Bill James Is Right

Having blasted sabremetrics the other day, I come now not to bury its founder, but to praise him.

Bill James is right, regarding what he said about baseball the other day.

In case any of you missed it, James issued a tweet that briefly drew more attention than the ones our commander-in-chief fires off every hour or so:

“If the players all retired tomorrow, we would replace them, the game would go on; in three years it would make no difference whatsoever. The players are NOT the game, any more than the beer vendors are.”

Heavens to Murgatroyd!

This brought down a predictable avalanche of opprobrium on James' head.  Much of it came from Tony Clark, now directing the Players' Association, which is understandable since Clark seems to be one of the really good guys in the game, a player who always gave his all, and seemed to know something about the history of the game.

But Bill James is right.

Look, major-league—and minor-league!—players are incredible.  They risk body and brain throwing themselves against walls in meaningless situations, possess amazing skills, and spend countless hours honing their bodies into weapons of mass destruction.

In addition, they take all kinds of silly guff from the likes of owners, managers, broadcasters, and, well, us fans.  For their ability and, usually, their desire, I give them full props.

But let's face it:  if you polled them at any given time, maybe 95 percent of them would rather be playing basketball, football, golf, or PlayStation.  Not to mention pursuing those time-honored ballplayer pastimes of drinking, partying, and chasing tail.

That's just the way it is.  If MLB folded tomorrow, they would miss the money (and the tail) but otherwise they would hardly be bereft.

So who is the game?

James made out that it was bigger than all of us, but that's not so.  No manmade institution exists in a vacuum.

It's certainly not the owners, 99 percent of whom are just in it for the money and the publicity.  It's not the broadcasters or the writers, who often make it clear that they, too, would rather be somewhere else.

It's us.  Baseball is the fans.

Sure, many of us are poor stewards.  We go to the games just to drink or brawl, or curse at millionaires.  We don't know what we should know about it, and we make impossible demands, and do plenty of front-running.

But what keeps this enormous enterprise going is still the fans.  We're the ones who keep shelling out the big bucks.  We're the ones who keep putting up with the stadium experience, no matter how annoying it gets.  We're the ones who watch the broadcasts that are now interminable, and saturated with commercials.

We're the only ones who care about beating Boston.  We're the ones foolish enough to "root for the laundry," as Jerry Seinfeld put it.  We're the only ones who keep in our hearts the history of the game (not even the writers keep track anymore), and who remember where we were when Bucky hit his home run, or Derek made that tag.

We're the ones who suffer, and obsess, mourn and rage—even though we know it all doesn't amount to a hill of beans.  We're the ones—many of us, at least—who sit back and discern the beauty in the game, and love the players on the field, and take pride in their play.

We're the ones who imbue it with meaning.  Without the fans, baseball is just a Sunday get-together for friends, another excuse for drinking beer and chowing down, which is how the clubs started.

Without the fans, all the drama, all the stagecraft, all the thrill is gone—and all those ballplayers who retired from a career of bitching and moaning about travel schedules, and lost days off, and their hangover from the night before...would never have those other memories they go to their graves with, having cherished the thought all their lives and long after they laced up a spike that they were special, special if only for playing a game.

We are the game.