Dominic Pino writes about new rule changes to baseball being imposed by MLB:
To appease hypothetical people who do not watch and don’t want to watch baseball, the league makes rule changes that bother the actual people who like baseball.
I’m one of those people. I have the same view of baseball that George Will — to pick a name totally at random — has of religion: It is socially useful. In my lifetime (I was born in 1993), the Cincinnati Reds haven’t given me that much to be excited about. (Unlike the Bengals!) Thus, I haven’t paid much attention to them. But I’m glad they’re there. I can’t fully communicate why. But the feeling of being at someone’s house party, with a couple of people playing cornhole in the back and others standing on the patio drinking cheap beer while, somewhere in the background, THE REDS ARE ON THE RADIO . . . it just seems deeply right to me. Others have much deeper ties to their teams than that, of course. These ties ineffably and collectively make up the cultural power of baseball as an institution. As such an institution, it should not be subject to radical change, especially if the intent is to appeal more to those not already interested. Reform, yes, if there are things wrong with it; Dominic cites a few good examples.
If I don’t care about baseball beyond this sense of its social utility, though, why do I care about this? Well, because when I do go to a baseball game, which happens on occasion, I want it to be an experience. I will make a day out of it. I don’t want it to be more efficient, or shorter, or more easily understood. I want to witness unfolding in real time what I usually just see presented as a kind of inevitable narrative in game highlights. I want it to be messy, unpredictable, and reflective of the game’s true nature.
Dominic’s description of the ideal baseball game for the purpose of expediency (“two pitchers pitching to contact, getting lots of groundouts and flyouts, and a final score of 1–0 with the home team winning so that the bottom of the ninth inning doesn’t need to be played”), on the other hand, just sounds . . . boring. Take me out to the ball game, not to . . . that.