Why Do I Stick With Baseball?

Our Columnist Opens His Heart About His Favorite Game

Ed Dykhuizen, Staff Writer

Well, I didn't get the huge response from last week's Baseball Hall of Fame column that I was hoping for, but that's OK. Maybe I'm just a little more obsessed with the Hall than most people. No really -- it's not you, it's me.

Or maybe other people are involved in sports that are actually playing games right now, like football or hockey. And I've even watched some of these sports, and enjoyed them, and discovered that if I tried, I could get as irrationally, emotionally involved in them as I am with baseball.

And yes, I have had those days of falling off the wagon (or is it "on the wagon"?) when I'm watching a baseball game and thinking, man, I wish they'd move faster. I get bored at ballgames too.

So why do I stick so fervently behind baseball? We all know it's a slow sport that simply can't compete in terms of showmanship with any other sport. Well, actually, it easily trumps cricket in terms of thrills per minute, but that's small consolation.

Baseball really should be put in a different category than the rest of the major team sports. As I've said before, every other major game occurs in a melee, with innumerable small actions occurring every minute. As opposed to the rest, baseball is inaction punctuated by a few sudden (and therefore, in my opinion, more dramatic) actions.

This is usually the point where the columnist waxes poetic about Elysian Fields and the sight of the green grass and the smell of the hot dogs and the touch, the feel, of cotton, the fabric of our lives. But I live in Minnesota, where the Astroturf is a sickly green color and the hot dogs consistently make me reach for my Tums (and if you want a healthy alternative, have a pretzel).

No, baseball is no longer about humble, simple fields and dignified hand-operated scoreboards, except in places like Boston, where they have trouble letting go. Baseball is about Jumbotrons showing a giant purple mascot taunting the rival manager as "Who Let the Dogs Out" blares through the loudspeakers.

And I like it. It provides a little bad-taste distraction, to placate that aforementioned short modern attention span. And for better or for worse, it is baseball. If they had the technology in the '50s to create blooper reels set to hilarious sound effects, they would have.

At any rate, baseball in Minnesota last year was a test of will, and, like any test of will, a rewarding one. See, all pleasures depend on relative measures. When the home team loses 93 games in a mausoleum, things like Matt Lawton hitting .305 and Mark Redman winning 12 games endear them to you as if they were Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. I've always felt more comfortable rooting for the losers anyway. They're the ones that need the support.

But still, the fact is that the home team didn't win, so there was a lot of dullness in the 2000 season for me. A lot of gallows humor. So I was in need of a reminder of why I've devoted so much of my life to this silly game.

And I was reminded during the playoffs. I like the Twins, but my team is the Cardinals. I watched each of the Cardinals' playoff games as if my life was on the line. I cheered and booed every ball and strike. My mind was racing madly, and there was plenty for it to race through.

And all those pauses, all that inaction that grew tiresome in the Metrodome became tension-heightening devices. See, anything pleasurable relies on a constant cycle of tension and release, tension and release. An event is foreshadowed, and then it occurs. This is the basis of everything from music to movies to sports.

In baseball this is used to a most ruthlessly dramatic extreme. Each action becomes fraught with dramatic weight because of the sudden violence with which they break through the intense, fingernail-biting, heavy contemplation of the unusually long moments of inaction. In other sports, with a tangled mess of action constantly occurring, individual actions can't have a comparable adrenaline shock to those occurring in baseball.

Of course, that's only true if you care about the outcome of the game to the necessary irrational, extreme extent. With other sports you can be indifferent and still enjoy the game -- enjoy the mess of action, the peacock-like showmanship of a dominating slam dunk or an end zone dance.

Sure, baseball affords a certain amount of wow-'em showmanship, in a Mark McGwire home run or a Roberto Alomar diving stop. But it just can't compare in quantity to the zoom-bangin'ness of other sports. Instead of a consistent, fuzzy stable of thrills, baseball is stark and mathematical, with quick thrills as common as tedium.

And I'm fine with that. After all, visceral entertainment has a high turnover rate. There was a time when "King Kong" was a mind-blowing spectacle -- now it's a respected, enjoyable, but slightly quaint historical artifact. The same will happen to "Jurassic Park." And, it may well happen to basketball.

Meanwhile, because baseball is less of a visceral sport, there is less to enjoy if your team doesn't win. Think of it this way: This makes the winning all the sweeter, because losing feels like a terrible waste of time. Thus baseball hews closest to the principal doctrine of all sports, which is that winning is everything.

While the flashy spectacles continue trumping each other, baseball, on a lower-flying radar, will keep on, relatively unchanged, because it reaches a little deeper, requiring more ardent attention and contemplation to be enjoyed.

It is the best alternative for those of us who need a sport to devote a part of our lives to. Other sports can fulfill this function, sure, but it's my belief that no other sport can do it like baseball can, and that, oddly enough, it can be traced to baseball's extreme amount of inaction.

Don't get me wrong -- I enjoy other sports, and I recognize that they can inspire the same fervor. But for my money, baseball's wild inaction-action juxtaposition rewards the impassioned fan like no other.

Any comments? Next week hopefully some baseball news will heat up.

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