baseball_sucks_or_it_doesnt

Baseball Sucks (Or, It Doesn't)

(Originally published September 2, 2011)

TUESDAY AFTERNOON, looking for ways to waste time before doing actual work, I stopped by Clikit or Tikit, podcast of longtime friends Pete, Nick, and (returning soon) Glenn. I clicked Episode 112, the latest one I hadn't yet heard, and, 26 minutes in, received quite the surprise.

I’ll explain what that was shortly.

First, a story…

Last September I was down in New Orleans for pre-production on a movie. I didn’t know the city yet or anyone in it, with two exceptions: first, a gelato place that also served paninis; second, the girl who worked there. Our film’s location manager took us during a scouting session, and I liked it well enough that I went back that Friday. That’s when we met.

Because it was the South, she struck up the conversation. “What brought you down to New Orleans?” she asked. I told her I’d written a movie. Then she said, “Really? I’m training to be an actress!”

Now, the correct thing to do in that situation is offer her a bit part in exchange for sex. I didn’t do that; I’m not that quick on my feet. But we talked for over an hour, a conversation interrupted constantly by other customers, yet one she kept starting back up every chance she got, laughing and smiling the whole time. I left kicking myself for not asking her out. Next time, I decided.

One week later, I went back to try their house special panini (or so I claimed). She was even more flirtatious than the last time, but the place was too busy for her to talk. If I wanted to keep things rolling, I’d need to order more food.

Later, while scooping my Guinness-flavored gelato, she asked, “So, do you have to do work this weekend?”
“No, I’ll probably just watch football all day,” I said.

I left. But instead of going to my car, I walked half a mile in the wrong direction, eating gelato and thinking:

Wait, did she just ask what I was doing this weekend? (Like I said, I’m not that quick on my feet.)

While I struggled to work up the courage to go back, I accidentally dropped a spoonful of Guinness gelato on the front of my shirt. Just the opening I needed.

I went back. The place was empty except for my soon-to-be girlfriend. I walked up to the counter cheerfully and said, “Hey, I just dropped a bunch of gelato on my shirt.”
“Oh my goodness!” she said, and started wetting a napkin at the sink.
“Actually, that’s not really why I came back. You asked what I was doing this weekend and it totally went over my head. Do you want to go out sometime?”
“Oh no!  I’m married!” She couldn’t have been over 27, but apparently she’d been married for a long time. Because it was the South.

That was one of very few attempts I made to meet someone after my last relationship, and it reminded me why. Then I remembered my stated plans for the weekend: “I’ll probably just watch football all day.”

Oh yeah. Football. Not only did I have a Plan B if I got turned down, it was better than my Plan A.

That weekend, Gameday Saturday through Sunday Night Football, I watched every game, and wrote a 3000-word essay entitled “Why Football?” As the NFL season began precisely the weekend I needed football the most, I wrote that football was not only great but the greatest. I left a caveat at the end that the opinions expressed were strictly my own, and that I’m very open-minded about the opinions of others, but my overall tone conveyed that all other sports are stupid and their fans are idiots.

Not everyone appreciated that.

Friends who love football, did, of course, but friends who prefer baseball did not. I only have two – to my knowledge – but those two have a podcast. 26 minutes into Episode 112, my reckoning arrived.

During a lull in the conversation about our fantasy football league, Nick says, “…Oh yeah! Critelli wrote this long essay about American football being “the best sport…” Pete then groans loudly, and things get ugly.

Or so I figured.

When I got to that point in the podcast, I turned it off. It was Tuesday, I had work to do, and I didn’t want to get into some serious shit right then and there.

Instead, I used it as motivation; if I got my work done, I’d be able to listen to it today – Thursday – and draft a response. I didn’t know what their arguments would be, but I started crafting some needlessly aggressive attacks anyway, like, “The reason people think they like baseball is because their dads made them watch it growing up, like how people who get kidnapped fall in love with their captors due to Stockholm Syndrome.”

But when I finally listened to it, I had a completely different reaction. Admittedly, it was an off-the-cuff conversation in response to something I’d written 3000 words on, so it wouldn’t be fair to start quoting and trying to discredit every talking point, piece by piece (as I was afraid they’d done to me; they hadn’t). Instead, I’m going to see if I can take them up on their challenge to be a guest on their podcast and have a no-holds-barred, WWE-style cage-match showdown on this very topic.

I don’t know how far that would get us, though. Here’s why…

First, as Pete says on the ‘cast, “Why Football?” is basically the only non-comedy piece on my site. I guess it has to do with the subject matter. Things like anxiety and depression, sexual humiliation, and religious disillusionment are light and silly. Football is more important to me than those things. This piece probably won’t be funny either. In fact, this is about to get extreme abstract and heady.

Sorry.

I’m a different person now than I was at the start of the 2010 NFL season (football is also how I measure time). One thing I believe, now more than ever, is that everyone’s opinions are “true.” We use the word “opinion” and say opinions are subjective, but reality is personal and subjective. Each person is the center of his or her own reality, and one’s perspective – and “opinions” – not only explain their reality but shape it. People develop beliefs either from what they’re told or what they discover through experience, and however those beliefs initially form, people then spend the rest of their lives gathering information that supports their worldview and ignoring information that doesn’t. By “ignoring,” I mean they either dismiss arguments to the contrary or literally don’t see them despite their being in plain sight, unless something occurs that forces them to reevaluate everything. This can happen not just with individuals but whole societies; 20th century philosopher Thomas Kuhn coined the term “paradigm shift” to describe it.

Here’s a concrete example: children who are taught that talent is the most important factor for their success will respond worse to failure than children who are taught that hard work is most important, because the former believe their fate is something innate and out of their control, and therefore they cede control over it. Another example: an adult who encounters obstacles on the way to a goal can view them either as challenges or reasons to quit. Whatever she decides they are, that’s what they become.

It might seem like I’m laying the groundwork for a massive beatdown of Pete and Nick, not just for their opinions on sports but their entire life philosophies. (That would be cool, but I’m not.) Because as I listened to why they prefer baseball to football, I realized we were both working from the same set of facts, but our beliefs – both about what makes sports compelling and what actually takes place in any given moment in our sport of choice – are completely different.

Everything we are saying is true. To us.

One of the reasons Pete and Nick prefer baseball is that it’s better to talk about because you know what’s going on at any given moment. You can see all the important players on a given play, know what they’re doing and how they affect one another. You can isolate performance and quantify it with an array of statistical measures. With a large enough sample size – 162 games, say – you can detect measurable trends.

Compare that to football, where there are only 16 games – 12 or 13 for college – and the players are part of units - defensive secondary, offensive line, etc. - which mask individual performance. Very often it’s difficult to isolate standout players and explain what’s happening. You can’t even see the whole field; the wide shots used on most football plays aren’t wide enough to show where the players in the defensive secondary are located, so you don’t really know what a play looks like when it begins.

I say football’s better to talk about because it's unknowable. If people can come up with different explanations for the same thing and no one can be definitively proven right, it makes for better discussion, assuming you buy into my philosophy of “everyone is right, to themselves.” Which I do.

Here's an interesting NFL fact: “Through 2010, Ben Roethlisberger is 7-2 as a starter against the Ravens during the regular season, with both losses occurring in 2006, the year that Roethlisberger’s Steelers would win the Superbowl. He also has a 2-0 record in the postseason versus Baltimore.” Why is this interesting? Throughout Ben Roethislerger’s time in the NFL, the Baltimore Ravens have had one of the best defenses in the NFL and their record overall is similar to that of the Steelers. So why is Ben Roethlisberger – one of the most inconsistent “elite” quarterbacks in the NFL – so good against the Ravens? Is the Ravens defense not suited to the types of schemes the Steelers run? Is Ben Roethlisberger “in the Ravens’ head?” Do the Steelers get up for the Ravens because it’s a divisional rivalry? Is it a total statistical fluke? That these questions exist and can’t really be answered means they’re worth discussing. To me.

There’s a weekly column on ESPN that’s unlike anything else on ESPN called Tuesday Morning Quarterback. It runs about fifteen pages long and much of it has nothing to do with football, though every week it contains a list of bizarre, noteworthy NFL stats. Here’s the list from November 30, 2010:

Football is full of fluky statistics. I enjoy it, Nick and Pete don’t. Nick on the podcast mentions another interesting statistic: all together, the amount of time Peyton Manning physically has the ball in his hands during a season is about fifteen minutes total; on a given play, he either hands it off to a running back or throws it to a wide receiver immediately after the play starts (generally within 2-3 seconds). After that, the rest of the play isn't up to him. It begs the question, again, how can you measure individual performance in football? Most of the game has nothing to do with any one player.

That’s never been a problem for me. I think I can explain why, for me, but maybe you’ll disagree, for you.

Most people see sports in terms of narratives. Pete and Nick refer to this derisively as the ESPN way of discussing sports, but I would argue ESPN’s rise is due to their recognition of a universal need.

Why do we watch sports?

The success or failure of people who have nothing to do with us, playing a game that has no intrinsic stakes, should not be compelling. I find it hard to believe that sports fans do not – consciously or unconsciously – use sports as a metaphor for something bigger. I believe most fans, on some level, use sports as a way to find the meaning of life.

For that purpose I think football is better. But that requires you to see football the way I do. Also, life.

One of the central tenets of both Buddhism and Hinduism is that the source of suffering is attachment: to possessions, to people, and, especially, to outcomes. What we hope will happen rarely happens, or not the way we plan, and that can be a source of profound disappointment if we allow it to be. The reason our expectations differ from reality isn’t chaos or random chance, but a confluence of an infinite number of individual forces that are fairly predictable on their own, but, combined, become impossible for the human mind to process. Because we cannot predict what will happen, we can only play our limited role to the best of our ability, and be prepared to respond to circumstances as they arise, whatever they may be.

In other words, if the girl at the gelato place turns out to be married, you can either sulk about it or write an essay on football that continues to piss people off a full football season later.

That’s the life narrative that makes sense to me. Baseball doesn’t fit that. To me. Most sports don’t. To me. Football does. I can give examples why or why not, but doing so would imply that my examples would be understood the way I understand them, which they most certainly would not. Someone else could advance the exact opposite theory using the same examples. Everything “true” is true to whomever decides it.

The exception to this kind of thinking is, apparently, baseball, where everything can be explained concretely and backed up with statistics.

That’s why baseball sucks. Or, it doesn’t. It all depends on who you ask.