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Why Baseball Is Perfect For Our Fast-Paced Lives

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Baseball is the perfect antidote for our times.

Its leisurely pace is tonic to the hyper-speed of our times.

Baseball is the opposite of everything that is inherent in our world today. Fast and glitzy.

It is slow. Like its progenitor, cricket, it has no clock. Just innings.

At the same time…

Baseball is one vs. one. The pitcher hurls the ball at speeds that the ordinary eye cannot see at a batter who can discern its velocity, spin and location. A skill that not one in a thousand possesses.

It is a team game. Aside from advancing the baserunner and fielding, teamwork mostly occurs off the field, in the dugout and in the clubhouse. Players spend nine months a year together.

No other sport occurs nearly every day during the season that stretches from mid-February to October and into November if weather delays the World Series. That is not a curse; it is its charm.

I remember a story that Tom Boswell, the long-time chronicler of the game for the Washington Post, told about his time a young reporter when he asked Earl Weaver, the sometimes cantankerous manager of the Baltimore Orioles, for an interview. Weaver said they could speak now, just prior to the game. Boswell was dumbfounded, expecting that Weaver would be deep into game preparation. Weaver shook him off explaining that he and the team did this 162 times per year. Not including spring training and the playoffs.

Now at the All-Star break of 2018, a time when players not playing in the game, which more and more is an anachronism, get five days off, it is worth taking stoke of the National Pastime

Cynics – and truth be told I am one these days because my Detroit Tigers are on a one-way train to Palookaville – say that there are too many teams, too many long games, and too many players that no one but the players’ mothers knows.

All true, but Major League Baseball is alive and well. The problem is baseball does not know how to sell itself. Executives think they need to promote the game as a series of highlights, the way the games are shown on the sports shows. Great catches, wicked strikeouts and monstrous home runs.

All wondrous, yes, but that is not baseball… Really!

Baseball harkens to a pastoral era. Cognoscenti know that Abner Doubleday did not invent the game any more than Babe Ruth had a candy bar named for him. Still, the game was born in the pastures of rural America. It was played before the Civil War and the Red Stockings of Cincinnati started playing “professionally” in 1869. Even golf in Scotland was not yet professional.

The game matured and became the Game of the early 20th century. Back then every little town had a pro team. Branch Rickey helped the St. Louis Cardinals build a minor league system. Rickey was so successful that he became general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And wanting to win so badly Rickey, a devout Methodist, knew he needed to bring in the talent that major leagues had long ignored – African Americans. Rickey brought Jackie Robinson – a man so athletically gifted that baseball was maybe his third or fourth best sport. More than athleticism, Robinson had courage, the kind that was strong enough to withstand the vile hatred inflicted upon him, not just from fans but from fellow players who realized that if baseball were integrated many of them would be out of a job.

Baseball is, therefore, America's game. It is both rural as well as urban. It is diverse as well as inclusive. In the game, there is the tension of our history as well as the inexorable pull to a better future.

Baseball is a game that is the minute-to-minute drama on the field as well as the hour to hour pace of the game and the day to day, week to week stretch of the season.

Baseball breeds reflection. For the pitcher who must decide which pitch at which speed to throw. For the batter who must position himself for that pitch. For the fielder who must position himself for each pitch. And for the manager who must juggle the talents and egos of superstars with role players.

Reflection, too, is for us fans. Sitting back in the ballpark and watching is peaceful. I still remember the breathtaking greenness of the outfield at Tiger Stadium. Listening on the radio is also pastoral. The great announcers – Ernie Harwell, Red Barber and of course, Vin Scully – told stories. They reminded us of our youth by recalling games and players of times gone by.

Baseball is life without a clock. What could be better?

Note: Baseball fans will enjoy a column Thomas Boswell wrote in 1987, “Why Baseball Is So Much Better Than Football.”

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