Couple months back, Rob Neyer wrote here on the question of sportswriters writing on politics, almost simultaneously with my proposal to change radically the centuries-old paradigm of an at-bat ending with a 4th ball or a 3rd strike. What the two pieces had in common, to my mind, is that there is a place that writing about baseball and writing about politics intersects and overlaps perfectly.
That place is "philosophy."
Neyer called the place where sportswriting intersects with political writing "principles." Sometimes in writing about sports, I find I’m more interested in the principles involved, the philosophy, than I am in the nuts and bolts of my ostensible subject. In that piece on balls and strikes, several readers’ comments addressed the issue of practicality, which was kind of beside my point. I understand that there is very little chance of actually revisiting the issue of the balance of balls and strikes, so everyone who commented on how impractical my whole idea was (in summary, having the first 9 balls in an inning not count at all, and every subsequent ball in that inning resulting in a walk) was taking the conversation away from philosophy and principles.
My friend steve161 dismissed my What-if? handily by insisting that the 3-2 count is not only time-honored but virtually sacrosanct. In every practical sense, I agree—we ain’t changing this stuff without ripping a gigantic hole in the fabric of the game. But in a theoretical sense, that rip doesn’t bother me at all. A lot of stuff got codified without a lot of planning or thinking, and we live with the consequences. (MLB historian John Thorn just published a fascinating piece tracing the origins of the distance from the mound to the plate as deriving from dueling, of all things.) My interest here, as elsewhere, is more fundamental: what are balls and strikes for?
Balls are there to force the pitcher to throw the ball where it can be hit, and strikes are there to force batters to swing at hittable pitches. Without them, we’d be there all day long and all night, too. (Which is why cricket matches go on for days.) That it’s three balls and two strikes, though, is a perfectly arbitrary accident: we kept switching the count around in the early days and at some early point (I’m thinking early 1890s?) 3&2 stuck. But would we have such a different game if another ball-count had stuck?
We’ll never know, of course, because it hadn’t, but I suspect not. I think that count worked out originally not because of any inherent beauty or brilliance or fairness of 3&2, but because a game based on a 3&2 count worked out to an ideal game-length. A single-pitch at-bat would have resulted in a game that lasted about half an hour, obviously too short for a sporting event. You miss the first few minutes, or repair to the beer-stand or bathroom, and you’ve missed half the game—totally unacceptable. But if you had a 5&3 ball-count, say, that might have resulted in a typical game going three or four hours, which might have been unacceptably long.
Now we DO have three- or four-hour-long games, of course, but maybe our culture has changed so that an unacceptably long game-time has become acceptable. There are numerous proposals to cut down on the length of game-times that don’t change something so basic to the game we know as switching to a 2-1 count, or to my somewhat loopy proposal to change the basic structure of the way balls and strikes are used, and I prefer the fine-tuning of these proposals to ripping the game up and starting over.
But it’s good to think about what would happen if we did start over from scratch. There are plenty of details in the current game that have outlived their usefulness, if ever usefulness they had. Bill has remarked on getting rid of the balk rule, and we’ve discussed in Readers Posts eliminating other aspects of the game, or changing them completely: the infield-fly rule, for example. And we have had tinkerings in the rule book, most recently involving contact between baserunners and fielders, which trouble some purists. I’ve heard Keith Hernandez, pretty much every time the new rule about runners sliding into second base comes up, going on a rant about how much he detests the rule. The position such purists are taking is essentially a philosophical (some would say political) position: "I resist change in the status quo."
Whatever the status quo is. The balk rule, the Second Amendment, whatever, if you propose changing it, some folks are going to range from "skeptical" to flat-out "opposed" without ever considering the merits of the change. They don’t even require an actual argument against the balk rule or the Second Amendment—they’re just opposed to changing it on the principle of "It’s worked for a long time now, so let’s just find a way to live with what’s been working."
I used to be a purist, believe or no, but as I’ve learned more about baseball history, and history in general, I’ve come to realize that the things I feel this unthinking loyalty towards haven’t actually been around forever, they haven’t necessarily been thought-through very thoroughly, and sometimes they don’t even work. Most people my age and younger have been following baseball since the first truly radical changes to the game have taken place. When I’m in my "cranky old man" mode, I’ve even trotted out nostalgia for the old structure of the same sixteen teams playing the same game in the same towns for fifty consecutive years, but in fact I was born a few weeks after the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee, breaking that fifty-year streak of stability. My whole life, I’ve seen radical changes in the game of baseball.
It has integrated, expanded, divisioned, DHed, monetized, steroided, and more. Most significantly, it has improved in a sense that would be true if none of these other changes had occurred: we now recognize that we really can’t compare the game that Ty Cobb played 100 years ago to the current game, not without acknowledging that we’re comparing pears to tangerines. (One of the many bits that astonished me in my reading of the Historical Abstract was what a gigantic figure, literally, Cobb was in his time: 6’1" and 175 used to be a very big guy. Now he’d be a little skinny marink.) Just the inevitable fact that players are constantly getting bigger, stronger, faster means that we must make comparisons carefully, in context, weighing dozens of relevant factors (and sometimes deciding that not all of them are really relevant, but we must consider them before we can reject them.) That inevitable fact is only going to continue, if not accelerate.
So it’s an artifice that change destroys the culture—change is the culture, but some people enjoy the illusion that change can be resisted, or even stopped. The first baseball game I ever attended in person took place at a curious juncture: Roger Maris had been stuck on 60 HRs for a game or so, and in a magisterial bit of eloquence (for an 8-year-old) I managed to talk my dad into taking me up to Yankee Stadium to witness the event that, according to sportswriters, would revolutionize the game. Up to that point, every season the purists could remember had gone 154 games, but the AL had switched to a 162-game schedule and we were now beyond the 154-game mark, thus tainting any achievement Roger Maris might achieve that day. As it turned out, it wasn’t until the next day that Maris whacked his 61st, but you’d better believe everyone in the park that day was watching Maris’s every wiggle as closely as we could. (He went 1-for-3, with a single off Don Schwall.) Years afterwards I read up on the controversy of Maris having the nerve to bat in a game past #154, and the whole asterisk thing, and the whole ripping-of-the-fabric-of-the-universe thing, and it seems so silly to us now, doesn’t it? We’ve adjusted perfectly to the concept that, in some ways, Maris clearly set a new record for HRs, and in some other ways, Babe Ruth, and Hank Aaron, and Mark McQwire, and Barry Bonds, and about eight other people still have a legitimate claim to the title of "World’s Greatest HR Hitter." It all depends on context, how you look at it, how you phrase your question, and we’re fine with that.
It’s kind of fun to be without right answers sometimes, isn’t it? Sometimes, I feel nostalgic about the ways things used to be, in a simpler world without these modern complications. But the complications always existed: we just didn’t like to acknowledge them. Which is why I’ve gotten more comfortable thinking of myself as a non-purist, as an open-minded relativist, without access to final answers.
Baseball allows us to think about these philosophical issues in a context where it doesn’t affect our daily lives very much, and that allows us to decide if we really are traditionalists, purists, sticks-in-the-mud because that pleases us in every regard, where it really does affect our daily lives (and where philosophy affects our politics), or if we’re only purists about baseball, or if we’re ultimately not purists at all, open to the principle of change being a good thing.
I’ll leave you with two final questions: Was this a column about baseball, or a column about philosophy? And is the distinction between the two important?