Luis has been going to quite a few Yankee games in the past month or so. He recently attended a Yankee loss, which is unusual, but declared the game worthwhile, which is even more unusual, given how much Luis likes to win. When I asked him why the game was fun despite the loss, he told me that it had that tension, the coiled-spring, edge-of-your-seat, ain't-over-til-it's-over, [insert tired sports metaphor here] feel that makes for a great baseball game. The aesthetic experience he had overwhelmed the natural urge to give a shit about which team emerged victorious, which points to another cliche about winning and losing not being the point so much as the process that achieves that outcome.
Accusations that baseball is boring have abounded for decades. John Updike's famous elegy for Ted Williams describes baseball as "a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance - since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical - always threatens its interest," which translates roughly to "the only way to give a shit about this is to have always given a shit about it." However, it is my feeling that baseball only began to get really boring in the last dozen years or so. Not at all coincidentally, this corresponds with increased use of statistical analysis in building and rating baseball teams.
Brief but necessary aside on baseball statistics: Since its inception, baseball has been obsessed with statistical achievement. One of the reasons that Ted Williams was worth John Updike's time was that we was the last player in Major League Baseball history to hit .400. Casual baseball fans know the basics: batting average (hits/at bats) and home runs (hits that leave the park) for hitters; strikeouts (the number of batters a pitcher has gotten out with no help from the defense) and earned run average (runs allowed/innings pitched) for pitchers - but in the last ten to fifteen years, a number of other statistics have come to dominate how the game is played and thought about. Chief among these are on-base percentage (hits+walks/plate appearances) for hitters and WHIP (walks+hits allowed/innings pitched) for pitchers. The reason these statistics ascended is simple - they work. If you put together a group of hitters who walk a lot, they are, by definition, not making many outs. If you make fewer outs, you have more opportunities to score. More opportunity = more success. If you also have a group of pitchers who do not walk a lot of hitters or allow many hits, then by definition they are denying opportunity to the opposing team. Logically, therefore, your team will win. To see the truth of this, watch the New York Yankees. They win a lot because they get a lot of men on base and then someone hits a home run. They win close games, occasionally, but more often a Yankee victory is domination. They put their boot on the other team's throat. It can be more than a little dull.
Growing up, baseball was full of what are now called "slap hitters," guys who stuck their bat out, made contact with the ball, ran like Hell and trusted to luck. Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, Rickey Henderson, Ozzie Smith, Kirby Puckett, etc. Ichiro Suzuki and Derek Jeter are the last of the great slap hitters, and it is very likely that we will never see their kind again. Why? Because trusting in luck does not win baseball games half as effectively as logic and reason. It is, however, fun. The tension that Luis values in his baseball comes from things like grounders in the hole that match the defense of the shortstop with the speed of the batter, hit-and-run plays, a short fly ball with a fast runner tagging at third.
An horrifying truth has become apparent to anyone who follows baseball: In order to win, a team must be boring. The game is constructed in such a way that the most effective strategy for success is to be as powerful and patient as possible. Oops.
Baseball is our national pastime, though, and judging by the crowds in attendance in Milwaukee, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Texas, it remains beloved even in its ponderousness.
Much less loved, but equally predictable, lumbering and dull is the game of politics. Just as the flaws in baseball have been badly exposed, even to people like me who will always love it, the American system of government has been damaged, perhaps irreparably, by the successful exploitation of long-present fissures. For example, because the United States was conceived as a federation of quasi-independent political entities, care was taken to ensure that each of those entities was represented equally in the federation, via the Senate. A Senator represents the state from which she hails, not the people. The people are represented by their member in the House of Representatives. You may recall that the United States settled the question of whether the individual states could actually be thought of as separate from the country during the period 1861-1865, and therefore wonder why it is that the 897,934 people of Delaware still have the same power in the Senate as the 25,145,561 people of Texas. The political theory behind this imbalance of power rests on the argument that tyranny by the majority of the people can be just as ugly as tyranny by a despot. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s provide an excellent example of majority tyranny. However, the American system exhibits unusual paranoia about majority tyranny and has thrown up unusual roadblocks against it. In addition to the 900,000=25,000,000 math that is the Senate's hallmark, there is the fact that the Senate requires a supermajority in order to pass legislation. It is true that the filibuster was never used to prevent the passage of any bill before this Congress, but that only proves the resourcefulness of Mitch McConnell. Also, votes in the Electoral College are apportioned en masse to whichever candidate earns the greatest number of votes in each state. So if, say, 13.1 million people in Texas vote for Candidate X and 12 million vote for Candidate Y, our system discounts those 12 million citizens. This leads to awkward situations like George W. Bush being elected President in 2000 despite the fact that more people voted for Al Gore and the constant attention paid to voters in states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Just as with baseball, our system coasts on its connection to the past, its status as the world's oldest republic. Conservatives invoke the wisdom of the founders and liberals tout the experimental successes in various states throughout the country's history. But, like baseball, a reckoning is inevitable for our Constitution and our government. We ignore the gut-level feeling that the quality of what we love is diminished by deep flaws at our peril.
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