How To Watch Baseball
I forgot to add this but baseball players have some truly tremendous donks. That's always fun to see too.
Before I begin, I just want to give a shoutout to my paid subscribers. You rock! And are cool as hell. If you also want to be cool as hell you can do a paid subscription below. Writing these things takes time and effort, and a little money makes these easier to do. It’s probably the chillest thing you can do and helps me keep Dang Dude going. Also, it’s cheap!
Watching baseball on TV is not easy. Or if you don’t believe that watching TV can ever be hard and want me to rephrase that, watching baseball on TV takes practice. Of course, this is nominally true of any sport. Watching something for the first time is confusing. Why do a bunch of people just line up and hit each other while the ball is somewhere else? Where even is the puck? What is offsides? All common questions first-timers ask while watching any number of sports. I want to posit however, that even for people who are intimately aware of the rules and culture of baseball, watching it on TV is hard.
The biggest reason for this is that TV cameras rarely capture the entire field of play. Most often they focus on the pitcher and whoever is at bat. On one level this makes sense. That is where the ball is, and these two players, and possibly the catcher, are the people who are going to start any action that might occur during a baseball game. However, the focus on just those two individuals, three if you count the catcher, which no one ever really does, ignores everything else that is going on during a game. Rarely do you get to see how the infielders position themselves for each batter, how they move about the field based on coach’s instruction and batter’s hitting tendencies. You don’t get to see how outfielder’s communicate amongst themselves, how they get ready during each pitch, how they plan their attacks. TVs only rarely show how runner’s take short or long leads, or try to fake pitchers and fielders out. There is a lot of gamesmanship on display during baseball games that gets lost in translation.
The other big reason for baseball being harder to watch on TV than in-person comes from the game itself. Baseball is a game of interruptions. Unlike basketball, soccer, or hockey it is a very staccato game. Football too is made up largely of discrete plays, unconnected from one another. Football has the advantage of their plays being longer and everyone on the field directly involved in each one. In baseball the large majority of each plays – I’m defining each pitch as a single play, take whatever umbrage you want to over that definition, but know that it is correct – don’t involve everyone and are very short. In today’s game of high-velocity pitchers, each pitch takes only a couple of seconds. If it’s a strike or a ball, only the catcher, batter, and the pitcher are involved, leaving out everyone on the field. That can be hard to watch for people who are used to watching other less disjointed sports. An additional wrinkle in watching baseball is that your favorite player is most likely not involved in every play. Unlike basketball where LeBron or Steph will most likely be involved in 90% of the plays Mike Trout or Shohei Ohtani will only bat three-to-four times a game. And pitch every fifth day, if your Ohtani. Imagine someone like Tom Brady or Drew Brees only taking every fifth snap and still be considered a superstar. It’s something you have to get used to.
So far this has been a negative piece. Hopefully I haven’t been convincing enough to turn you off of watching baseball on TV. I think it is one of the best things you can do, and one of the only reasons to actually pay for cable. Though MLB.TV is very cheap, especially if you have a student email, and you can get pretty much every game. So now is the time where I turn my metaphoric rhetorical tables, and try to convince you to start watching baseball on TV.
First off, televised baseball helps you realize the uniqueness of every human being. I know that if you haven’t realized that by now, or need the help of TV to realize that you’re probably a lost cause, but I’ll forge forward with this point anyway. By spotlighting the role of pitchers and batters TV baseball, probably quite by accident, highlights a whole range of human uniqueness. No two people bat or pitch the same way. Every delivery is unique just as every swing looks different. This can seem weird to some people. Surely there is one best way to pitch a ball or swing a bat. Scientists must have proved this long ago. However, people like Vlad Guerrero Jr, Moises Alou, and every ¾ arm slot, or submarine pitcher have proved them wrong. There is no universal best way to pitch or hit, there is only the best way for you. Professional baseball players have figured out what is the best way for their body to move down to the micron and they do it over and over again. A truly impressive feat. Watching these players and figuring out their idiosyncrasies is one of the joys of baseball.
The other great thing about watching baseball on TV is the announcing. Baseball games are long. Routinely going over three hours. This means that announcers have to fill a lot of time, more so than other sports, as there is a lot of time between action. The fact that most announcers are old players means that they can get up to some wild stuff in the booth. For instance while watching the Phillies lose to the Marlins the other day the Phillies color commentator John Kruk, a former Phillie first baseman admitted that he had never seen a single episode of Seinfeld. To me this is wild. It seems impossible that a white American sixty-year-old man has never seen an episode of one of the most popular sitcoms of all time. And it’s not like Kruk was playing during the whole original run of the show either. Not to mention the fact that there are re-runs of that show playing 24/7. Kruk’s broadcasting partner Tom McCarthy was aghast. This led to a couple more minutes of chat about Seinfeld in the middle of the game. In no other sport are you going to get that. Just a nice moment of someone having to explain what Seinfeld is to an adult man. Beautiful.
So the next time you’re bored I suggest not picking up a book – those are for nerds – and instead watching some baseball. Grab a LaCroix or three and settle down for a bit. You’re in for a treat.
Thoroughly enjoyable read, Dylan. Baseball is the best!