This is the NFL season in which I have not watched a single game all the way through (and as a Giants fan, I think I saved myself some grief in avoiding the shutout they suffered against the Eagles last week). I made this moral stand because Roger Goodell is a poopy-head, but also because I have come to question the morality and ethics of a sport in which a man like Ray Rice can be seen beating his significant other and this somehow qualifies as only meriting a two-game suspension (yeah, I know he's on the "do not call" list now, but if not for the uproar he would still be looking at a chance to come back to his team ASAP). So as a longtime sports fan who must find *something* in which to invest his time, I turn to that old stand-by, minor-league hockey.
I kid...actually, my first love when it comes to sports was baseball. Like a lot of first loves, I moved on a while ago, on to other loves (basketball, football, golf...no, not that last one, that will never happen). But I remember baseball fondly, and I turn to it now because, goddam it, there is nothing wrong with it.
"Ahem," I hear you say, "how soon you forget the steroids era, Barry Bonds, and so on?" And you're right: I'm a huge hypocrite. But at least with baseball, I know nothing is left that could shock me, really.
When I got into baseball, it was at a time in my youth when I could still hold to the tenet of every young sports fan: these guys are heroes. Nowadays, of course, I know instinctually that this isn't the case (even though my heart wants it to be so, when I get invested in a team or a player). But disillusionment with the game of baseball didn't kill my love for it. Yes, Ty Cobb was a racist asshole, but most of his records have been broken now. Yes, baseball was ignorant in segregating itself from black players who had to make their own way in the Negro Leagues, but that's why Jackie Robinson is the most important baseball player ever (if not the most important athlete ever). Baseball is a reflection of America's sins as much as its saving graces, but one of the sports' saving graces is that it can contain such seeming contradictions as Cobb and Robinson within its collective history and not implode.
Baseball also lends itself well, perhaps too well, to poetry. Literature about baseball is hard to beat (the closest any sport comes to matching baseball for pure lyric beauty, in my opinion, is basketball; football, based on the books I've read, is third, though how far back or close depends on the author). Baseball is lyrical, as anyone who's read anything from a cheap Fifties-era bio of Willie Mays aimed at children or W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (the basis for Field of Dreams) could tell you (and that would be me, specifically). It lends itself much better to the written art, because it combines the drama of the individual with the drama of the collective team effort. Football is more martial, more military: when George Carlin died, Sports Center ran his monologue about football versus baseball and completely missed the point (Carlin was praising baseball, and damning football). Football is perfect if you're using metaphors about war; baseball is more peaceful, more pastoral. And as anyone who's studied pastoral poetry can tell you, the poets who wrote about the beauty of the country were poseurs, dandified city-dwellers who faked it.
Baseball has never been, nor ever will be, perfect; I saw Field of Dreams last night on TV and, while I appreciate James Earl Jones' soliloquey to it, I'm calling bullshit on the part about baseball representing what we could be again if we only just tried. It's more complicated than that, though of course it's deceptively simple. Baseball has seen its fair share of issues (there's that whole racial-discrimination thing I mentioned at the top, for starters, but also cheating, steroids, domestic abuse, drug abuse, booze and so on), but at its core it's a beautiful thing to behold. Yes, the pace is glacial at times, and yes, the element of human error can cost a game (I'm not sure how I feel about instant replay being used; I admit it's useful, but do we really want to eliminate human error from the game?). I have complicated feelings about it, but I've already been through the wringer with baseball; the Ray Rice thing is my trial by fire with the NFL, and so far they're losing me. I don't know that I'll ever really look at football with quite the same amount of affection: if Jameis Winston goes to any team that I care about, the odds are I'll be doing this self-imposed football ban for quite a while. But I know baseball is fucked-up, at least. I'm comfortable with the contradictions, for now (barring something on the same level happening with MLB). Baseball and basketball in particular translate well to the written and cinematic medium; that's why you'll never see a football Field of Dreams or even Major League. Football may be exciting, but I wonder if it's too much so. Baseball's just about my speed now. Too bad I came to this realization right as the World Series is about to be played, followed by months of off-season. But like baseball, I never said I was perfect.
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