DESIGNED FOR DISTRACTION:

I associate my deep attachment with immigrating to the United States from Dublin in 1979 and landing in Pittsburgh on the eve of the Willie Stargell-led Pirates' glorious playoff run. As I practiced an American accent in the mirror, I quickly understood the currency I would acquire if I could rattle off RBI, ERA and batting average statistics with the speed of the boys who lived on our block. Play ball!

As I grew up and, in my 20s and 30s, spent thousands and thousands of hours listening to or watching baseball games, I developed a more multidimensional rationalization for my passion. I described all the life lessons that baseball teaches: the importance of resilience in a game where the best hitters on Earth sit back down dejected 60 percent of the time; the centrality of teamwork and solidarity over individual feats, as playing on a winning team requires moving a runner over, hitting a cut-off man and calling the right pitch for one's battery mate; and the necessity (I made this argument even before Bill James and Billy Beane helped revolutionize baseball's front offices) of mastering data and history to make sensible judgments. [...]

Jacoby fell in love with the game in her grandfather's bar in a blue-collar community just south of Chicago. As patrons tuned in to games -- on the first color TV in the neighborhood -- Jacoby sat on her bar stool and found herself entering "the previous seven decades of American history." She was hooked. When she lived in Moscow in 1969, she phoned the U.S. Embassy regularly to get the latest Mets score. To this day, her remedy for insomnia is watching the Mets' Game 6 comeback in the 1986 World Series against the Boston Red Sox. Because she, like all baseball fans, has experienced both heartbreak and triumph -- and because neither announces itself in advance -- she retains the sense, almost no matter what the score, that anything can happen, because at some point in history, it has. She believes that the slow pace of baseball provides a space for fans to feel involved in decision-making, something other sports do not allow. "Conversation, for every serious fan, is a part of the game itself," she writes, "and pauses are assets rather than liabilities."

Jacoby isn't thrilled with the efforts Major League Baseball has made to modernize itself. She points out that most of the adjustments designed to shorten the game have shaved off several minutes at most -- hardly enough to redeem those who want instant gratification and believe, to their core, that in baseball, most of the time, nothing happens. As she writes, "I do not think M.L.B. can institute any rule changes that would make real inroads into the shortened attention span of the young without fundamentally altering the game." She rightly worries that the league risks destroying the village to save it.

In the end, Jacoby fastens on the only real cure for the vulnerabilities she diagnoses. Baseball will not be saved by catering to the Age of Distraction -- by introducing more stingray tanks in the outfield (as the Tampa Bay Rays have done), serving the best sushi in concession stands (as Seattle and San Francisco do), or requiring fewer pitching changes or the equivalent of a pitcher's shot clock (as Major League Baseball is considering).

Instead baseball will retain its audience by doing what it is already doing -- tailoring more youth programming for demographics like girls and African Americans, who are less likely to watch as adults because they play the game far less as kids. But more than this, it will thrive by embracing its fundamentals, the very qualities that those in a hurry often shun: patience, concentration, and the alluring sense of possibility bounded not by a clock but simply by performance (and getting that last out). In other words, rather than contorting itself to accommodate our Age of Distraction, baseball should provide a sanctuary from a culture that needs to slow down. And it is baseball's timeless remove from the speeds and appetites of everything happening outside the stadium that will ensure its appeal.

"This," Jacoby writes, "is why baseball matters and why it matters even more today than it did in the past. The game stands up and out in the lowest-common-denominator American culture of distraction, disruption, and interruption."

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