[SanDiegoSteve]

Originally Posted by Publius

Randy:

I laugh to myself in amusement, or shake my head in bewilderment at the irony every time somebody demands the channel be changed to football or basketball because “baseball is boring”. All three have allure, but the former two are gaining more. The trend mirrors the general dumbing down of American society. Baseball will continue to lose popularity because the masses have too short an attention span to pay sufficient attention to the subtlety of baseball to ever gain an understanding sufficient to develop an appreciation of it

Basketball and football are hip-hop, slam dancing and graffiti, the dime novel. They are power and speed, the awe what is possible by the physically extraordinary among us.

Baseball is the symphony, ballet and sculpture, poetry. It is finesse, the awe of what is possible by the physically ordinary among us.

In football, two-way play is unusual. In basketball, it’s optional. In baseball, it’s (generally) required. It takes two extraordinarily different skill sets to play offense and defense. You can spend ten years in the minors developing and still get a crack at the bigs. The others write you off if you haven’t made it by age 25. Make that 21 in basketball. Baseball doesn’t require stamina for a game, but it does for a season.

Football and basketball allow you to redeem your failures on the next snap, or the next trip down the court. In baseball, you have to wait two or three innings for your shot at atonement. In baseball, a 35% success rate gets you to Cooperstown; in the others, a 40% success rate gets you an unemployment check.

Baseball doesn’t allow a clock to run out your chance to come back. There is no taking a knee in baseball. There is no partial credit. There are no field goal attempts if you are stranded at third, no free throws if a hard knock keeps you from crossing the plate. It’s one run at a time, and that’s the only way to win.

Rut is right—appreciation of baseball is dying. A pity, but given a “culture” that demands instant gratification and eschews lifetime achievement for fifteen minutes of fame, what else would you expect?

Baseball is Augustus; football and basketball are Nero.

Very well put. Good post!