Sunday, November 18, 2018

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.






10 comments:

  1. Extremely well put.

    Run it as an op-ed. Or, at a minimum, as a letter to the Times. Although, based on your research, you will probably have to substitute soccer for baseball.

    Doug K.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Doug K.!

    Also, I meant to add, "we are the world, we are the children."

    ReplyDelete

  3. Please provide complete details on what, precisely, is wrong with chasing tail, thinking about chasing tail, your mind wandering to chasing tail during a pitching change, preferring to chase detail rather than to play for the Orioles in late May of yet another awful season -- etc.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I gotta disagree with this one. As others have said, remember 1995? Did you REALLY enjoy watching those “replacement players”? I remember Buck Showalter talking about having to manage them. He remembered talking to the home plate umpire before a game to go over the ground rules (what’s a HR, what’s a double, etc.). He told the umpire, “Why bother? Did you watch my guys take BP? I got no one who can even reach those parts of the ballpark!”

    I’ll take today’s ballplayers anytime, even the ones who loaf to first base while watching their flyballs to the wall and counting their $$ in their heads.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anon, I see your point. We all want to see the best players. But Bill James correctly says that it's the game that endures and Hoss adds that it's really us. The fans.

    If all of the players who went on strike that year never came back new ones and new favorites would take their place in time. And, since we root for laundry, we would start to like (and in this crowd dislike) whatever is in front of us.

    But, as Bill James indicated, the players come and go.

    Mantle gives way to Munson who gives way to Mattingly who gives way to No One, but then to Jeter, and Matsui, and now Judge.

    No player or group of players is bigger than the game. We do root for laundry. We are the strike the game could not survive.

    I can't speak for anyone but myself but I love baseball, pretty much in all forms.

    When my son was in Little League I watched a lot of crappy baseball with players who were fortunate to run around the bases in the right direction. I loved every minute of it.

    Recently I was playing in that 1864 baseball league (until my knees reminded me that I am in my 60's) and was hitting 300 foot singles. I had a blast.

    A lot of us on this site wrote about Strat O Matic and APBA. You know that's really just rolling dice and looking at pieces of cardboard.

    As to the way it's played now...

    The game adjusts to whoever plays it and so will we. Given the preponderance of shifts I look forward to rooting for a Yankee who earns the moniker, "The Bronx Bunter" or the "Sultan of Shift".

    But without us, as Hoss pointed out... they've got nuthin'.

    Doug K.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Who gives a shit whether you "blast" sabremetrics? Since you've never even read a book on the subject, you have no idea what you're talking about, so give it a rest, ya' philistine, babbling geezer.

    ReplyDelete
  7. YEAH HOSS, BUT THE SCARY PART IS IF YOU HAVE AN OWNER AND GM WHO AGREE WITH THIS PHILOSOPHY .....

    IT'S TANK TIME!

    WHICH IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT IS GOING ON WITH BASEBALL NOWADAYS....

    NOT GOOD FOR BASEBALL.

    NOT GOOD.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anon, I would never like to see scabs do anything because they're scabs, taking the jobs of other working people who are only trying to get some leverage in an economic system that otherwise gives all power to the owners

    I'm also always amazed at how incredible ballplayers are, the things they can do.

    And Joe FOB, no, I don't blame young men at all for thinking about more carnal pursuits most of the time. I know I still do, and I'm three times the age of some of these guys.

    But I'm just saying that relatively few of them are motivated by some greater love of the game. They don't know or care about its past, and they don't share our agony.

    Why should they? They just come to play, and they do that very well indeed.

    But that doesn't make them the game. We are the game, the keepers of the flame. We'll always be that.

    ReplyDelete

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