Over a lifetime, I’ve pruned my sports watching. As a boy in the 1970s in a sports-obsessed household I watched everything U.S. TV networks offered and read my weekly Sports Illustrated as if it would save my soul. The 1972 Munich Olympics cost me innocence -- the killing of Israeli athletes and the officials’ theft of the gold-medal men’s basketball game (which, to be honest, affected my 8-year-old self far more deeply) made me forever skeptical of nostrums about “fair play” and “character.” In my teens I gave up college football and most college basketball, sickened by the NCAA’s Avery Brundage-level hypocrisy about the “student athlete” while a cadre of men in suits made millions. Hockey was never part of my Northern California sports culture. In my 20s I gave up the NBA regular season -- my team, the Golden State Warriors, was generally awful, and little mattered until Playoff Theatre. (I have good company; LeBron James said last week, “I’m not one to get caught up in the regular season.”) I stopped watching tennis, a sport that has never figured out its calendar. (Now a New Yorker, I do buy an annual grounds-pass for a day at the U.S. Open.) The Seoul Summer Olympics in 1988 were my last, killed by NBC’s soap opera treatment. (If I could attend a Games alongside a knowledgable companion with a nose for competition -- say, Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe -- I’d go.) My dad and brother loved golf, but I never got the bug and at some pre-Tiger point realized its country-club culture was irredeemable. In my 30s I won a March Madness pool, decided the winnings weren’t worth the work, and shut down my last vestige of college spectation. In my 40s I weaned myself from the NFL: the league’s corporatized greed put too many bales on the camel, the tipping bale being its tobacco-industry-like treatment of players with brain injuries; I felt like a Roman enjoying the spectacle of lions ripping apart criminals and Christians.
Baseball remains. It suffers from the problems afflicting all major U.S. sports: rich-boy owners reminiscent of Russian oligarchs; league officials unable to rein the oligarchs in; an addict’s relationship to TV money; casually cruel treatment of its athletes (see: steroid use); routine disregard of its fans. Too often the game’s poohbahs are short-sighted to the point of idiocy. The 1994 lockout and World Series cancellation put at least two stakes in my heart. (That then-Commissioner Bud Selig won recent election to the Hall of Fame sickens me.)
But each spring, the games impel me to push open my crypt. A key reason: the regular-season grind of 162 games matters. Granted, it matters far less than it used to. The 10-team playoff format evens the field; a 106-win behemoth may well fail to show its edge over an 85-win wild card entrant over five or seven games. But daily ball from April to September, the unspooling of a hundred stories (the aging star, the fireballing phenom, the flawed middle-infield defense, the inexplicable pinch-hitting prowess, the absence of a capable lefty in the bullpen, a string of late-inning comebacks), make for a winnowing process that rewards close attention. The game’s narrative richness allows me to enjoy a sparsely-attended September tussle between also-rans. (Growing up in the ‘70s as a San Francisco Giants fan, I got a lot of practice.) Watching good teams play meaningful games is a bonus.
Regular-season integrity partially explains the one spectator sport I’ve added as an adult: English Premier League football. The structural imbalance between the league's dregs and its Rich Six (Tottenham, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea) is offset by its perfect schedule (each team plays each foe twice, once at home and once away); its race not just for a title but for the four top spots to qualify for the enriching European Champions League; and the simultaneous race to avoid a bottom-three finish that will “relegate” a team to a lower division (to be replaced by the top-3 finishers in the division below). When each game matters, great theatre results.
All of this is meant to explain my response to an idiotic idea being bandied about by the Major League Baseball Commissioner’s office. To cut game times (a commissioner obsession that has already resulted in a wrong-headed rule allowing automatic intentional walks), the league is pondering the contamination of extra innings. The rule was used at last month’s World Baseball Classic tournament: once you reach the 11th inning, each team starts with a runner (the batter who made the last out of the 10th) on second base. This of course promotes scoring, hastens a game’s conclusion, and sends impatient fans to the parking lot and to bed.
As a counterargument, allow me to present a single piece of evidence: last night’s Mets-Marlins 16-inning, 5-hour-and-38-minute, Einstein-On-The-Beach epic. The 9-inning preliminary was crammed with event: a Marcell Ozuna 1st-inning grand slam; an immediate tying Mets riposte, highlighted by a bases-clearing triple by catcher Travis d’Arnaud; a trio of middle-inning Mets solo homers, two by Yoenis Cespedes; an answering 4-run Marlins rally, ending with d'Arnaud body slammed but holding on to a Jay Bruce throw to cut down a runner at the plate; a Mets’ bid thwarted in the 7th when Cespedes ran past a coach’s stop sign, declined to slide, and got thrown out at the plate himself; and, an inning later, a tying 2-out rally (d’Arnaud single, pinch-hitter Michael Conforto double): Mets 8, Marlins 8.
Then, as so often happens in baseball’s multi-act dramas, the Peckinpah reel turned into a Bergman retrospective: aimlessness, exhaustion, gathering darkness. After 10 innings the strapping 28-year-old d’Arnaud, wracked by four hours of squatting and pitch calling and ball blocking, needed help to descend the dugout stairs. Ninety more minutes passed. Innings 9 through 15 featured a parade of feckless at-bats, with no Mets and a lone Marlin reaching as far as second base. Amid the gloom came sparkles of light: Mets reliever Josh Smoker, barely hanging on to his roster spot, pitched three spotless innings; righty Hansel Robles, promised a night off after pitching in three straight games, told Manager Terry Collins he could go and trotted out to pitch a clean 15th. (It was either him, Collins said later, or backup catcher Rene Rivera.)
Leading off the 16th, d’Arnaud deposited a 1-0 fastball into the left field stands for his fourth hit, third run, and fourth RBI: the game of his life. Robles trudged back out and walked the leadoff batter. Dangerous Giancarlo Stanton lined out to right. Dangerous Justin Bour struck out. Manager Collins then faced a choice: pitch to the dangerous Marcel Ozuna (two walks and two hits in seven plate appearances, including the grand slam, and 16 RBIs in the season’s nine games)? Or walk him intentionally and face, in Miami’s jury-rigged and depleted lineup, Adam Conley, a starting pitcher with 9 hits in 61 career at-bats (.138), no extra base hits and 32 strikeouts? Miami had no alternatives. Collins spun the wheel and instructed Robles to face Ozuna with only breaking pitches, preferably off the plate. Robles proceeded to throw a non-sliding slider that hung over the plate; Ozuna crushed it 400 feet, where it dropped to earth 8 feet in front of the center field fence, into the glove of Juan Lagares. Mets 9, Marlins 8. Had ‘em all the way.
In the scope of any baseball season, a win in the season’s 10th game is of little note. But, come what may, any recap of the 2017 Mets will feature d’Arnaud’s weary legs trotting home in the 16th (“I think the excitement and adrenaline of the home run helped”), Robles’ dangling arm, Collins’ decision. And then: how will the teams bounce back? What will happen to the Mets bullpen should their starters falter over the weekend? How will they muddle through this series, and the next, and the next? Will any of it matter in their drive for an unprecedented third-straight playoff appearance? None of this would come to mind had Michael Conforto and then A.J. Ellis started the 11th inning standing undeservedly on second base.
Is your average fan likely to stay in her seat or on his couch for five-and-a-half hours and 16 innings? Of course not. But baseball, by definition, is about gratification delayed. (Sometimes for as long as 108 years.) This isn’t to say all change is bad. Cut game times by enforcing existing rules (on time between pitches, say) and limiting mound visits. (See the Arizona Diamondbacks for a team that turns every game to a late-inning slog, with catchers often running to the mound several times in one at-bat.) But the sport is not in crisis; certainly its owners’ wallets have never been fatter. Why damage its integrity to chase misguided notions of what fans want? Why not allow its stories to unfold, then celebrate them? Why not teach a new generation of fans to appreciate its long haul?
1 comment:
I did not realize Conley was on deck at the time Ozuma hit that 400 foot out. That is insane. I kept thinking the teams just want to go home, and yet when push comes to shove, neither wants to lose after 6 hours of play. It's funny stats that allow Cabrera to "keep his hitting streak alive" by having double the usual at bats for a game, or give D'Arnaud his "first-ever four-hit game" (ditto). But it definitely proves my adage that every game, no matter how grueling, serves up at least one moment you've never seen before -- and sometimes an entire unique narrative.
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