Dear Readers,
It feels like baseball has been in crisis most of my adult life. It’s too slow. The World Series viewership is down. Kids are choosing to play basketball and football (and even soccer! gasp) instead.
So why has baseball fallen on hard times? The fast paced nature of the 21st century? Too many TikTok-addled attention-spans? Or has the increasing reliance on sabermetrics robbed the game of its beauty?
It’s probably combination of all of the above, although I think the pacing and attention-span argument get far more oxygen than the latter portion regarding sabermetrics’ effect on the sport.
While analytics are undoubtedly essential to building a successful baseball team in the 21st century, they’ve had the unintended side effect of severing the game today with its long history and traditions.
Suddenly, it doesn’t matter if you win 20 games, or bat .300 - statistics that held a sacred status in the sport for more than a century. And while these stats might not be the most indicative ways to measure a players worth nowadays, they are important to the story of baseball.
There’s something compelling about watching a starting pitcher go deep into a game, to see if he can go all the way, or the excitement that builds whenever a player gets even remotely close to Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak - the human element to the game that transcends the numbers.
Even today’s best and most popular players capture the public’s attention in ways that don’t show up on the stat sheet. Mookie Betts’ joy, Ronald Acuña Jr.’s flair, Shohei Ohtani’s otherworldliness - these are the intangible qualities that make these stars so magnetic, even as they also grade out as the league’s best in the advanced metrics.
This biweekly newsletter will focus on the heart and soul of baseball - the reason we still listen to that familiar voice on the radio broadcast in the digital age, or why we can’t help but return to Fenway Park each and every year, even after the owners have forsaken the team.
Sometimes this column will have a more serious tone, other times it’ll be more fun, but it’s always going to be about the aspects of the sport that matter to me, the ones that seem to be increasingly disregarded - like which players jump off the screen and why; what’s up with these terrible new Nike uniforms; the Shohei Ohtani gambling saga, etc - and their place within the greater context of baseball history.
Something tells me I’m not alone, and if you’re reading this and nodding your head - now you know that you’re not alone either! Let’s keep it going, so if there is anyone in your life that loves baseball, history, or even just having a hotdog and a beer at a ballgame, regardless of who is playing - please send it their way! I’d appreciate it, and hopefully they’ll appreciate it too.
Yours Truly,
Jamie McClellan