10.) Spring Training
Baseball is only sport where the preseason is anticipated, where it is wanted. In basketball, the preseason is ignored, in football, it is mocked. In baseball? It is beloved, it is the sign that the winter may be behind us. When football ends, the sports world seems so dark, but to all baseball fans we know those four words are coming up soon: "Pitchers and Catchers report." During Spring, everything feels new, everything seems attainable. The beautiful baseball fields in Florida and Arizona come alive each year with the amazing sights and sounds of the game. Considering I don't actually watch spring training games, it is a completely inexplicable love for what it represents, but it is exactly that... a love.
9.) The Hot Stove
Over the years, football and basketball have tried to pimp out their offseasons, and to some degree they do a good job, but nothing is quite like the Hot Stove. Their the sport that began using the phrase before anyone else, basically deciding to phrase out a period of the sport where nothing is really happening. It may be more critical to the game's marketing than anything else, but the Hot Stove season s real, providing awesome fodder for Sports Talk, for speculation, for hope, and for silly amounts of money. Teams are smarter now than they used to be, locking up younger players to team-friendly long term contracts that delay their free agency well into their peak years, and lack of PED use has returned aging curves back to normal. Those two factors have slightly muted the Hot Stove, but it still remains the Gold Standard for offseason interest and imagery.
8.) The Award Debates
This goes hand in hand to my #4 pick, but no sports has pimped out their awards, and made them more of a lightning rod and discussion topic than baseball has, and I love it. Some of it, really, is the random segmenting of the two leagues, giving us two MVP and Cy Young awards to debate about. All sports try to parse the world 'valuable' out of the MVP, but no sport does a better job of that than baseball does. Was Mike Trout more 'valuable' on a non-playoff team than Miguel Cabrera? Can a pitcher be as 'valuable' as a regular, allowing Juan Gonzalez to idiotically win an MVP over Pedro Martinez. What stats are more important, what narratives, what personalities? The list of MVP awards and Cy Young really describes the history of baseball, the players that defined seasons and defined eras. With all its downtime, all the statistics and elements you can count and quantify, baseball is the perfect sport to embrace debate, and with the bevy of awards, no sports does a better job of awarding as many deserving players as possible.
7.) The New Media
Baseball's lasting memory of the past 10 years is probably the shifting of the way it is covered, from the poetic lyricism of Americana in the 60's-90's to the contained realism and statistical revolution of the 90's-00's, and the new media that has increasingly overtaken the normal baseball conversation has really made it more appealing to me. Sure, when I was 10 and didn't know better, I probably could have lapped up the beautiful prose spilled over 'clutch' players, but the same bounty of words spilled more carefully, more informativelly is so much better. My first foray into uncovering baseball writing was actually its most infamous critique, the legendary Sports Blog FireJoeMorgan.com, ran by three guys, one of whom just finished successfuly show-running Parks and Recreation. From there sprouted Baseball Prospectus, and Rob Neyer, and Jonah Keri, and David Schoenfield, and Keith Law, and the older guys who were able to change with the times, and adjust their considerable writing talent to a more modern perspective. The best examples of this are ESPN's Jayson Stark and Buster Olney, who have brought WAR right into their vernacular, and of course, Tom Verducci, who remains the best sportswriter I've ever read. The new baseball media has also spread to the podcast world. While I rue the loss of Baseball Today, a nerd's dream daily baseball show with Schoenfield, Law and Mark Simon, I still do get Effectively Wild, with Sam Miller and Dan Lindbergh, still really really good. Baseball is covered well, more honestly and grounded than most sports coverage, leading the way to use numbers, knowledge and narrative to write well about a subject so banal.
6.) The Irregular Fields
A football field is 120 x 53. A basketball court is 98 feet long in every NBA arena. While the diamond remains a diamond, baseball has crafted its unique place into its game literally, altering every singe field in MLB. No two stadiums share the same dimensions. No two stadiums share the same features. With all the cookie-cutters taken away from us, we are left with 30 beautiful cathedrals to this amazing game. The stadiums are all unique, from McCovey Cove, to the short porch, to the ivy in Wrigley, to the choo-choo train in Houston, to the sights of the Allegheny in Pittsburgh. But then so are the fields themselves, from Hills (Houston), to walls (Boston), to low-porches (San Diego), there are no two stadiums that are even 50% alike. Every ball-park is special, even the dumps in Oakland or Tampa Bay. And those are basically it. The average baseball stadium is a unique, open, retro-fitted, monument to this beautiful American pastime. I've only seen games in four different MLB stadiums, but one day I hope that the number goes way up. I would love to take two months off and travel the country and visit all 30. To watch a game under the canopy in Seattle, to eat Chili in Cincinnati, the grabbing a Bud in the beautiful Busch Stadium, to gazing upon the Rockies in Coors Field, to getting a day-time buzz at Wrigley, to playing in teh pool in Arizona, and to slding down the slide in Miller Park. You can do it all going coast to coast, as the game-day experience is truly unique in all 30 major league ballparks.
5.) Prospects
The NFL draft may be the king in terms of celebrating the future stars of a sport, but no game in America has so much power wrapped up in selling the potential of its game as baseball. The prospect system is both an industry all its own (minor league baseball, taking place in a ton of small towns across the US is a beautiful game), and an incredible boon to baseball. For the fans of the currently down-trodden, help is always on the way. Only in baseball (and hockey, I guess), will teams draft 17-18-19 year olds, who won't see the big team for 4-5 years, and fans will still care. Fans will remember who Baseball America has as its Top 10 prospects, what the next wave of players are, can envision all of them panning out and a lineup projecting out a good half decade. It doesn't always work, sure, but baseball inspires hope more than any other team. In the NFL, you have to wait to get that great QB, in baseball, the next great player is always potentially there.
4.) Statistics
This ties in with the new media, but baseball has hedged its bets on the fact that in their sport, you can count things. A lot of things. There are fewer variables, fewer team-impacted stats, fewer of the 'well, he gets to play on Team X' arguments, at least if you discount the stats that are impacted by those things. The statistical revolution in sports was spearheaded by baseball, as in baseball the seeds of statistics were sowed way back in the 70s-80s. Basketball is slowly making good inroads on advanced stats, and will continue to do so as SportVU becomes more mainstream, but it is so laughably behind baseball it is amazing. There are mainstream stats in baseball that require advanced mathematics to compute. There are more adjusted stats in baseball than any other sport, more context-independent stats, and more lovably, more statistically-driven debates in baseball than in any other game anywhere on earth. Baseball does have an intrinsic advantage when it comes to statistics, as it really is a game that is mostly about individual matchups: the pitcher vs. the hitter. Fielding plays some role, but even there more than 90% of fielding plays are incredibly routine. Statistics have fueled an incredible new industry in Sabermetrics, and have been the impetus for things like the Sloane Sports Conference, the 'Prospectus' industry, the 'pro-sports-reference.com' behemoth, and scores of economics, math and finance majors wading their way into Sports Management. The statistical revolution is here to stay in baseball. It is here to stay in all sports, something we can credit baseball, Bill James, Stats. Inc., and WAR to.
3.) October
I don't think any sport has a month more synonymous with it than October and baseball. The closest thing I can think of is January and football, but the Super Bowl is always in February now. The NBA and NHL playoffs take roughly three months long. Baseball has October, a perfect season for it to capture the beauty of its outdoor game. The cool nights descending on the simple diamonds in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Minnesota, Houston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Kansas City, San Francisco. Nothing is better. The intensity, the pressure, the drama that builds every second between every pitch. October baseball may at times take too long, or go too late, or feature some strange announcers, but it always brings the heat. The atmosphere in a stadium when there is two strikes and two outs, or when a big hitter goes long, or when the crowd builds to a haunting silence in tense anticipation. October baseball is the purest form of the sport, the purest for of American competition. 50,000 people gnawing their knuckles off at the entrails of just two people, the pitcher, the batter, the bat and the ball.
2.) The Long, Long, Long Season
Baseball has almost exactly 100% more games than the NBA or NHL, and almost exactly 1000% times the amount of games of the NFL. It goes on forever, and I love it. The season starts when it is between 35-50 degrees in most MLB cities. It ends when it is that temperature as well. It is the sport of summer, the sport that is always on every night for kids when they're out of school. It is the sport, though, that starts in Apri, with Opening Day the sports version of a National Holiday. And it ends in October, as I mentioned. If you count spring training, it goes from the dead of winter, through spring, summer, fall, and ends when the leaves are falling off again. You can check in and check out. You can miss a month, and still have 3-4 left. You can watch two months of baseball and still be early enough in a season that basically any team is alive. The season just goes on and on, but the dragging almost seems like an intrinsic value to the game, unlike the at times aimlessness of the basketball or hockey season. Baseball never leaves you, it never disappoints you. You can get disenchanted for a few weeks, but then your team wins a few games and you hop right back in. You can go through a period of playing no one, but then go through a few weeks of playing the main rivals. The season in baseball means more than any other sport in that people care about regular season results, the largest debates about who is better in baseball generally focus on regular season exploits, because there's so much more of those than postseason filler. Baseball is unlike no game in how important the regular season is and how much is placed on what happens, day after day, week after week.
1.) The Dramatic Pauses
The catcher throws back to the pitcher. The pitcher stays on the mound. The batter takes a step back, swings the bat a few times, tightens his batting gloves, dusts off his shoes and gets back into the box. The catcher waves some signs, the pitcher shakes him once or twice, all the while staring intently at the box. Finally, he gets the sign he wants. He cocks back his arm, waits another pause, and then begins the motion, fires a pitch at the batter. That entire sequence takes about 20 seconds. The batter then has about .3 seconds to hit the ball, but that is another story. That 20 second sequence is repeated about 280 times a game, and it is those pauses in between the action that are baseball's best moments. The moments where the possibilities are endless, where everything is possible. It can be nothing, sure, but it can also lead to an amazing defensive play, a frozen-rope single, a great catch in the outfield, or a massive home run. The drama of a late-game pitch is about as contained and perculated sports can be. We hang by each thread because baseball is built to draw us in just that way. Baseball has caused many a sports heart attack, caused millions of sets of nails to be bit and gnawed to shreds. Baseball trapped us all in a wave of that contained emotion, and trapped the true essence of this beautiful game in that 20 second period between each and every pitch.
Baseball is only sport where the preseason is anticipated, where it is wanted. In basketball, the preseason is ignored, in football, it is mocked. In baseball? It is beloved, it is the sign that the winter may be behind us. When football ends, the sports world seems so dark, but to all baseball fans we know those four words are coming up soon: "Pitchers and Catchers report." During Spring, everything feels new, everything seems attainable. The beautiful baseball fields in Florida and Arizona come alive each year with the amazing sights and sounds of the game. Considering I don't actually watch spring training games, it is a completely inexplicable love for what it represents, but it is exactly that... a love.
9.) The Hot Stove
Over the years, football and basketball have tried to pimp out their offseasons, and to some degree they do a good job, but nothing is quite like the Hot Stove. Their the sport that began using the phrase before anyone else, basically deciding to phrase out a period of the sport where nothing is really happening. It may be more critical to the game's marketing than anything else, but the Hot Stove season s real, providing awesome fodder for Sports Talk, for speculation, for hope, and for silly amounts of money. Teams are smarter now than they used to be, locking up younger players to team-friendly long term contracts that delay their free agency well into their peak years, and lack of PED use has returned aging curves back to normal. Those two factors have slightly muted the Hot Stove, but it still remains the Gold Standard for offseason interest and imagery.
8.) The Award Debates
This goes hand in hand to my #4 pick, but no sports has pimped out their awards, and made them more of a lightning rod and discussion topic than baseball has, and I love it. Some of it, really, is the random segmenting of the two leagues, giving us two MVP and Cy Young awards to debate about. All sports try to parse the world 'valuable' out of the MVP, but no sport does a better job of that than baseball does. Was Mike Trout more 'valuable' on a non-playoff team than Miguel Cabrera? Can a pitcher be as 'valuable' as a regular, allowing Juan Gonzalez to idiotically win an MVP over Pedro Martinez. What stats are more important, what narratives, what personalities? The list of MVP awards and Cy Young really describes the history of baseball, the players that defined seasons and defined eras. With all its downtime, all the statistics and elements you can count and quantify, baseball is the perfect sport to embrace debate, and with the bevy of awards, no sports does a better job of awarding as many deserving players as possible.
7.) The New Media
Baseball's lasting memory of the past 10 years is probably the shifting of the way it is covered, from the poetic lyricism of Americana in the 60's-90's to the contained realism and statistical revolution of the 90's-00's, and the new media that has increasingly overtaken the normal baseball conversation has really made it more appealing to me. Sure, when I was 10 and didn't know better, I probably could have lapped up the beautiful prose spilled over 'clutch' players, but the same bounty of words spilled more carefully, more informativelly is so much better. My first foray into uncovering baseball writing was actually its most infamous critique, the legendary Sports Blog FireJoeMorgan.com, ran by three guys, one of whom just finished successfuly show-running Parks and Recreation. From there sprouted Baseball Prospectus, and Rob Neyer, and Jonah Keri, and David Schoenfield, and Keith Law, and the older guys who were able to change with the times, and adjust their considerable writing talent to a more modern perspective. The best examples of this are ESPN's Jayson Stark and Buster Olney, who have brought WAR right into their vernacular, and of course, Tom Verducci, who remains the best sportswriter I've ever read. The new baseball media has also spread to the podcast world. While I rue the loss of Baseball Today, a nerd's dream daily baseball show with Schoenfield, Law and Mark Simon, I still do get Effectively Wild, with Sam Miller and Dan Lindbergh, still really really good. Baseball is covered well, more honestly and grounded than most sports coverage, leading the way to use numbers, knowledge and narrative to write well about a subject so banal.
6.) The Irregular Fields
A football field is 120 x 53. A basketball court is 98 feet long in every NBA arena. While the diamond remains a diamond, baseball has crafted its unique place into its game literally, altering every singe field in MLB. No two stadiums share the same dimensions. No two stadiums share the same features. With all the cookie-cutters taken away from us, we are left with 30 beautiful cathedrals to this amazing game. The stadiums are all unique, from McCovey Cove, to the short porch, to the ivy in Wrigley, to the choo-choo train in Houston, to the sights of the Allegheny in Pittsburgh. But then so are the fields themselves, from Hills (Houston), to walls (Boston), to low-porches (San Diego), there are no two stadiums that are even 50% alike. Every ball-park is special, even the dumps in Oakland or Tampa Bay. And those are basically it. The average baseball stadium is a unique, open, retro-fitted, monument to this beautiful American pastime. I've only seen games in four different MLB stadiums, but one day I hope that the number goes way up. I would love to take two months off and travel the country and visit all 30. To watch a game under the canopy in Seattle, to eat Chili in Cincinnati, the grabbing a Bud in the beautiful Busch Stadium, to gazing upon the Rockies in Coors Field, to getting a day-time buzz at Wrigley, to playing in teh pool in Arizona, and to slding down the slide in Miller Park. You can do it all going coast to coast, as the game-day experience is truly unique in all 30 major league ballparks.
5.) Prospects
The NFL draft may be the king in terms of celebrating the future stars of a sport, but no game in America has so much power wrapped up in selling the potential of its game as baseball. The prospect system is both an industry all its own (minor league baseball, taking place in a ton of small towns across the US is a beautiful game), and an incredible boon to baseball. For the fans of the currently down-trodden, help is always on the way. Only in baseball (and hockey, I guess), will teams draft 17-18-19 year olds, who won't see the big team for 4-5 years, and fans will still care. Fans will remember who Baseball America has as its Top 10 prospects, what the next wave of players are, can envision all of them panning out and a lineup projecting out a good half decade. It doesn't always work, sure, but baseball inspires hope more than any other team. In the NFL, you have to wait to get that great QB, in baseball, the next great player is always potentially there.
4.) Statistics
This ties in with the new media, but baseball has hedged its bets on the fact that in their sport, you can count things. A lot of things. There are fewer variables, fewer team-impacted stats, fewer of the 'well, he gets to play on Team X' arguments, at least if you discount the stats that are impacted by those things. The statistical revolution in sports was spearheaded by baseball, as in baseball the seeds of statistics were sowed way back in the 70s-80s. Basketball is slowly making good inroads on advanced stats, and will continue to do so as SportVU becomes more mainstream, but it is so laughably behind baseball it is amazing. There are mainstream stats in baseball that require advanced mathematics to compute. There are more adjusted stats in baseball than any other sport, more context-independent stats, and more lovably, more statistically-driven debates in baseball than in any other game anywhere on earth. Baseball does have an intrinsic advantage when it comes to statistics, as it really is a game that is mostly about individual matchups: the pitcher vs. the hitter. Fielding plays some role, but even there more than 90% of fielding plays are incredibly routine. Statistics have fueled an incredible new industry in Sabermetrics, and have been the impetus for things like the Sloane Sports Conference, the 'Prospectus' industry, the 'pro-sports-reference.com' behemoth, and scores of economics, math and finance majors wading their way into Sports Management. The statistical revolution is here to stay in baseball. It is here to stay in all sports, something we can credit baseball, Bill James, Stats. Inc., and WAR to.
3.) October
I don't think any sport has a month more synonymous with it than October and baseball. The closest thing I can think of is January and football, but the Super Bowl is always in February now. The NBA and NHL playoffs take roughly three months long. Baseball has October, a perfect season for it to capture the beauty of its outdoor game. The cool nights descending on the simple diamonds in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Minnesota, Houston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Kansas City, San Francisco. Nothing is better. The intensity, the pressure, the drama that builds every second between every pitch. October baseball may at times take too long, or go too late, or feature some strange announcers, but it always brings the heat. The atmosphere in a stadium when there is two strikes and two outs, or when a big hitter goes long, or when the crowd builds to a haunting silence in tense anticipation. October baseball is the purest form of the sport, the purest for of American competition. 50,000 people gnawing their knuckles off at the entrails of just two people, the pitcher, the batter, the bat and the ball.
2.) The Long, Long, Long Season
Baseball has almost exactly 100% more games than the NBA or NHL, and almost exactly 1000% times the amount of games of the NFL. It goes on forever, and I love it. The season starts when it is between 35-50 degrees in most MLB cities. It ends when it is that temperature as well. It is the sport of summer, the sport that is always on every night for kids when they're out of school. It is the sport, though, that starts in Apri, with Opening Day the sports version of a National Holiday. And it ends in October, as I mentioned. If you count spring training, it goes from the dead of winter, through spring, summer, fall, and ends when the leaves are falling off again. You can check in and check out. You can miss a month, and still have 3-4 left. You can watch two months of baseball and still be early enough in a season that basically any team is alive. The season just goes on and on, but the dragging almost seems like an intrinsic value to the game, unlike the at times aimlessness of the basketball or hockey season. Baseball never leaves you, it never disappoints you. You can get disenchanted for a few weeks, but then your team wins a few games and you hop right back in. You can go through a period of playing no one, but then go through a few weeks of playing the main rivals. The season in baseball means more than any other sport in that people care about regular season results, the largest debates about who is better in baseball generally focus on regular season exploits, because there's so much more of those than postseason filler. Baseball is unlike no game in how important the regular season is and how much is placed on what happens, day after day, week after week.
1.) The Dramatic Pauses
The catcher throws back to the pitcher. The pitcher stays on the mound. The batter takes a step back, swings the bat a few times, tightens his batting gloves, dusts off his shoes and gets back into the box. The catcher waves some signs, the pitcher shakes him once or twice, all the while staring intently at the box. Finally, he gets the sign he wants. He cocks back his arm, waits another pause, and then begins the motion, fires a pitch at the batter. That entire sequence takes about 20 seconds. The batter then has about .3 seconds to hit the ball, but that is another story. That 20 second sequence is repeated about 280 times a game, and it is those pauses in between the action that are baseball's best moments. The moments where the possibilities are endless, where everything is possible. It can be nothing, sure, but it can also lead to an amazing defensive play, a frozen-rope single, a great catch in the outfield, or a massive home run. The drama of a late-game pitch is about as contained and perculated sports can be. We hang by each thread because baseball is built to draw us in just that way. Baseball has caused many a sports heart attack, caused millions of sets of nails to be bit and gnawed to shreds. Baseball trapped us all in a wave of that contained emotion, and trapped the true essence of this beautiful game in that 20 second period between each and every pitch.
