BORED TO TEARS

The Reluctant Fan: Professional baseball's lachrymose and soporific spell: a review of May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy by Andrew Zimbalist (David Kipen, June 2003, Atlantic Monthly)

My wife drew a blank this morning when I asked her what Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, and Ted Williams had in common. Thinking cap firmly in place, she did hazard a guess: "They're all baseball players?" (She meant this as a joke, she says now.) "They all hit home runs? In the World Series?" This was getting us nowhere. It was time to turn over all the cards, as they used to say on What's My Line?, and spill. Unfortunately, I was spilling already-misting up, or starting to, as I sometimes do when the conversation turns to baseball.

Misting up is one of two physiological reactions the game tends to produce in me. The other, a symptom I regularly present in the later innings of most game broadcasts, is unconsciousness. At first, when on the couch with the remote, or in the study with the computer, or in bed with an ear over the pillow speaker, I'm in heaven. Too soon, though, heaven is forsaken for dreamland. Something about a postgame show always wakes me up, but sleep usually makes a comeback before I can hear what the final score was. It's like radio traffic reports: We wait forever to hear one, but when we do, our attention falters before the announcer can get around to the route we want. "Hey, did she mention the 101 yet?"

Tears and snores. One wouldn't think the same stimulus could produce two such divergent responses, but then, baseball has never been an oasis of strict causality. Sneak a bad pitch past a napping hitter and you're a hero. Snap off a wicked curveball and get beat on an excuse-me swing. Logical it's not. How to explain a game (to the uninitiated, or even to initiates) that has us choking up like a pesky bunter one minute, and nodding off the next?

The stock answers are that we weep from nostalgia, and we doze out of boredom. According to this line of thinking, we're tired of greedy owners, and of overpaid ballplayers who change teams so often that we're left rooting for little more than an empty uniform. We pine for the game of our childhoods, when salaries were lower, tickets cheaper, and all the grass-if not greener -was at least real.

Andrew Zimbalist is here to tell you that the stock answers are, like a batting-practice pitcher's aim, all too true-yet inadequate. A professor at Smith, Zimbalist argues persuasively that the biggest problem with baseball today is the monopoly power exercised by the owners running it.

The other leagues don't seem to be run any better and they have no anti-trust exemption. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 27, 2003 6:16 PM