Base Baseball

When I play that old college game of If-you-had-a-time-machine-when-and-where-in-time-would-you-go-back-to?, I vacillate depending on mood and the alignment of stars between the assassination of Caesar (did he really say, “Et tu, Brute”?), the original performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Globe (did he really write all those plays, and did he gather with all the players at a pub after the performance for a night of ribaldry?), and the night of December 31, 1906, when Mark Twain (or his Siamese twin) delivered a lecture on temperance while drunk (or pretending to be drunk) (classic Twain that doesn’t show up in Hal Holbrook impersonations).

But when I read today the following in John Thorn’s Baseball in the Garden of Eden, I’ve added going back to attend a baseball game with the 1897 Baltimore Orioles:

They [the Orioles] matched skill, daring, and inventiveness with extraordinary dirty play, vile language, and relentless umpire baiting.

There was no doubt alcohol was involved as well, tying it in with the themes in my examples above — ability, violence, debauchery, and excess. The way baseball should be. The way baseball was even still back in the 1950s, when my grandfather would take me to watch the Wichita Braves games at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium, the cigar smoke and the stench of stale beer, the cursing at and by players and umpires and fans, the occasional fight, either on the field or in the stands, the bridging of generations in an initiation of maturation, of play the way it really is.

Not the way it is now. In the past half century, baseball has degenerated into a “family” sport, requiring hundreds of dollars a visit, a Disney Land of insufferable mascots, silly inter-inning games on the field, t-shirt guns shooting into the stands, playgrounds in the outfield concourse, restaurants without any view of the field, advertisements blasting on the Jumbotron. I took a tour of the Arizona Diamondback stadium a couple of years after it opened in Phoenix (now Chase Field), and the guide explained at one point, noting all the extra-baseball goofiness around the concourse (including a swimming pool in center field), that the average “fan” (sic) loses interest in the game after an average of 3 ½ innings, and so they added all the “extra entertainment features” to the experience. Well, if somebody loses interest in the game after 3 ½ innings, they shouldn’t be there in the first place — it’s a baseball game, not a shopping mall. Some courageous club should field a team like the 1897 Orioles. It’s not like anyone other than those of us who actually watch the game would even notice. And maybe it would chase the mall-fans away from the game.