Fields of the Mind

[Baseball] is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

I grew up a baseball fan. As a kid I both played and watched baseball. To this day I can name the entire LA Dodgers lineup from about 1982-1986. I don’t play anymore, beyond throwing the ball with my son, but I still love to watch baseball, and he loves to play.

We went to a minor league game down in Florida a few years ago, the Blue Wahoos, and we stopped by the baseball hall of fame during our trip through upstate New York in 2023. Most of our baseball though has either been Elliott playing on the Washburn little league team or watching it on TV.

I have mixed feelings about professional baseball, or at least Major League Baseball. On one hand it has become such a blatant money grabbing machine that whatever soul baseball might have once had, it seems to have left the MLB. The MLB seems to go out of its way to make going to a baseball game a truly horrendous experience, from the price of tickets to the ridiculous water seizures at the entrance. When we were at that minor league game there were signs all over the park apologizing because the MLB would not let them take cash anymore. I wrote then that only diehard fans would put up with the hassle and expensive of MLB games anymore.

I stand by that. And I think plenty of people agree. There’s been a resurgence of independent leagues in the past decade, even as the MLB turns its back on more minor league teams. The MLB is more concerned with exclusive suites, ever higher ticket prices, and gambling, which together are its major sources of revenue. None of these should have anything to do with baseball.

We’re lucky that there is an amateur baseball league in this area. Two of Elliott’s coaches play and he goes to their games every chance he gets. I think that, combined with the games we’ve seen in our travels, everything from that minor league game in Florida to an Amish vs non-Amish game we stumbled on in Illinois, has given him a sense of the baseball magic that exists outside the money-driven, analytical game it has become in the MLB.

Still, if you’re into baseball you want to see the best players in the world playing the game, and that’s in the MLB.

For us, our “local” MLB team is about an even split between Minneapolis (Twins) and Milwaukee (Brewers), both about a four hour drive away. Since we’ve been to Milwaukee a couple of times, we decided to head down to explore Minneapolis and catch a Twins game.

We’ve been to Minneapolis twice, but all we ever did was spend the night at a hotel by the airport and fly out the next day. This time we drove all around the city, seeing the sights a little bit in between stops at all the hobby shops Elliott had discovered using Google Earth.

Prior to the game I couldn’t have told you a single player on the Twins. Even now I only know one or two names. I’m not, and probably never will be, a Twins fan. If you put a Twins game on TV I wouldn’t bother to watch, but that’s the odd thing about going to the ballpark — it doesn’t really matter. The experience of baseball transcends that.

For all my misgivings about the MLB, baseball itself remains the only game I have ever cared about. It’s the best game. For many reasons, but I think much of it lies with the rules, the constraints that surround it. Given the right constraints, artistry always emerges.

Consider the pace of baseball, which is perfect, not too fast, not to slow. The rules of the game are simple enough to grasp at a glance, and, perhaps most importantly, the outcome of a game is never certain until the final pitch.

Then there’s the length of the baseball “season”, which as Giamatti says in the quote above, is actually perfectly timed to three seasons. It starts, everyone full of hope, in the spring, really comes into its own in summer, and then, the cold reality of October rolls around. Only one team wins the world series.

The rules of baseball can be slightly arcane in their edge cases, complex enough to allow for deep baseball nerdry if that’s your thing, but the basics are simple enough that anyone can follow it. The rules and the structure of the game also make baseball the fairest game you can play. There’s no clock to run down. You can’t hold the ball, or dribble off to the side and wait things out. You have to throw the ball over the plate and give the other team their chance just as they did for you, and every time the ball crosses the plate the fate of the game can change.

Baseball is also never a one-superstar game. No matter how many home runs your big slugger hits, he only comes to bat 4, maybe 5, times a game. No matter how many people your star pitcher can strike out, he only pitches once every 5 games. A single star player might be able to carry a game every now and then, but a single player cannot carry a team for a whole season. You have to have a team.

Perhaps my favorite thing about baseball though is that the most unlikely of players can win a ballgame. The guy who hasn’t hit the ball in 25 games straight can nevertheless come to the plate in the bottom of the ninth and hit a home run that wins the game.

What really draws me in to baseball these days though, and I suspect this is true for most fans, is the narrative, the endless stories unfolding in real time. Every player has a story, which turns every game into a bigger story, which turns every series into a story, which turns every team into a story, and all these stories are constantly twisting and turning in unexpected ways as the season unfolds.

This, I think, is why listening on the radio is the best way to experience baseball if you can’t make it to the game in person. The story comes across better on the radio, where there is no picture to distract you.

Baseball radio commentary is forever telling stories. In other sports commentators tend to use downtime, if there is any, to analyze plays. There might be some of that in a baseball broadcast, but it’s always wrapped in stories — about the players, about the game, about the team, even about the broadcasters¹. You get to know all these people, know their stories, good and bad. You know the story well enough to tell it yourself, and you do.

I also love that baseball doesn’t take itself too seriously. If a team is down by 15 runs and doesn’t want to waste its reserve pitchers on an obvious loss they might ask an infielder to pitch. The Dodgers did that earlier this year with Kiké Hernandez, who then proceeded to do impersonations of all the pitchers on his team, having a good time despite losing. Because at the end of the day, it is a game, the greatest of games perhaps, but still a game.