Some Notes on Baseball

I work with a bunch of baseball fanatics. Yankees fans mostly, along with a few outcast Mets fans and one REALLY outcast Red Sox fan. The Yankees fans always revert to a sort of historical justifcation for why the Yanks are so great. They tell me about whats its like to walk into Yankee Stadium, about how you can feel the history on your skin, about the "hollowed" ground. I recently want to my first game there and I find it amusing that everything I had been told about the team and the stadium were also talking points in a promotional video played over the jumbotron before the game began. The spectacle bends its shadow back in time and becomes history.

My English friend Helen came to the game as well and was sure that she was entering the heart of American culture. She found this prospect to be amusing to no end so she was cheering like a maniac (she also doesn't understand how the game works, but insists she has played a baseball-like game called "rounders"). I didn't quite know how to explain that baseball isn't really the type of sport where yelling and screaming are very common, or how to explain that the game is in the details and not the action, what it means to throw a change-up when the batter is ahead in the count, why somehow would sit for three hours with a scorecard documeting every occurance of the game in numbers and dashes.

I found a New York Times Magazine in my bathroom last night and stumbed across an article about simulated baseball. Computer generated games (and whole seasons) with teams comprised of players dating all the way back to 1885. Every action in the games is dictated by a purely mathematical calculation based on statistical record. Baseball is, afterall, probably is the sport which can be most fully accounted for statistically. So maybe the religous aura and tradition surrounding baseball are just that: religious, the mystery the hides the the fact that there is none.