Baseball
I like hotdogs.
I really do. But they are in no way my favorite part of baseball.
In fact, they are not even part of baseball.
Try and find hot dogs in the Official MLB rules.
GO ahead.
Do it.
I’ll even supply the link to you.
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/officialinfo/officialrules/foreword.jsp
Done looking? Couldn’t find it huh…
That’s because it’s not part of the game. It’s part of the experience.
And there is a difference.
Growing up in Northern Delaware, there was no doubt I would be a Phillies fan. From my Dad’s influence, growing up a Phillies fan was as much of a given as learning English. In the lean years after the strike until recently I would joke with friends and family that growing up a Phillies fan was akin to child abuse. I grew up with Harry Kalas’s voice as familiar to me as my fathers. It was like losing a family member when Harry died in 2009 and I remember tears coming to my eyes as i sat at work when i heard the news while looking at the only photo on my desk at the time, of me meeting Mr Kalas.
My Dad, with his Mike Schmidt style mustache that he’s has worn my entire life, likes to tell me stories about how I watched the 1980 world series with him on his lap, and how we used to only buy Phillies hot dogs to collect the discount coupons in them for phillies games. I cant remember my first baseball game, because I’m pretty sure I went to games forever. Sitting in the 700 level, watching games at the vet with my dad and his friends. It’s
My dad taught me how to play baseball. How to catch, how to hit, and was even my little league coach. Dad taught me how to throw a curve ball, shame my curve ball sucked.
When my grandmother, my dads mother, fell ill and was hospitalized in my late teen, we sat in her hospital room keeping watch over her, drinking coffee, and watching our phightens… filling the awkward silence with the one thing we could talk about, baseball.
I mention these things because baseball has always existed in my life and has as much an emotional attachment to me as it does anyone else. My close family times with baseball helps to feed my passion and emotion for the game. However it is not the sum of it all. At the end of the day it’s about the game. Not the nostalgia for days past, nor for the experience of being at the ball park eating a hot dog. Sure fireworks after the game are exciting. Sure the solo shot in the 5th inning gets the crowd cheering and the CBP bell ringing. Yet it’s merely just the environment in which the true show takes place. The real excitement is about the battle between the pitcher and the batter. The connection between the Pitcher and the Catcher. The 162 Games a year, 54 outs a game, 9 innings, 4 Balls, 3 Strikes, 2 teams.
Numbers. Lots of numbers. Numbers are the way we understand the game. Beyond the pure emotional experience of cheering for your team and rooting for your favorite player.
Kids like the experience. You take your 9 year old daughter or son, niece or nephew, grandson or granddaughter to a game and she wants an ice cream, a hot dog and some cotton candy. She’s just happy to be there with you to watch a few innings. She hopes to get a foul ball or see a home run and watch the bell ring, but by the 7th inning she wants to head over to the kids zone to go on the slide or play in the ball pit to run off the sugar high, crash and then wake up in the 9th inning asking “Did we win?”
I imagine being a Casual Fan is very similar to watching the game as a 9 year old. The passion is just not there as it is with more invested fans. A casual fan can detach themselves from the team. Sometimes for years at a time between good seasons or playoff runs. They just don’t feel the same amount of pain of each loss as more invested fans do and as one of my friends mentioned, “if they win, cool, if they lose, eh”.
For more invested fans however no such relief is available. Each loss in a good season is like a stake to the soul. In Will Leitch’s book “Are We winning yet” he describes how “die hard” fans watch games with less hope that they win, and more hope that they don’t lose. Bad seasons weigh on the heart through the playoffs and does not end when another team lifts the trophy. Off season moves by the front office are followed with more attention then a presidential race and they await the winter meetings in Early December almost as they do pitchers and catchers reporting in February.
Yet through all this the result of each season fails to damper their passions for their team in any way. They still follow each game, each pitch and every at bat for 9 long innings and 162 games. Early mornings find them still checking box scores daily and hoping beyond hope that their team comes together for just one magical run you will remember for a lifetime.
As you get older you begin to get a richer more mature understanding and appreciation of the game. Just hoping for a hit or a home run begins to evolve into understanding the probability that your favorite player will actually deliver. You begin to understand why the lead-off hitter watches the first few pitches in his at bat, why throwing a fastball for a strike isnt always the best pitch to make, how while Jeter makes lots of acrobatic plays and looks cool doing it, he’s not the best defensive player in the game.
And we use statistics to have a deeper understanding that it’s not just a “will he hit or will he miss” outcome to a pitched ball. Some are simple and quick to understand: Hits, Runs, RBI’s, Errors, Strikeouts, Walks. Some are more complex: ERA, Batting Average, On Base Percentage, Slugging Percentage, OPS, WORP, WAR, RAR, VORP, BaIP, WHIP, Fielding Percentage, and Range Factor.
Does the complexity of those numbers make them any less relevant or important to a baseball fan? Absolutely not. If anything they help you to see the game beyond just wins and losses, which for alot of us with teams not often playing late into October you pore over to validate your love for your team. If you just start paying attention when your team does well, hell, you miss a lot of great baseball.
Remembering you have a team during the years they make the playoffs or win a world series are key indications of a casual fan. Fans who do not make an effort to watch or attend a game in a span of time that includes months let alone years how do you make the case that you are a true “fan” of the game. I think Casual observer might be a better and more polite term. Bandwagon fan might be a more brutal yet more accurate one.
I’m not saying there is a right or wrong way to be “fan”. Everyone cheers for their team in their own way and shows their appreciation for their team based on their own personality. I’m also not trying to indicate there are better or worse fans of baseball. Ok, that last part is probably not true. There are definitely bad fans, but that’s not the point I’m making with this article. My point of contention is that there are fans enjoy the experience of going to a game and there are fans that enjoy the game. Trying to say one is better because of stats or heart, or the experience, or thrill of cheering are delusional.
Limiting your view of stats to the basic ones like wins, walks, runs, home runs, and strikeouts, while easy to understand really truly limits your experience of the game. Otherwise your just sitting in a concrete bowl, cheering for whatever spectacle is placed in front of you. Whats the difference between the teams? The sports?
When you strip off the stitches and peel back the outer layer to peer inside a baseball, you’ll be amazed at just how much goes into such a simple artifact of summer. The tightly packed wool and cotton yarn around a cork rubber core belies it’s simple nature.
This analogy holds true to the relationship of baseball and it’s reams of stats.
In ’72 the phils won under 60 games. But Carlton had 27 wins, a WHIP of .993!!! a league leading ERA+ of 182!!! AND a WAR of 12.2! One of the greatest and most dominating years of a Phillies pitcher. On a team that wouldn’t even get a whiff of the playoffs for 4 more years.But if your just focused on the teams wins, and don’t follow the game until they are making a pennant run, you might miss it.
Sure the 2000 Red Sox finished 12 games over .500 and missed the playoffs but Pedro Martinez had one of the most dominating pitching seasons of all time. 18 wins, an 1.74 ERA, a historically best WHIP of .737, 11.8 SO/9, ERA+ of 291!!!!! And a WAR of 10.1! Is David Wells the better pitcher that year because he had 20 wins?
