(This is the third in a series of articles. The first can be read
here, and the second is
here.)
When I was a kid my mother would give us a dollar for doing a chore around the house, and my brother and I would walk down to the convenience store on the corner to buy baseball cards. This was in the late 1980’s, when a pack of baseball cards cost .50 cents.
The convenience store was on 3A in Weymouth, a triangle-shaped building that faced streets that crossed at an angle, with an old church on the far corner. 3A is a busy four-lane road that loops around a portion of Boston Harbor and then crossed a bridge into Quincy, but our access to the store was down a quieter residential street. The shop sold Topps cards there, but we were able to get our hands on Donruss packs at the Hanover Mall. I liked those more than the Topps set because the Diamond Kings were beautiful, and they had extra MVP cards for every team.
That was a small exposure…small exposure one.
We watched games on TV-38. I remember the futuristic lasering of the baseball diamond, which would give way to a picture of Fenway Park, and then some slow-motion images of Boggs and Dewey swinging and Roger striking someone out, all to a jazzy tune that I can still hear in my head. The games started at 7:10 and usually wrapped up by 9:30 at night, and while I didn’t often get to watch more than an hour, I could usually catch a few innings after dinner.
I don’t know the details of how we had TV-38, whether it was provided by cable or if you could watch the games through an antenna. We had cable, and it was in the standard package. I don’t know how much it cost, but I doubt it was a significant burden. We were not rich, or anything close to it.
Exposure two.
Exposure three is radio. They still have radio: my kid is seven and he loves listening to the radio. For a brief period, before the world went crazy, he’d often walk to the bus stop muttering some line from a Mike Bloomberg ad, because he had heard it playing before leaving the house. It remains the most astonishing part of this presidential year that a campaign so much on the cutting edge of technology could sputter into nothing. Poor Mike.
My kid listens to the radio, and I used to listen to the radio. I like listening to baseball on the radio more than watching it on television. I still do it, though the trait makes me a damned dinosaur. The MLB package gives you radio feeds for all of the major league teams, and I love hearing the regional ads that come on. If you need an auto mechanic in Queens, I know a guy.
Newspapers…those were a thing. Sometimes we had a subscription to the Boston Globe and sometimes we’d have to wait until we visited my grandparents to get a hold of theirs. The Sunday edition had…and has, I believe…a terrific spread of articles, which we’d bring home with us and leave out until the pages got tossed away. Batting leaders and stats for all of the teams and write-ups…they’d come every Sunday.
That’s four…four exposures. What else?
Magazines. Sports Illustrated, of course, and The Sporting News. We had a subscription for Beckett Baseball Card Monthly that we’d fight over every time a new issue came along.
The USA TODAY had a weekly newsprint publication that was $1.00, and it was dedicated entirely to baseball. I can’t remember the name of it, but I’d buy it almost every week. A dollar…a lonely dollar…for fifty pages of baseball content: a few articles and pages of stats to chew over.
And…six…baseball card shops. We moved to the Cape when I was eleven and there was a baseball card shop we’d ride our bikes to. It was a space where we could hang out and pester the owners and talk about baseball.
I met Mark Fidrych because of that shop: I went in one day, and the owner said he was drinking at the motel bar across the street. I remember my uncertainty at entering the place, which was exactly what you’d imagine a motel bar on the Cape to look like at 3:00 o’clock on a school day. But the Bird was kind, and no one was checking ID’s. He gave me a signed picture and scrawled his name an old Topps card I had raced home to dig out.
That’s six exposures…six access points that meant that baseball was just around when I was a kid.
And the seventh was games. We played baseball. We’d go out of our house and play games, or make them up to fit the contours of our yards. That wasn’t an uncommon thing, to play catch or have a game in the street or a backyard. If you were out playing, someone might come along and join in. I didn’t play that much, but there were some games.
So there were sometimes games and there were always loose baseball cards to sift through or a radio to turn on or some print material to read. At night there was the local game to watch. This Week in Baseball was on Sunday, right after Meet the Press or The McLaughlin Group. I didn’t give a damn about those old guys yammering about Reagan or Bush…give me Mel Allen’s voice and Ozzie Smith doing backflips and I was in heaven.
How many of those things still happen?
My kids never see baseball card packs at the store, and anyway they’re too expensive now. My son has an allowance of five dollars when I remember to pay him: he hasn’t shown much of an interest in spending that on cards. If he could get two packs for a dollar, I think he’d go for it, but I’m not giving him twenty bucks a week to adjust for that particular inflation.
Television broadcasts are more expensive than they used to be. I only do the MLB package, which is $150 a year, but that blocks out the local teams (I live in Virginia, so I can still catch most Red Sox games). I have no idea what the cost of a cable ‘bundle’ is for a team, but I imagine it is a lot.
We have radios, but I think that is probably anachronistic: I don’t know anyone else that still uses a radio much, unless they’re in a car. Most kids aren’t going to sleep listening to the game over at the ballpark. Newspapers? If I ever moved back to Boston, the first thing I’d do is get a subscription to the Globe, but it’s a rare gem in the business…most newspapers are suffering. Magazines? Same.
There are very few baseball card shops and card shows, and there are very few kids able to ride their bikes to a card shop if one existed, anyway. Kids don’t go out and play anymore, not in the same way we did. There’s Little League, but sports are a formal thing now.
I don’t mention this to bemoan the present and glorify the past: that’s not my point. The world has changed, and probably those changes are for the better. There are new exposures to baseball that didn’t exist when I was a kid. Fantasy baseball didn’t exist: now it’s everywhere. That’s great: fantasy sports allows a new way of connection to players and other fans. There are no more newspapers, but they’ve been replaced by hundreds of good websites with articles that tackle sports from all possible angles, and many of them allow you to participate in a community of fans who share your interest. There are good parts to being a fan these days.
But the fact holds: when I was a kid, I was saturated in baseball. Baseball was something that was around me, something that was always audible, always within hand’s reach.
It is not like that anymore. Baseball increasingly needs to be sought.
* * *
Jumping around slightly: I don’t think I watched a single major league game last year. I don’t think I sat down and did nothing else except watch a baseball game, at least until the playoffs.
I have children, and it is easy to blame them for everything. I have to read them stories and let them watch cartoons and feed and bathe them when a concerned stranger complains that they are more grass stain than skin. I don’t have the freedom to sit in front of the television for four hours.
And I don’t have the inclination.
Perhaps that sets me in the minority among the diehards who care enough to populate this site, but it puts me in the majority of the American population. Very few of us have the luxury to dedicate the three-to-four hours it takes for a game to unfold, and there are more distractions beckoning our attention than every before.
And the game itself is getting less interesting. Strikeouts are up, stolen bases are down, and…here comes the manager to make another pitching change.
Do you know what the average number of pitchers in a game was last year? Per team, I mean. Go ahead and guess.
It was 4.41, a new record. That is an average of nine separate pitchers playing in a game, which means that a night at the old park will feature seven pitching changes. Riveting stuff.
Baseball-Reference has a metric of the average time of a 9-inning game. It states that the average length was 3:05 in 2019. The database says that that the average time of a game in 1988 was 2:45…a twenty-minute change in the length of a game.
That may seem slight, but it’s a gradual change that has significant ramifications. Length is another kind of an exposure…or a barrier to exposure. It keeps people out.
I was working in a high school when the Astros played that marathon Game 5 against the Dodgers in the 2017 World Series. It was a terrific game, and I stayed up to watch the whole damned thing. The next morning, I wandered blearily through the school hallways hoping to sight some die-hard who looked as disheveled as I felt. I didn’t see anyone: none of the kids cared.
That is apocryphal: some kids must care. But the number is declining.
* * *
We are getting closer to a thesis. Two more articles, I think, will get us there.
On the subject of exposures: I visit my family at some point every summer, and inevitably I have to think about whether or not I want to bother dragging my children to Fenway Park. The oldest has been to a game: when he was small enough to not need a ticket, he got a chance to see David Ortiz hit a homer, a moment that panicked him when the crowd stood up in unison. The youngest hasn’t gone yet, and while I will someday take them both, I am waiting for a moment when they will have more than a passing interest.
It is expensive, and it is a hassle. I am a loyalist: if I’m going to a game, I want to ride the ‘T’ in and walk from Kenmore: I remember my first game and the many games since, and I want to give my children the same memories: that sense of a crowd moving towards something.
At the same time, my kids are still young…bedtime is 8:30. When we visit our family, the schedule is crowded enough without adding a baseball game into the equation.
Instead I take them to minor league games. In addition to Pulaski, we have the Salem Red Sox close by, and a bunch of other teams scattered about. My summer plan, before summer was cancelled, was to check out all of the other Appalachian League parks, and write reviews of them.
It costs next-to-nothing. I can ply my kids with ice cream and popcorn and then leave after six innings. I don’t think I’ve gone to Salem without at least one of my kids getting a ball from a coach (I splurge for the seats on the third-base line), and there is no great drama getting to the car.
I don’t know how much it sticks, though.
I remember the first time I went to Fenway, how much I was aware of a sense of building, and then that climactic moment, after the crowded Green Line train and the walk through the clamor of Kenmore on a game night, of climbing out of the tunnel and first seeing the lights and the grass. It is a moment that has lost none of its power to astonish me. It hooked me, the sense of moving towards the privilege of bearing witness to something great. The foundation to that moment was laid in all of the little avenues and exposures to the game that were surrounding me. And then it was real.
David Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments and questions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.