Hard Ball for Hard Times

A look at baseball’s toughest era…

Will the game ever be that good again?

By Neil Caudle

Summer 2002 Perspectives (Ohio University)

 

Now that we’re comfy, and our national pastime is Shopping, baseball is simply too hard. It is too hard for our kids, who, if they dared to be players—players, that is, by the standards of 1930s America or today’s Dominican Republic—would unplug the earphones and turn off the tube. Would hustle on down to the sandlot or pasture or schoolyard and play for the pleasure of playing the game. Play the skin off their knees and the covers off their baseballs. Play until every last inkling of twilight had sunk from the sky.

 

And we, their parents, would have to find something useful to do, such as planting a flowerbed or visiting the elderly. Because we wouldn’t be driving our kids and their spanking new gear to the ballpark a few nights a week, a few weeks a year, watching the mess little darlings will make of this wickedly difficult game, appalled at their strikeouts and errors and rubber-kneed fears of the ball. The failures in baseball are painfully, unfashionably conspicuous. So this game is too hard for the parents.

 

And for goodness sake, the game is hard to watch. Too much dead air. Too much time for reflection, the perilous prospect of thought. We can try stuffing the gaps full of nachos and sodas and trips to the souvenir stand, but ne’er appease the restless beast of Time. Maybe that’s fine for the grizzled old coot down the aisle, who is patiently tending a scorecard and tracking the fielding adjustments, guessing along with the hitter on slider or fastball or curve. But who wants to learn all that technical stuff? It is too hard, like chemistry or math. So forget it. Who needs it?

 

We do. We need it. Baseball isn’t the Web or the spa or the mall. Baseball is Main Street. Baseball is so American that the French refuse to play it. Baseball is ours.

 

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