit .279.

And the pattern generally holds true for every team.

In 2021 the team with the worst batting average in baseball was the Seattle Mariners with a team average of .226. If the 2021 Mariners put the first pitch in play, they hit .287. If they took the first pitch and it was a strike, after that they hit .204. If they took the first pitch and it was ball, after that they hit .239.

So there’s a whole lot happening on that first pitch and the same is true of every other count and there’s one thousand and one things you could pay attention to and the key part of that statement is PAY ATTENTION and most people don’t so they miss what’s great about baseball.

Until…

You get to a game like the 2014 Wild Card Game and then everybody is living and dying with each and every pitch. And the time between pitches is what makes it great because it gives you time to consider the situation and get a knot in your stomach and start praying or cursing while you think about what’s going to happen next.

Once somebody starts teaching you what to watch (and that’s a lesson that is never finished) there are so many things happening you can’t possibly watch them all and the game goes from slow and boring to incredibly fast and that’s just the kind of thing I was writing about when the people who paid my salary decided enough people didn’t care, so I think it’s only fair to blame the end of my baseball writing career on America’s short attention span – a statement which only seems controversial if you actually kept reading and didn’t give up 24 paragraphs ago.

Which would make my point.

Eventually, baseball will be played again because there’s too much money to be lost if it isn’t, so when you watch one of those games forget about all the bullshit you don’t care about and focus on the game because it’s still beautiful…

If you pay attention.