There is nothing here that hasn't been said many times before, most likely. But given my love of the sport, and given many other people's decided lack of understanding about why my love of the sport is so great as compared to their love of, say, football (and throughout this piece I use "football" to mean American-style football) or soccer or basketball, I felt it useful to congeal all of my reasons into one concise statement.
Let me start by saying that I love baseball. It my favourite of all of spectator sports to watch, both on TV and live. It is also, by far, my favourite sport to listen to on the radio, which is itself one of the reasons I love baseball. I have been a baseball fan since 1972, when I was six years old. Having grown up in and around Anaheim, I went to Angel baseball games back when they were the California Angels and had the likes of Joe Lahoud, Leroy Stanton, Ellie Rodriguez, and Morris Nettles on their starting roster (hardly a Hall of Fame lineup). Angel games back then were probably, in the minds of non-baseball aficionados, some of the more boring games in all of baseball. The Angels had some of the worst hitting in the Major Leagues, and even those that could hit subsisted on slap singles followed by stolen bases. And even with the one-two combination of Nolan Ryan and Frank Tanana, bolstered at times by Bill Singer or Ed Figueroa, the Angels often placed well below .500 by the end of the season, and win or lose their affairs were often 1 to 0 or 2 to 0 ballgames.
Yet, in spite of this, my love of the game was almost instantaneous, and from going to the games, watching on TV (back then you were lucky to get a single game of the week on Saturdays on NBC), and collecting baseball cards, to participating in Strat-o-Matic baseball leagues and playing Little League, I was hooked.
But of course, the question remains…why? Here are my reasons:
1. There is no clock.
This one is often brought up, and it is fairly unique to baseball. In fact, baseball is the only team sport without a clock, and with regulated "frames" of play that provide each opponent with the same number of chances to score. There are some other one-on-one sports that do the same. Bowling comes to mind, and, it can be argued, tennis as well. But baseball is certainly the only team sport to have no clock.
Why is this a good thing?
Many people love clock-based games. They like the fact that the clock, usually ever-ticking, keeps the game moving. While football does have a lot of clock stops, still the clock is usually ticking away, urging the teams to get moving and score, and in all clock-based games there is a sense of impending urgency for at least one of the opponents.
However, there are quite a few things about the clock that I dislike immensely.
First, while the clock can be said to add an entire layer of strategy onto the game (i.e. managing the clock, when to take timeouts, etc.), in many ways, clock-based strategy seems almost like cheating. This is especially true when teams go into delay mode. Soccer is infamous for this. Often, a single goal is enough to win a game of soccer. This means the first team that scores then bases the entirety of their game strategy around delaying the other side and running down the clock. They kick the ball out of bounds whenever possible. They pretty much completely forget about scoring a goal and instead level massive kick-a-ways to the other side of the field to eat up time. This is about as exciting as watching bread rise.
This delay tactic is less prevalent in other sports, but it is still present. Hockey, especially in the last period, is all about delay. In football, in the 4th quarter, when the leading team is up by a couple of touchdowns with a certain amount of time remaining, they go into delay mode, running the ball constantly, waiting until the last second on the play clock to snap the ball. And even better, pretend to be entangled with the defensive team after a play to delay getting back up and to the scrimmage line. It's hardly dynamic or exciting football.
And let's not even go too deeply into the time-honoured approach of faking injuries to stop the clock.
There is, I guess, too much of a feel of "working the system" in clock-based strategies.
Second, despite the idea that a clock moves the game along, in actuality it serves to exponentially slow down the end of the game, especially in football and basketball. What non-sports interested wife doesn't recall wanting to go somewhere and having her husband tell her there's only "two minutes" left in the game, only to find that, a half hour later, there is still 30 seconds to go?
I want the game to progress at an even pace, a consistent, stately pace instead of bursts of speed followed by agonizing nothingness, especially towards the end of the game.
Third, in clock-based games the saying "it ain't over 'til it's over" does not apply. Sometimes it is over well before it's over. Yes, I know we can all point to miracles where someone scored 4 times in a football game in the span of two minutes. But those are once-in-a-lifetime occurrences. More often…too often in fact, with 2 minutes or 5 minutes or sometimes even 10 minutes left the game is out of reach…a foregone conclusion. The problem is, the clock requires both teams to continue to play even though everyone, from players to coaches to the fans knows the game is over. Again, this does not make for exciting watching.
In baseball, there is no clock. Therefore, there is no clock strategy. While there is, admittedly, a tiny bit of time strategy in stalling briefly to allow a reliever to warm up, such tactics are not sanctioned by the rules of the game and the umpire immediately comes out to move the game along.
And in baseball, it truly isn't over until it's over. While football fans can point to one or two games in the history of the sport where someone came back from a 28 points deficit with 2 minutes left to play, baseball is full of 9th inning comebacks of 5 or more runs; they happen every season multiple times. It is possible in baseball to score 10 or more times in a single inning. Again, it happens multiple times every single season.
Because of this, a dedicated baseball fan, even 8 runs down with 2 outs and 2 strikes in the bottom of the 9th inning can still hope. There is ALWAYS a mathematical chance to come back in baseball. In clock-based games, and especially football, at some point before the game actually ends, the chance of coming back diminishes to zero.
In addition, because a clock-based game has the potential to end up in a tie, all clock-based games have mechanisms for resolving ties, whether they are shoot-offs, sudden death, etc. Only baseball continues in a consistent manner beyond the first 9 innings with no special rules or sudden death mechanisms. I like that about baseball, because while you can end up with a 20 inning game, you also don't feel cheated if your team loses a hotly contested game simply because the other side got a lucky first score in a sudden death overtime or got a single lucky shot in a very limited shoot-off format.
2. The scoring is perfect.
In baseball, I feel the scoring, meaning the frequency of scoring, is just about perfect. To illustrate this, let's look at the extremes.
I pretty much cannot stand to watch soccer. I know most of the world outside the US loves the game, but any game that goes on for 2 hours and usually ends up with a score of 1 to 0 or 2 to 1 is simply boring. Why? First, because if there is only going to be one score in the entire game, and if, as in soccer, such a score usually develops in a very short period of time (it takes at most about 30 seconds to go from one's own goal to a shot on opposing goal), then there is too much of a risk that while I was out of the room getting a beer or going to the bathroom that one score happened. And then that's it! I've missed pretty much all or half of the scoring in the entire game.
Furthermore, while soccer has lots of action, and many shots on goal, the vast majority of these are blocked, making watching soccer the sports version of coitus interruptus.
Basketball has the exact opposite problem. Scoring is so frequent in basketball that it is difficult to build up any sort of real excitement for any given scoring instance. This is especially true in the first half of the game. When the score is Lakers 12 and Suns 13 in the first period, just how overjoyed can you be when Kobe Bryant shoots a 3 pointer and puts the Lakers ahead? The only time in the game when single scores matter is in the last 5 minutes or so. Which is why a great many people and I only bother to watch the last 5 minutes of a basketball game (when, I might reiterate, the clock halting is so bad that this last 5 minutes takes a half an hour to resolve).
Baseball, on the other hand (and to be fair, football and hockey also have good scoring frequency, especially with the new hockey rules put into place recently) has an excellent scoring frequency. Rare is the baseball game in this day and age that is decided with a 1 to 0 score. The average scoring in a game is something like 9-10 runs per game. This means that the scoring is enough that falling behind by a single run or two or even three is no cause to give up hope. On the other hand, scoring is moderated enough that every single run is important and it is easy to point to significant turning points in a baseball game's score that you simply cannot do with regard to basketball.
3. The season is long.
I fully understand why football can only be a 16 game season. The sport is too physically demanding to require its players to play more games (aside from the post season and Pro Bowl). But it also means that a few flukey losses can ruin a season, or at least severely dampen it. This is especially true of college football, but even in the NFL, a key injury costing 2-3 games can make the difference between a good season and a bad one.
Not so with baseball. And while hockey and basketball have longer seasons than football, baseball's season is by far the longest, and with the most games played. This means that any given loss is not a catastrophe to the team. That promotes a "we can get 'em tomorrow" attitude. In addition, since teams in baseball in the same league play each other multiple times per season both home and away, it allows for grudge matches and revenge games to be played WITHIN a season.
In addition, the baseball season allows even the worst team to have many games under its belt before it becomes obvious they have no chance. And even the worst teams are not mathematically eliminated until late in the season. This means, for example, the 2002 Angels could start the season 6 and 14 and end up winning the World Series. How many football teams could start the season 3 and 7 and end up winning the Superbowl?
In some sense, all of the reasons I dislike the frequency of scoring in basketball are the same reason I like the large number of game in the baseball season. While I want my individual games to have significant turning points, I prefer my season to be a marathon where a single loss or two (or ten) don't wreck a season.
In baseball, a 6 and 14 start is not desirable, but it is certainly not a cause for panic. This allows hope to spring eternal.
4. Baseball + radio = awesome.
These days, with cable and satellite and what have you, it is much easier to watch any major sports game you want on TV. Not so in the older days. Even as late as 1985, the majority of games were available only on radio. And of all of the sports, none can be presented on the radio as well as baseball.
Hockey on the radio is simply a farce. I don't blame hockey for trying, and I suppose if you are a hockey fan in your car it's better than nothing, but the game is simply too free-form and moves too fast to have any hope of really getting into it on the radio. Even the most agile-mouthed announcer cannot even hope to pronounce a guy's name before he has already passed the puck to another French Canadian guy with an even longer name.
Basketball has the same problem as hockey. Anyone who has listened to basketball on the radio can well attest that more often than not while the announcer is describing the dribble from mid court you can hear the swish of the ball in the basket and then, 5 seconds later, the announcer uses the time between a basket and resumed play to describe the shot.
Football is much better to listen to on the radio, since it is divided into discrete chunks (i.e. plays) that allow the announcers to comment and set the scene. But even then, there is no way on radio for a single announcer to describe the action happening on the line of scrimmage, simultaneous with the quarterback, simultaneous with the receivers going down field. Instead, the announcer has to follow the ball, which gives you a descriptive, important, but limited picture of what's going on.
Baseball, however, is very easy to compartmentalize verbally. At most an announcer has two things to describe simultaneously…the runners and the fielder. And since the game proceeds at a consistent, stately pace and as most of the action involves the pitcher and the batter (and even then such action is sequential; you don't need to describe the pitcher once he has made the pitch), it is easy for a radio announcer to paint a full picture of the game, without sacrificing clarity and without losing any facet of the game. This is why many fans of baseball will watch the game on TV with the sound muted and then listen to their favourite radio announcers. When have you ever heard of anyone doing that for football or basketball or hockey? Even if such things happen, they are extremely rare as compared to baseball.
Because baseball lends itself so well to the medium of radio, it is easier to follow baseball as a sport because you can listen to it while driving. If my family wants to go on a road trip to a lake to go boating on Sunday, I have to stop watching football and settle for a less than adequate radio broadcast. That lessens my enjoyment of the sport and makes it harder to follow football when not glued in front of the TV set. But baseball you can take with you anywhere. I can listen to the game while we drive to the lake. I can bring a portable radio with me on the boat and while I fish with my family.
I can listen to baseball while I am at work or while I commute to or from work without missing a beat or feeling like I got a second-rate experience.
5. Baseball combines the best of both worlds.
Baseball is unique amongst all sports in that it combines the best attributes of non-team sports with the best attributes of team sports. Despite the assertion that sometimes basketball is not a team sport (Kobe…are you listening?), the fact remains that only baseball amongst the team sports includes a component that is very close to the non-team sports. And, in fact, even then the only sport it is comparable to is tennis.
One of the great things about tennis is that it is a duel. Mano-a-mano. Most other non-team sports (like golf or bowling) are all about taking turns against a feature like a hole or pins. But tennis has two individuals, alone on a court, facing each other and dueling to the death (or until victory).
Few if any non-team sports have that sort of prolonged duel, and no team sport does…except for baseball. Baseball has the pitcher squaring off mano-a-mano against the batter. One on one. A duel just as intense as tennis.
But unlike tennis, which remains a duel for the entire match, in baseball this duel can suddenly blossom into a team sport, with all of the great things that team sports can boast over non-team sports. Player to player interaction and cooperation, plays, decoys, etc. A well-turned double play has as much poetry, timing, and coordination to it as does a downfield pass in football or an alley-oop in basketball.
Baseball is unique in giving you both flavours under the guise of a single sport and a single game. When Peyton Manning lines up behind center, he is not dueling against any particular defender. While he, as the quarterback, is the center of attention, just like the pitcher on the baseball field, he is facing the entire defense. Any one of whom can thwart him. Any one of whom can blitz in and knock him flat. Who is he going to stare down? Who is he going to intimidate?
But in baseball, while Ichiro might be in the outfield, and Figgins may be on second base, when Vladimir Guerrero steps up to the plate against Johan Santana, it is all about Vladdy versus Johan.
6. Baseball has plenty of action.
It should be no surprise that the number one complaint from people who don't like baseball is that they claim it is boring. Too slow-paced. Not enough action. To which I respond "bullocks!"
The problem is not that baseball has no action or not enough action with enough frequency. The problem is that people define the action in baseball improperly. Most people consider action in baseball to be when the ball is put into the play by the batter. Some people don't even consider that to be action, and claim that action in baseball is when someone gets a hit.
But I think such sentiments reveal an ignorance of the game. The real action of the game of baseball is the pitch. Each pitch is an action. And if you view each pitch as the action of baseball, suddenly the game doesn't seem slow paced or boring at all. In baseball, a pitch happens every 15 to 20 seconds. This is actually much less time between pitches in baseball than between plays in football. I daresay that once you view a pitch in baseball as its action, football seems to be a bit boring at times!
The problem is that in order to successfully view a pitch as the action in baseball, you have to know the game. In football, there is an easy to see difference between a long bomb, a screen pass, and a hand off. Anyone not even remotely familiar with football can look at those three things and see a difference.
But with baseball, most casual viewers cannot tell the difference between a curve ball and a fastball. And even most casual fans are not savvy enough to appreciate the immense amount of strategy that goes into each pitch. They are not aware that the 1-0 breaking ball low and away was designed to miss the strike zone in order to set up the high heat inside on the next pitch. To them, it simply looks like the pitcher hurled the ball really fast and it missed. They don't know that when that pitcher threw an inside fastball to David Ortiz he was playing with fire and you wonder if he is going to have the guts to do it again…and why did he do it the first time…was it a mistake or does he have a plan?
If you are aware of the game and the strategy inherent in each pitch of the game, then the action in baseball comes pretty fast and furious, and when the ball is put into play or a hit is made, it is all the more exciting.
7. The fields are different.
Only in baseball are the playing fields truly and significantly different. Yes, you get domed and undomed stadiums in football. And playing in Green Bay in the snow is different than playing in San Diego in the sun. But basketball and hockey are absolutely homogenous, and even in football the actual playing field is the same everywhere. But in baseball, each stadium is different. Each has its own little quirks. And that makes each game a little bit different and each stadium that much more interesting.
Playing in Boston is entirely different than playing in New York. And it's not simply a matter of climate and the crowd enthusiasm. The Green Monster changes the game… plain and simple. And for better or for worse, it makes playing in Boston different than playing anywhere else…and differences tend to be interesting.
8. Baseball anticipation is like no other sport.
Baseball progresses in fits and spurts. This lends itself to a unique tenseness and anticipation in the late innings of close games of importance that no other sport can rival. Yes, every sport has tense moments, but only baseball tends to drag out these tense moments in a delicious, almost torturous manner. In basketball, in the winding seconds of a close game, the team gets the ball and usually has about 3-5 seconds to run its last play. Is there tension? You bet! And as the buzzer sounds and the ball flies from the 3-point line towards the basket, there is an amazing amount of tension. But it lasts for 3 seconds, and then it's done. You knew it was coming, you knew the time frame in which it would resolve itself, and it finishes.
Hockey and soccer are the same way. Because the act of scoring is relatively sudden, there is not a lot of ratcheting up of tension. You simply have that last few seconds, and in soccer and hockey you cannot even be guaranteed of getting a shot on goal during that time. With basketball, at least you pretty much always have a last shot for a field goal.
Football is somewhat better, but still you pretty much know you have a certain number of seconds or a certain number of downs to make your touchdown (or get to within field goal range). Because you know the frame in which your team has to score, some of the anticipation dissipates because you can predict how it will play out. That said, it is certainly exciting to watch from first and goal in the 4th quarter with 45 seconds and 2 time outs left when your team is down by 6 points. You will have four plays that will decide your team's fate. Those plays, up to 4 of them, will likely be very exciting, but the tension still cannot go past 4 plays (excluding penalties).
Similarly, a final field goal to win or lose the game is a very exciting circumstance. But again, aside from the time outs the opposing team takes to rattle the kicker, the tension builds and then there is a single kick and the tension ends.
But baseball…because of the foul ball rule in baseball, with a 1 run game and 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th inning in the 7th game of the World Series, you don't know what's going to happen. You cannot even predict how long your agony will last.
In a football game, with 10 seconds left and 4th and goal for the win, that's it. You know for a fact that there will be one more play and then it's over.
In baseball, you have no idea. The batter steps up. The pitcher gets the sign (tension is building). He winds up (more tension). He releases…you wait…the batter swings…BAM! (you leap up out of your chair)….and the line drive goes foul. You sit back down. Take a breath. Get yourself set. And it all happens again. And sometimes again and again and again. Deliciously so. I have seen such duels last 5 minutes, getting to a 3-2 count and then having the batter foul off 8 pitches. That's 5 minutes straight of the type of immense tension and anticipation that you get, at most, 5 seconds of in basketball, a split second of in hockey, and maybe a minute or so of in football.
No sport, I repeat no sport can match the tension and anticipation that baseball can bring.
These are not the only reasons I love the sport, but they are the main ones that separate baseball from the rest of the major sports, and I encourage anyone who has previously dismissed baseball to give it another try with the above things in mind. You might find yourself enjoying the game in spite of yourself!
PLAY BALL!