Why America No Longer Cares About Baseball

When professional baseball was but a mere child new to the world, artists would sit and illustrate key plays. These drawings and sketches would be found in newspapers the next day, and that's how everyone knew what happened in games: who hit that amazing home run, what that infamous pitching looking like hurling that ball in to strike out the last batter, and what that amazing catch in the outfield looked like.

Not only can we watch MLB live these days, but we can watch it in high def and whenever we want to. Hell, we can even rewind and fast-forward the game while it's happening.

Fairly recently, I was in the Chili's restaurant/bar in the Chicago O'Hare airport; I was stuck there on a layover and my flight was delayed. There was a game on the television at the bar while I quietly sipped my iced tea and watched.

And eventually, I heard someone say that same thing; it's that sentence I always hear about baseball while I'm trying to watch a game in public: "I like it if I can be there at the game, but I can't watch it on TV. It's just so boring."

Usually, I just politely smile or maybe give a slight chuckle when this typical phrase is uttered. And then I go back to watching the game, annoyed that my entertainment and temporary solice was interrupted by someone at a bar. And I'm always rudely interrupted trying to watch games by the way. Apparently, a blonde female looking at the television is not watching the actual baseball game or interested in it but merely staring blankly at the screen thinking bimbo thoughts.

When actually, baseball is the thinker's sport. And that is why this country has turned its back in it. Because we don't want to think any more if we can avoid it.

We are no longer a society that respects education, appreciates books, or even cares what is happening in any country other than our own. Give us our football; we love it endlessly because it moves fast, it's over fast, and there is a slew of hard-hitting plays.

And we love our violent incidents, don't we? The last time any event in MLB was televised rampantly was the Red Sox-Rays brawl two seasons ago. Before that and since then, the only highly-publicized MLB events were related to the steroid scandal.

No, we are not the same nation that cares about baseball and worships it like we used to. Ask people why and you'll get the same answers: there's too many games, the players make too much money, the games are too long, the season is too long, it all moves too slow, they're all on steroids, they're not on steroids anymore so there aren't enough home runs, blah blah blah.

All these answers are illogical. If you appreciated the sport, you wouldn't care. The players make so much because it IS a long season and there ARE a lot of games. And, as Ted Williams said, hitting a baseball is the hardest single thing to accomplish in all of athletics. And these are men that do it well, consistently. That's why we hear about their "slumps," because we expect their batting averages to be high all the time and take notice when that isn't the case.

This society, increasingly so, wants everything to have incredible speed. We want fast cars, we love fast food, and we better have access to our high-speed internet at all times or else. Football and basketball both move at a pace that is consistent with this modern American mentality.

But baseball? Oh goodness, no. Baseball can be slow. It can be painstaking. It is not for the faint of heart (if you love one of teams and it's a close game), and a lot of the time it is not something that can be done with and forgotten in two hours or less.

To truly love baseball in our era, you have to be a certain personality type: an obsessive-compulsive ritualist (this is a plus because then the players' odd at-bat habits make sense to you), a passionate massochist, an anlyzer, an escapist who wants their escape to last ast long as possible.

It's the sport for true fanatics. And not many true fanatics exist anymore, in any sport, but you are most likely to find them at baseball games.

Our lives are a constant blast of movement and change. There is rarely a moment to stop and ponder, and even if we are granted one, we find it depressing and can't wait to get moving again. We don't want to pause for a single second or think too much about any one's actions, including our own.

And baseball, well...it's full of pauses, of painstaking decision-making. Each pitch during every at bat is a display of compulsive ritual and nervous energy. None of the players would ever like to speak of their own personal "luck" rituals, but most of them have had their own set of strange behavior that has been going on since they played in AAA, college, high school, or maybe even as far back as Little League.

David Ortiz, Designated Hitter for the Red Sox, steps out of the batter's box before each pitch is thrown to him, for example. He puts his bat in the crook of his arm or against his leg, and spits on the palms of his right glove, and slaps his hands together a certain number of times.

His former teammate Nomar Garciaparra had an infamously long and annoying string of rituals he would do each time he stepped in the box.

Joe DiMaggio would never ever run in from the outfield unless he touched his foot on the second base pad.

Watching a baseball game is watching 30+ people on a playing field, having simultaneous panic attacks. And the managers of teams can be even worse. Have you ever watched a them down in the dugout during a game? I swear I have seen Jim Leyland smoke two or even three cigarettes at once. Some managers can't decide which dugout goodie to chew on nervously: (sunflower seeds, bubble gum, chewing tobacco, antacid tablets, etc.), so they just shove it all in their mouths at once. The result sort of looks like a demented sqirrel that's about to puke.

No-hitters and perfect games are the most well-known sources of superstition. When the pitcher sits on the bench between innings, you would think he had the Ebola Virus: all teammates and personnel shoved away from him on the other side of the dugout, knowing not to speak to him or even come close.

Other sports have their luck rituals and such, yes, but in no sport is superstition as prevalent as it is in baseball. It just isn't even close. Three major curses on three different teams? Need I say more? And one huge unbroken curse remaining that in all likelihood will never be reversed (sorry Cubs fans).

Maybe obsessive compulsive individuals who rely on rituals daily in their own lives are the ones who love baseball the most. Perhaps we identify with the mental pauses, the stare-downs, the sheer anxiety that comes with playing and watching the sport. As mentioned above, it is not a sport for the faint of heart. It is slow, agonizing at times, and relentless in its ability to mess with your head. The smallest shift in wind, the tiniest hand movements in the wrong direction, one failed step in the outfield, and everything changes. That's all it takes.

The rituals are in place for psychological safety; you can practice hard every day and have talent pulsing in every pore of your body. But baseball is a highly-skilled event tainted with high amounts of chance. Anything can happen, so comfort is found by clinging to some sort of consistent pattern.

And maybe some of us, like myself, are so enamored with baseball because it feels like our own lives; except that we get to take solice in the fact that we are not the ones in that batters' box or the guy up on that pitching mound.

This is why baseball is just not watched widely any longer by society's average folk. Because they're sane, and baseball is anything but. You cannot challenge an umpire like you can challenge a ref's call in the NFL. Hell, they still don't even allow instant replay to be used in decision-making in the MLB.

Baseball is hardcore vintage, truly old-fashioned, in a world where nothing else is.

Exciting plays occur regularly, but the waiting game, those pauses, are always there. You are watching man vs. man, man vs. physics, and man vs. himself and man vs. his own psyche all at once.

I understand why baseball is just too much for some people; why it's not fast and hip enough, why the NLF pre-season games consisently receive higher ratings than the World Series.

There's too much time to think in baseball, and the few of us that can appreciate that and love the zone and drone of it mingled with bursts of excitement, we're always gunna be there. Obsessing, twitching, holding lucky items, slapping our palms together. Maybe even eating entire buckets of chicken like Wade Boggs used to do before each game.

The OCD freaks, the math geeks, the rejects, the ones who watch ancient games and still collect baseball cards and who still keep score at each and every game: we love the damn game, alright? So the rest of America, you can say whatever you want about how "boring" it is to you. Just don't bother saying it while there's a game on; chances are we'll be too busy pondering the nerdy stats and rocking back and forth in a nutty daze, staring at the screen, and we won't even hear you.