Guest Post: Something for Everyone

Written by Larry Granillo | 22 July 2010

After a brief respite yesterday, we're back with another terrific guest post today, this time courtesy of Tommy Bennett. Tommy is one of the best writers we have today when it comes to mixing stats-based analysis and thought-provoking questions about the game. It's a pleasure to have him guesting here today. You can find Tommy's writings over at Baseball Prospectus and you can follow him on Twitter at @tommy_bennett.

When I first started going to ballgames, most stadiums were hulking concrete bunkers. As you gave your ticket and entered the concourse in most of these stadiums—Shea, Veterans, the Kingdome—you didn’t yet have a clear view of the field. Instead, you were presented first with concessions and old guys selling scorecards (back when you could still buy a scorecard separate from the program). The smell and the crowd were what reminded you that you were at a baseball, not a football, game, since most of these stadiums were designed and used for multiple sports. The plan of the stadium called for dozens of tunnels that led from the concourse to the seating sections, and most traveling around the stadium had to occur outside, in the concourse.

That compartmentalized planning has been replaced by the more single-minded, pastoral, revivalist stadiums we go to today. Most new ballparks now have standing room only sections throughout the park, and it is generally much easier to see the field from the concourse. These changes are great for baseball fans: few fans would opt for Shea over Citi or the Vet over the Bank. But those old stadiums with their enormous seating capacities drive home a feature that makes baseball unique among American sports. Baseball has niches that, like cubbyholes or stadium tunnels, cordon off aspects of baseball that can at times appear unrelated to the game on the field.

Let me give you an example. Baseball teaches us about mortality and the passing of time. Baseball literature, in particular, is obsessed with this theme. W.P. Kinsella, in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy , describes a game between a local Iowa squad and the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance 1908 Cubs that lasts for over 2000 innings. The game takes place in sleepy farm town of Big Inning despite the fact that for dozens of innings on end, the big inning does not come. As the floodwaters rise, the maniacal dedication to finishing the game grows absurd. But what, it is surely fair to ask, does this have to do with baseball?

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It’s not just Kinsella, either (though the same theme is present in Shoeless Joe as well). Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, Inc. is a sort of actuarial cautionary tale about the decline and death of all things young and promising. Let me put it a different way. It’s the story of a lonely office employee who spends an unhealthy amount of time drinking alone and playing dice games of his own invention. In the imagined pub run by one of his now-retired former (and imagined) baseball players, we meet generations of washed up ballplayers and their sons who have now taken their places. But the ostensible protagonist, the guy whose imaginations we are invited to inhabit, doesn’t even like watching baseball. Instead, he sits at his kitchen table and slavishly rolls the dice that seals the fate of the greatest fictional imagined pitcher of all time. And this is a book about baseball?

How about another example? The 1989 Donruss baseball card set is exactly what I’m talking about. Other sports have cards commemorating their players—heck, even Marvel comics had their own trading cards—but, really, who cared about those? But 1989 Donruss was a baseball card series for the Astroturf era: a spectrum of garish color adorned the outside frame while a mustachioed gentleman with a mullet gracefully swung a bat in the center. If you were lucky, you could snag a pack with the coveted “Rated Rookie” logo on one of the cards (the promising young Steve Jeltz in the 1985 series, for example).

Baseball cards grew almost to be a pursuit apart from the game itself. Kids who never pay much attention to the standings nevertheless collected cards, traded them with their friends, or put them in the spokes of their bicycles. The most coveted of baseball cards, like the Honus Wagner T206 card, sell for millions of dollars on the auction circuit. The point is that you could be completely obsessed with baseball cards, you could know the values from the latest Beckett price guide, you could have mint condition factory sets, and you might still not be that interested in the day to day games of the baseball season.

This severability of baseball interests, the fact that we can compartmentalize the experience of baseball, is one of the reasons it is so bewilderingly vital. What a website like wezen-ball stands for in my mind is a tribute to the radical diversity of baseball’s cool. Over the last few years, the site has reminded me what collectible preseason guides had to say about players like Tim Raines and Jim Rice. Lar has timed—with a stopwatch, every day—the amount of time it takes players to run around the bases after they hit home runs. He’s catalogued the statistics of Charlie Brown’s baseball team, for Pete’s sake. And you know what? It’s all endlessly fascinating to an unapologetic baseball fan like me. It’s not swinging a bat or taking ground balls, but it’s all part of baseball nevertheless.

As you come up out of the concrete tunnel and step into your section, you can see and hear the fans around you. You see the fans coming out of tunnels all around the stadium trying to get to their seats before the first pitch. Some of the fans have a beer in one hand, others have a glove tucked under one arm, and still others clutch a scorecard and a tiny team pencil. Only a game like baseball can support and combine the interests of all of these fans, from the dice-wielding shut-ins to the ‘roided up jocks.