On baseball

   I would like to take a moment to talk about baseball. (So I will, thank you for being here.)

Baseball, in my mind, is a sport that you follow. It is not like football (American or English) where you have to watch each game to understand how you team is doing. It's not like basketball where you can dissect a few play to show where your team is weak.  If basketball, football(s), and hockey are the sports version of reality TV,  Baseball is a soap opera.

   Part of this is the sheer volume of baseball that takes place every year and the consistency with which it occurs. The MLB season is 162 games to the NBA's 82  and the NFL's 16. Baseball games typically take around three hours of real time compared to the two hours taken by basketball and soccer games. Football games often take three hours but there is only sixty minutes of playing time in each game. Football and soccer are played mostly once a week while basketball and hockey are played every four or five days. Baseball teams play nearly every day for almost half the year. Because they play so consistently and so often, the more important baseball story lines tend to be of the course of several games rather than during the process of a single game.

   Baseball is also a slow game. It is the only north American sport I know of that is based on stations and not time. In baseball, everyone knows at any given time, what all the possible outcomes of a play are, and all the correct ways a team could plan for that play. Nearly everything has happened before and the game is a test of who can perform the correct task more consistently over 162 games and three best of seven series. But since no one can control what will happen when the ball hits the bat, it is like a chess match in which a three year old is allowed to move the pieces whenever they want. Individual baseball games are hard to predict and consistency over the course of the season becomes the most important measurement of a teams skill.

   Baseball is a sport that you follow. In the news paper the next day, in the box scores and the standings. Baseballs context is is made up of several games instead of a single game. This is why the last team stat in the Standings Column is each teams record over the last ten games. My Yankees successes or failures matter half as much without knowing whether they have recently  been better or worse than the Red Sox. April is the least important Month on the baseball calendar (despite being the opening of the regular season) because the context by which the year's will be judged has not yet been built. Whatever your feelings about sabermetrics vs the baseball narrative, there is no sport that  so aptly built to support the sports narrative the way that Baseball is.