To celebrate the first week of the Major League Baseball season, I’m going to step up to the staff-column plate and try to prove to a university full of football and basketball fans that baseball is actually the best sport of all time.
What are the first things that enter the mind when thinking about this great country of ours (I mean America, you communists)? There’s apple pie, which not-so-coincidentally is universally accepted as the best kind of pie. There are hot dogs, which are cheap, quick to cook and fattening — three of Americans’ favorite qualities in foods. And then there’s baseball, which has provided the United States with more of its national heroes over a longer period of time than football or basketball could have ever hoped to. Before the first Super Bowl even took place in 1967, MLB had already provided us with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle.
One could argue that hot dogs are only perceived as quintessentially American because they’re the food most associated with baseball. (Whereas apple pie is most associated with getting stolen while cooling on the windowsill, symbolizing another one of Americans’ favorite things — petty theft.)
The point is — baseball has such a rich tradition. The sport instituted a hall of fame before other sports were even a blip on the American consciousness.
It’s so saddening how, year after year, the climax of March Madness drowns out the holiday atmosphere of Opening Day. All throughout the month of March, baseball fans (also known as proud Americans) slowly anticipate more and more the beginning of April with its promise of the beginning of baseball.
In those quick glimpses whenever an unbeliever turns the television to college basketball, the true baseball fan sees the saddening contrast between the two sports. Perhaps the best illustration of the sheer banality of basketball is how every single game seems to wrap up the same way. One team gets a marginal lead. The other team starts fouling and calling timeouts. The last two minutes of every game becomes an agonizing 10 minutes of torture.
While football is the easiest sport to keep up with, with its one-game-a-week season in the fall, basketball is the sport most connected to Americans’ worst qualities. Millions of lazy Americans who never read because of the distractions of technology surely take refuge in the sport of basketball, with its ADD mindset of offense, offense, offense. Watching a basketball game can be as much of a mess as an amateur pick-up basketball game.
On the other hand, watching a baseball game can be poetry in motion, seeing the distinctive delivery of the pitcher, the defensive alignment guarding against a double play or the batter’s attempts at a sacrifice bunt to move the runner over. Baseball is the thinking man’s game. It’s all strategy, like a physical game of chess.
Those who have a hard time even making it through movies, constantly looking at the runtime and counting down the minutes, surely love sports with clocks. That way they can keep looking at the clock, waiting for the boring game to end. Of course clocks also lead sports into the fallibility of clock management by both coaches and officials, essentially taking the ball out of the players’ hands in deciding the games.
Meanwhile baseball lives by no clock. If it has to go six hours, instead of three, to proclaim a victor, it will. It will end when a team has actually defeated the other team. A winning team can take no solace in the ability to use the victory formation to run out the clock or dribble in the backcourt a little while longer than necessary. In baseball, you have to get the outs and finish the opponent to vanquish them.
Even baseball’s season requires more of the teams than in other sports. Professional baseball’s season is 162 games. At the end of the year, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the eight teams (yes, only eight, not 12 as in football or the superfluous 16 in basketball and hockey) deserved to play for a world championship. And for every team in baseball, that 162-game journey to a world championship began this week. The 2010 season should be a captivating, enjoyable ride, with a decisive and satisfactory conclusion.
For anyone who read this column thinking to themselves that hockey, soccer or auto racing deserved mentioning, you might as well no longer consider yourself Americans, for none of these qualify as legitimate sports. Neither does basketball come to think of it, but I just enjoyed telling everyone why basketball sucks.