The Sky Is Falling, Baseball Is Dying, and the Roof May Leak
The Consolations of History in Calamitous Times
On Saturday, November 17, I gathered with my Greene County neighbors at the Beattie-Powers Place to deliver my eighth annual Hot Stove League talk and to gab afterwards with my baseball-loving friends.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Dickens knew, when he wrote those words about the days of the French Revolution, that it was simultaneously both and neither. You folks came here to talk baseball and not politics and, trust me, so did I. But let me get to that desired goal by way of some dark days in the Hudson Valley, more than 200 years ago.
In this past week, the White House was spanked in Federal Court for having denied a Secret Service pass to Jim Acosta of CNN, whose press credentials were restored yesterday. The narrow basis of the ruling was due process, but the judge indicated that a case brought solely on First Amendment grounds would likely have prevailed. Our current Chief Executive is not the first to have viewed the press with distrust and disdain; one of our Presidents honored on Mt. Rushmore had a temper, too … and he imposed tariffs that were ruinous to the American economy, and had a checkered romantic history.
Thomas Jefferson became President in 1800, largely by opposing the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798, famously casting himself as a defender of the press. “Were it left to me,” he once declared, “to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Yet Jefferson found ways to soften the sting of the press.
The new President wrote Thomas McKean, the governor of Pennsylvania, that the “press ought to be restored to its credibility if possible…. I have therefore long thought that a few prosecutions of the most prominent offenders would have a wholesome effect…. Not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution: but a selected one.” In Hudson, New York — just across the river as we sit here today — the selected victim was Harry Croswell, an obscure 24-year-old printer whose self-published quarter-sheet The Wasp stung not only that city’s rival Republican paper, The Bee, but the President himself. (Croswell had commenced his newspaper career right here in Catskill, just down Green Street at the corner of Main — formerly adorned with a New York State historical marker that has disappeared — as a printer’s devil for The Catskill Packet, edited by his brother Mackay.)
Harry Croswell was brought to trial in the Claverack courthouse (still standing in Columbia County) in July 1803. The accuser was the President himself. Croswell was convicted. But the Federalists were not disposed to let a small-town printer take the fall for their crusade. His attorneys requested that his case be heard at the New York Supreme Court in Albany. The appeal was granted, and Croswell would be represented gratis by none other than Alexander Hamilton.
On appeal, Croswell won. Unfortunately, at a dinner party held in Albany during the trial, Hamilton delivered several criticisms of Jefferson’s Vice President, Aaron Burr, labeling him “a dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government.” When Burr discovered this insult months later, despite its having been reported in the press far and wide, he challenged Hamilton to a duel. On the morning of July 11, 1804, at the Weehawken Heights, not far from where baseball would soon be played, Burr shot and killed Hamilton, thereby eliminating his personal rival and the primary Federalist intellect.
[I have written before, with my then-school-age son Mark, about Harry Croswell, The Wasp, and Hamilton — and their role in assuring Americans of a free press. See “Let Freedom Sting,” in two parts: https://goo.gl/ADzHK3 and https://goo.gl/mih1Ct. My then-girlfriend and future wife added this on Harry Croswell’s invention of the “cock-tail” (yes): https://goo.gl/66L8pK]
Croswell wrote on May 13, 1806: “Cock-tail, then, is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters; it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, in as much as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said also, to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because a person having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else.”
I submit that those were worse times than today’s. And so was the Civil War. And the tempestuous 1960s. A case may be made for other eras, too.
In baseball, too, it is the best of times and the worst of times: each and both and neither. All fans will agree that there too many strikeouts — for the first time in history, more of them than basehits — and not enough balls in play. Some are frustrated with the prevailing all-or-nothing approach, and the luster may even have come off the home run itself, baseball’s biggest and best event.
Older fans may long for the age of steals, sacrifice bunts, hit-and-run plays, and triples, my particular object of longing. Newer fans may grow impatient with advanced metrics, Statcast, and other scientific innovations that in turn have led to defensive shifts, reduced innings for starting pitchers, and rosters packed with bullpen pitchers in place of bench players.
All of this reflects a game that with each passing generation has welcomed superior — and bigger, as well as better conditioned — batsmen, pitchers, and fielders. It is hard to argue that today’s average players — let’s leave Ruth, Cobb, Wagner, and Williams, even Mays and Aaron and Clemente, to one side for now — are inferior to the men who populated the eight-team leagues of 1900 to 1960.
And yet …
Balls in play, which delight fans with what may be termed “action” (as opposed to today’s Three True Outcomes style (home run or strikeout or base on balls) are down from almost 30 per game in 1954 to less than 25 this past season. Quality Starts — a term I have always hated, as it extolled the virtues of six innings with three earned runs (an ERA of 4.50) — diminished from 63 percent in 1968 to 41 percent last year. (I am indebted for these calculations to my friend Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus.) One might ask: If starting pitchers are getting better, why are they throwing fewer innings?
The stolen base and the bunt are on the way out. The reasons for the decline in both have to do with analysts revealing that run expectations are radically lessened not only by the unsuccessful attempt but also, in the a case of the sacrifice bunt, by the successful execution. One may blame analysis, knowledge, and science for these outcomes, but it is hard to give three cheers for ignorance.
The dilemma for owners and players and fans may be understood as The Paradox of Progress: we know the game is better, so why, for so many, does it feel worse? I submit that while Science may win on the field, as clubs employ strategies that give them a better chance of victory, Aesthetics wins hearts and minds.
Nibbling around the edges of the game, principally to pick up the pace, we could talk about a pitch clock, or roster size, or limiting pitching changes or replays. Off the field, we could implement Ron Blum’s idea of returning the Disabled List (DL) to 15 days from its current 10, which has encouraged chicanery and pitcher shuttles between major and minor leagues.
Let’s focus for a moment on the elephant in the room: the commercial breaks that come with completed half innings or pitcher replacements. In the 2018 World Series each such instance consumed 2 minutes and 50 seconds. For easy mental computation let’s call it 3 minutes … multiplied by 17 in a nine-inning game won by the home team. 51 minutes. Let’s say that the two clubs combine to use nine pitchers, thus making seven changes. Add 21 minutes. Commercial breaks contribute more than an hour to a nine-inning game, making the two-and-a-half hour game of 1946 into the four-hour postseason game of today.
But somebody has to pay the freight for staging the games and broadcasting them: the networks, the sponsors, the fans. Could you lop 30 seconds off the breaks by allowing some commercials to run in split screen during an inning? That innovation could be one that fans will hate … or come to abide.
Ball player Pete O’Brien said: “Somehow or other, they don’t play ball nowadays as they used to some eight or ten years ago. I don’t mean to say they don’t play it as well. . . . But I mean that they don’t play with the same kind of feelings or for the same objects they used to. . . . It appears to me that ball matches have come to be controlled by different parties and for different purposes than those that prevailed in 1858 or 1859.”
