Answer Him This: Why Baseball?

The question came too quickly, and without the warning I’d have liked.

“Why do people find baseball so interesting?”

But there I was, with my back both literally and figuratively against the wall, fielding the inquiry like Dr. Strangeglove once fielded grounders: clumsily, awkwardly, without the panache that makes baseball’s elegance self-evident.

After the party, my wife would say that it must have been hot in that house, that the hosts must have set the heater too high, because sweat had formed above my upper lip. To the contrary, I would tell her. That was flop sweat, my dear.

That was the kind of sweat — telltale, embarrassing, impossible to pass off as the honorable byproduct of an honest day’s work — typically visited upon the career criminal whose pores respond poorly to the strain of interrogation. We’d been at the party for half an hour, mixing with friends and meeting strangers, when one such stranger asked the inevitable: What do you do?

Upon hearing I write about baseball, he scrunched his nose and wrinkled his forehead. Suddenly, with the candor and credibility of a sworn affidavit, his face took on a look that suggested I write about ringworm and had said so.

Later, in the pressureless confines of my own home, I tried to recall my feeble, fumbling response. I had said something about “continuity,” had I not? — the quality, less intrinsic to other sports, that ties baseball’s past to its present by way of statistics that remain relatively stable across the seasons.

I mean, in 1932, a guy named Arnie Herber posted 639 passing yards to lead the NFL in that category. In 2018, Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger put up 5,129. Those figures, as anyone can see, are as comparable as ringworm and raspberry cheesecake. Conversely, in 1932, Jimmie Foxx led the big leagues with 58 homers, and in 2018, Khris Davis paced the majors with 48.

That’s a difference of 17 percent, which, by any reckoning, compares favorably to the 702 percent difference that defines the gap between Herber and Roethlisberger. Owing to rules changes and strategic innovation, those QBs were playing vastly different sports, so stylistically dissimilar that Big Ben tallied 72 percent of Herber’s season total in just one game.

Foxx and Davis, though, are different — different in that they’ve played the same sport, or nearly so, despite its nuanced evolution and regardless of the fresh metrics we use to retroactively quantify their performance. Indeed, to the casual fan — and ignoring for a moment the radical defensive shifts Joey Gallo sees — their brands of baseball have remained virtually indistinguishable.

Okay, fine, but did that answer actually address the question in full? Does it? That same question, it must be said, was made all the more challenging in that it came with an accent. The inquisitor hailed from a country wherein baseball, aside from the dramedy of Million Dollar Arm, isn’t much played.

And so, given the circumstances, I was now an ambassador, one who, despite his lack of prepared talking points, had been tasked with speaking on behalf of that most American of pastimes — namely, the American Pastime — while extolling its hidden virtues and defending its honor among crudités.

Mind you, the challenge differed greatly from those ineluctable barstool debates wherein the average American is forced to assert to a collection of Europeans that football isn’t inferior to futbol, it’s just different. This, instead, was less a defense against condescension than a chance to advocate on behalf of a usually beautiful, sometimes mysterious, often impenetrably subtle game.

“Continuity” notwithstanding, however, I had blown it. Fumbling, mumbling, and sweating tiny bullets in lieu of an eloquent response, I had found myself rescued from further embarrassment by a summons to cut the birthday cake.

So there it was, the question, hanging in shared air. And there it remains.

Why do people find baseball so interesting?

***

What I must now make plain is that my inquisitor did not Kramerize the question in question. That is to say, he did not raise the distinction between this inquiry — “Why do people find baseball so interesting?” — and this one — “Why do people find baseball so interesting?” Indeed, unlike the passage with which Seinfeld’s Kramer so famously struggled — “These pretzels are making me thirsty!” — mine came without inflection. It came straight, a four-seamer.

As counterintuitive as it might seem, however, this condition made it harder, not easier, to answer the question posed. First, I had to justify baseball’s place in the cosmos, and second, to expound upon the interest it bears.

Have I mentioned I went down swinging? …no, looking.

Now, at a safe remove from epic failure, I try once more to answer. I try to explain in finite space what writers and commentators have attempted to articulate, without definitive success, for more than a century … to put into words the otherwise ineffable enchantments of this old game.

Let us begin with the game itself while acknowledging that at the core of this inquiry is the curious notion of watching baseball, following baseball, not playing it. In short, the dude wasn’t wondering why some other dude plays shortstop. He was wondering why some other dude would exhaust three hours of free time by voluntarily paying witness to that shortstop. He was wondering, in other words, why anyone would spend 15 minutes reading a piece that tries to answer why baseball is interesting enough to read about.

For some of us, though certainly not all, the interest does begin at shortstop. Or in center field. Or on the mound. It begins with the physical feeling, the tactile sensation, of gripping that smooth white sphere and letting loose just as those raised red threads go sliding across the fingerprints as if to submit to forensic evidence: This was my throw. It still is my throw. I own it.

It continues in the batter’s box, where, unbeknownst to the first-time batter, that initial encounter with contact — solid contact, producing a drive the skin remembers — will survive the days and years to become a longtime tenant of the body and mind, there to find revival on the strength of some other dude’s home run. The chair in front of the flat-screen, or Seat 5A of the ballpark, is the most immediate time machine: a place where you feel it again.

Okay, that’s one answer, but aside from this somatic brand of nostalgia, why, I’m asking, do people find baseball so interesting? What sets it apart from, say, other sports? After all, every sport offers the thrill of victory as a glorious counterpoint to the agony of defeat. Every sport allows you to jump around with your delirious post-win teammates. And so every sport allows its fans to jump around, too, to transcend for a few permissive moments the usual bounds of decorum.

So, in place of other sports, why baseball?

Let us look again, this time from our seats, at the game itself. All sports embrace their own forms of strategy, their singular employment of game plans and supporting intelligence. But among the team sports, only baseball strategizes in so mano-a-mano a fashion, with pitcher and batter doing battle in tense isolation from teammates — a vacuum apart from the in-game flow.

By contrast, basketball players move and mingle, swift afoot as they zip to a zone defense or the triangle offense. Football players are nothing if not cogs in the greater machine. And futbol? It seems one seamless ballet, the scorer a product of his teammates’ dance. The same should be said of hockey, field hockey, lacrosse.

But baseball — it’s nine-on-nine, yes, but meanwhile it’s one-on-one.

It’s Bob Welch versus Reggie Jackson.

It’s Mariano Rivera against Luis Gonzalez.

What’s more, and especially in the postseason, the TV camera makes greater isolation of each man’s aloneness, pushing the lens so close to his stubble that we can practically see the whiskers bristle as he ponders the scheme of the upcoming pitch.

This up-close-and-personal perspective is still another element that makes baseball so interesting, is it not? We see the man in portrait, but in a pose he hasn’t quite chosen. This is his life in the moment and moving inside its frame. He is stilled just now for the camera, stalled mid-step for the audience at every ticking instant both before and after the combustions of the game.

We sit and watch. We see him blink.

We see him not blink.

We see him wince or scream.

By contrast, we have the football player. If he’s lucky enough to be off Injured Reserve, he arrives on our TV but once a week, for four months at a stretch, and even then he’s camouflaged by the accessories of war: the pads, the helmet, the reflective face shield that makes cold anonymity of his place on the depth chart. And even aside from his indistinguishable appearance, he’s shuttled in on third-down situations, a situational mercenary whose sole function is prescribed in advance. Seriously, man, who is this guy? Would somebody hand me a program?

The baseball player, by comparison, is a recognizable companion for half the days of the year. If we happen to watch spring training, and if he happens to reach the Fall Classic, he’s around for more than half our calendar. We would recognize the guy at the grocery store, yes? — likely in the specialty aisle, that’s true, where crackers cost $9.99 a box, but still, we know him.

What makes him even more companionable is this: his notably mortal physique. The NFL player is an aberration of size and strength, so thick with fast-twitch muscles that he can bend the bench press to his will. He has pecs like Slavonian oak barrels and arms like the marble a chisel has met. The basketball player, on average, is far above average: a colossus. Look up.

But baseball players? Look, some look like Giancarlo Stanton, and one like Yandy Diaz. But some, it must be said, look like Eric Sogard — especially Eric Sogard. And no NBA player, not even a so-so guard, looks like Sogard.

His nickname, you have to know, is Nerd Power.

Another undersized guy, the 5-foot-6 Jose Altuve, is the best second baseman in the game today, a dynamo of strength and speed and dexterity. Despite his copious gifts, however, he sure couldn’t guard LeBron. He sure couldn’t sack Tom Brady, no matter how much you’d want him to. He sure can hit Joe Kelly, though, having posted a career OPS of 1.921 against the eighth-year righty. Then again, Joe Kelly looks a lot like Ryan Seacrest.

It would be a mistake, and an overly convenient assertion, to suggest the baseball player is Everyman, a guy just like the rest of us, lunch pail in hand and heading to work in the cubicle. In truth, he is gifted beyond the common, and even if those gifts are concealed within the fibers of kinetic feel, even if the ability to pressure-point the arm-side run on a two-seam heater is nested inside those fingerprints, it is nonetheless manifest on the field of everyday play.

Maybe that’s it. He plays every day. He clocks in every night. Sometimes the audience prefers the daily drone of baseball to the event-driven thrum of football.

So put the game on, will ya? Let’s take another look.

***

As a sport, and as every contest within that sport, the game is sanctified by eccentricity. Its characters, whether we see them in the cracker aisle or not, are rostered into routine, there to make strangeness and entertainment of nine-inning segments of 162-game seasons, there to run the bases backward, à la Jimmy Piersall, there, like Mark Fidrych, to talk to the ball.

The game itself gives space and time to the player apart from the team. See Prince Fielder eat a nacho, Fielder having failed to reach the pop-up but having succeeded in reaching the chip. See Ozzie Smith do his backflip. See Turk Wendell do whatever it is that Turk Wendell did — wave to the center fielder before the first pitch; insist the umpire roll the ball back to him; brush his teeth between innings. See Manny being Manny.

Baseball’s characters, so-called, not only supply the quirks to a game built on a nine-inning, 90-foot frame; they also serve as the avatars of baseball’s greatest feature: anything can happen, and anyone can cause it. They are the embodiments of the predictably unpredictable and the invariably variable.

Look at it this way: In basketball, that last shot is going to LeBron.

In football, the final play is in Brady’s hands.

But in baseball? In baseball you have to bat in order. And that’s why journeyman Steve Pearce, and not superstar Mookie Betts, is the 2018 World Series MVP. That’s why Pat Borders, and not Robbie Alomar, remains the hero of the ’92 Jays. That’s why Luis Sojo — Luis Who-jo? — figures prominently in World Series lore.

And that’s why Bucky Dent, in Boston, is Bucky F***ing Dent.

Baseball makes monuments of the most unexpected moments, and even if football can answer with David Tyree’s miraculous Super Bowl catch, the gridiron cannot mandate, as the rules of baseball do, that he must be thrown to.

Baseball’s unpredictably is hardly limited to postseason heroics. Those moments are magnified by history’s lens, no doubt, but they are merely the most notable examples of the variability of the everyday. Witness the win percentage. The 2015-16 Warriors finished the NBA season at 73-9, for a mark of .890. The 1972 Dolphins went undefeated, finishing their Super Bowl run at 17-0. Who put that Pop Warner schedule together?

Now take a gander at the Pastime. The best win percentage in major league history belongs to the 1906 Cubs, at .736. In 2018, baseball’s best percentage belonged to Boston, at .667. In baseball, victory becomes defeat whenever a bases-loaded line drive goes directly into leather and not into outfield grass. Defeat becomes victory whenever that same liner, going low, hits a pebble and bounces above a scalp.

One way or another, the game-ending liner is a different beast than the game-clinching free throw delivered by a 90-percent shooter. A bounce on the rim is a bounce on the rim, guided by the hand of physics. It’s just a hop, not a bad hop.

Baseball is something else.

***

Given the quirky nature of baseball, especially as it contrasts to the lineup-driven structure and day-by-day routines that make it possible, it seems altogether fitting that its games are plotted on standard templates within nonstandard dimensions.

A football field is a football field, a hockey rink a rink, but a baseball field, once you get beyond the 90-foot demands of its diamond, is anybody’s guess. Rather, it’s somebody’s plan, now made solid in Boston’s Green Monster on the one side and, on the other, San Francisco’s Death Valley.

It’s Oakland’s foul territory, so vast that you could use it to rotate crops, and Tampa’s towering catwalks, so ill-conceived that they alter pop-ups and outcomes and entire teams’ moods. It’s Wrigley’s ivy and Comerica’s padding. Automatic doubles are automatic; ground-rule doubles are cool.

Every stadium, no matter the borrowed elements of its jewel-box design or the cookie-cutter aspects of its facade, is one-of-a-kind. So, too, is each game inside it. You never really know, and that’s why you watch. That’s why they play. A journeyman junkballer tosses a complete-game one-hitter.

Whoa, who saw that coming?

Watch the game, check the box scores, read all about it.

A .300 hitter wears a golden sombrero. An ace gets rocked.

A longtime bush-leaguer is now a late-bloomer. A change in his stance, way down in the sticks, unleashed like magic a scary power stroke.

Have a seat, grab a drink, and watch — even if you look away.

A guy greets Tommy John with his elbow, and now he’s back.

Keep reading, keep watching, there are so many ways to care.

Did that guy just steal home?

Keep listening, hear the echoes, even if in the background.

That ball might be gone!

Watch. Wait. It’s required.

A game passes the one-hour mark, the two-hour mark, and the clouds above it are cats playing violins, or dogs chasing dump trucks, and ooooooooooh, double play.

That’s baseball. Nothing really happens, but then, suddenly, it happens: eight innings of shutout ball and then a couple walks, a hit-by-pitch, and now? Now the bases are loaded, the team is three runs down, and a pinch-hitter is stepping up.

Never heard of the guy? Now you have. He just hit the walk-off.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, Altuve goes down swinging.

The best in the game, for this one moment, is garbage.

Back on the standardized hardwood, though, LeBron is on. He’s rarely off. Steph Curry never forgets how to shoot. Over on the gridiron, Big Ben, even on a bad day, hits 50 percent of his throws.

But baseball? A Triple-A call-up makes Mookie look like a fool.

A 10-year benchwarmer takes the shutdown reliever deep.

It’s just this once, true, but once is enough because once is forever.

Watch the highlights, check the stats. It isn’t going away.

With its slate of 162 spaces, the season comes like a trickle and then, suddenly, a flood, washing over its witnesses until they forget what day Mike Trout tripled on that 3-2 slider. But he did.

It’s in the books, with all the other triples, all the other marks.

Continuity, you could call it. It’s one long story, always unfolding.

***

Nobody, save for some bespectacled archivist in the bowels of NFL Films, remembers what happened in professional football in, say, 1947. Did some guy’s single-bar facemask get stuck in the Briggs Stadium mud?

But everybody, even the NFL archivist, knows what happened in baseball. Jackie Robinson came to dinner. Robinson stepped to the plate.

Everybody, likewise, knows the Bambino. His name is Babe Ruth. It’s a name like Paul Revere’s, like Joan of Arc’s, never far from the tongue. Whether he called his shot or not, he pointed straight to the lore that keeps it.

The story of baseball, still being told, is one that dares you not to get maudlin. You, as narrator, might wish to cite the baseball story as the American story, with its Old Testament damnation of the Black Sox and its New Testament embrace of Jackie Robinson, Billy Bean, Jessica Mendoza.

You might wish to call upon nostalgia while hoping, without succeeding, to avoid the saccharine pits of old-fashioned hokum. But it’s true: You went to games with Dad, you learned to hit from your brother, and Mom tossed batting practice until the evening star came up.

It’s difficult to tell the story — to even begin the thing — without reference to what becomes irredeemably cornball, the stuff that hipster ironists denounce: the smell of April grass, the feel of springtime sun, the avatars of rebirth, Persephone in the dugout, Dionysus on the mound, those dying-and-rising gods having come to the ballyard to announce that baseball has returned.

The feel of soft leather is real, though. Summer nights are warm.

How do you ignore it?

How, too, do you articulate its truth without sweat defining your lip?

You can turn the other way, go silly and fun. You can even make a listicle.

• Baseball is the only sport that supplies consistent bloopers! See Jose Canseco gift a dinger, on behalf of Carlos Martinez, by boinking it off his head! See Steve Lyons drop his trousers! See…John Kruk!
• In baseball, a fan can hold a baby with one hand and catch a foul ball with the other! And then he gets to keep it! Do they let you keep the basketball when some 7-footer kicks it into the stands?

You can go all barstool, conjuring opinion and calling it debate.

• Jack Morris, a Hall of Famer? Gimme Frankie Viola!
• You think Adam Ottavino would strike out the Babe? You’re a loon.
• Barry Bonds? He’s why the asterisk was invented.

You can go nerdcore, citing sabermetrics as a savior and fantasy as the real.

• Trout is up to 199 wRC+! That’s insane.
• Bro, nobody cares about your fantasy team. They care about mine.

And yeah, you can root for laundry. Scream in a win, pout in a loss and wait like hell for your trophy: A season comes down to a game you’ve forgotten, way back in April, maybe in May, having hinged on one wild pitch. The 162 is defined by October, a season of waiting, a year in the making, and decades in a simmer, all riding on the next offering from a guy you saw at the market. See his whiskers. This is your life.

Or…you can revel in the unbiased beauty of the grand old game: Bryce Harper’s violence as defined by a swing path, Cole Hamels’ smooth release.

Nightly it’s a pageant, daily it’s a strange parade, and maybe it defies explanation.

Who can say? Can you? That said, if you do enjoy baseball, if you do find it — and I quote — “so interesting,” you don’t have to explain it to anyone.