I am all about loyalty. I was born in Seattle, Washington, and though I wouldn’t live there again for a million (pre-inflation) bucks, I have never stopped being a fan of the Seattle Mariners. The last time they played in—let alone won—a playoff series, was in 2001 and I was all of nine years old. Their playoff drought of twenty years was the longest in sports, encompassing 3,138 games. This year, that all ended.
On October 8, I watched the Mariners storm back from a score of 8–1 and defeat the Toronto Blue Jays, thereby punching a ticket to the next round (the first “real” round for you purists) of the playoffs—the American League Division Series.
At the time of this writing, the first game of that series is set to start in three hours. Second-year starter Logan Gilbert will face the indomitable Justin Verlander, the ace who simply won’t go away, let alone relinquish his grip on excellence. At the time of posting, that series will be done and dusted, and the Mariners will be either “waiting for next year” or preparing for the American League Championship Series (undoubtedly against the Bronx Bombers). I decided to write this now, and not when the dust settles this time next week, because if the former contingency comes to fruition,* I won’t have the heart to even think the word “Mariners” until next spring; if the latter, then I might need to take a sabbatical, because some deeper magic will clearly be at work.
I say deeper magic because there is always some magic at work in baseball, and in all sport in general. And I say magic because there seems, at least intuitively, to be no better word to describe the wondrous power of sport to charm and capture, to empower and motivate, to build and destroy—and to do so even against your own better judgment. “Why do you do this to yourselves?” my father would ask my brothers and me as time after time the Mariners slumped, usually self-destructively, to yet another losing and forgettable season.
Why does anyone willingly accept to love a team and watch or follow game after game, knowing full well there is a fifty-fifty chance of defeat, perhaps embarrassing defeat, with all that is left to show for the spent time and energy a mass of frustration and regret? And then with the next game, the next series, the next season, you do it all again. Is it for the same reason that you climb the highest mountain, fly the Atlantic, go to the moon?
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.
In his essay “On the Seriousness of Sports,” the late, great Fr. James Schall, S.J., describes one popular explanation for the vast popularity of sports generally speaking, which could in turn explain the ubiquitous phenomenon of fan loyalty: “One popular theory is that people are merely escaping from life, from its seriousness, from the drudgery or boredom of their daily rounds.… Sports are thus considered, in this view, a sort of mild drug, like double-strength Tylenol: harmless enough perhaps, but certainly distracting us from the finer things of life.”
Sport in general is the sedative; the team you follow is your preferred form of that sedative. What you call fanhood is simply brand loyalty. I root for the Mariners the same way I buy Polar seltzer instead of Canada Dry. And it actually matters quite little if the brand I happen to prefer is inferior to other brands; the point isn’t the quality, it’s the sedation. And the sedation you know is better than the sedation you don’t.
Now, Schall argues (quite persuasively) against this account of sports. His self-described “startling” theory is that “the closest the average man ever gets to contemplation in the Greek sense is watching a good, significant sporting event.” Anticipating the objection that this theory but substitutes sport for religion, Schall continues: “I do not intend to argue or imply, as many do, that sports are a form of idolatry, that the game or the players are some form of divinities, even though the origin of games was often clearly related to worship.” Sport can, of course, become an idol—just like any other manifestation of power or pleasure. One could easily and convincingly present a case that in our age it has become just that—a replacement for divine worship or just the better, more enjoyable religion among many.
Those charges may well be accurate, but I think they are matters of secondary concern. The primary concern is that sport as Schall describes is an endangered species. My concern is not so much about whether our faith can survive sport, but whether sport can survive our reason, specifically our “applied science.”
In Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis distinguishes magic from technology (“applied science”); but this distinction is one of degree, not of kind. Lewis likens them to twin siblings: “The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.” Thus, when Lewis says magic, he basically means weak technology. As for the unifying factor between the two:
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.
I claimed that there is a magic to baseball, to sport. If the magic of sport was magic in the sense that Lewis describes, then we would have no problem. The magic of sport would be the pleasant, relatively witless charm of some impoverished but still powerful effort to make reality more enjoyable—to subdue it to our proclivities for competition and entertainment. In this case, we could simply chalk off baseball as one abortive attempt among many to make life less nasty and brutish as we wind our short way to dusty death.
But the magic of sport is not of this kind. What precisely it is, this power of sport to make us “want to hush, then yell, then tell someone about it,” I really can’t say. I think if I could say it, or anyone else could say it, we would break the spell. Some things are and should remain mysteries; once solved, they cease to be what they were. And that is never good. No, but we can say something about the mystery of this power, this magic, of sport. Schall, yet again, puts it well:
In our fascination at watching a game, in reading about one, we have at least one example of something that clearly need not exist, but which, when it does, fascinates us. Games are not necessary. They are not for something else, like exercise.… We stand fascinated just watching before the crap table as we do before the Super Bowl for the same reason: because an event whose result we do not know is playing itself out before our very eyes, a game in which somebody could cheat, and therefore a human game that need not exist at all, like our own lives—need not, but does.
This is part of the deeper magic of sport: that it is gratuitous. It gives us something and we feel drawn, ineluctably, to give something in return. We want to be part of it.
The technocratic age, our age, presents a grave threat to this deeper magic. We are seeking to bend sport to conform to our malformed appetites and evacuated attention spans. This is the way of technology. Applied science subsumed the means and ends of Renaissance magic and upgraded them into a triumphant success: technology. (I’m no ingrate: that success has produced tremendous boons for all of us, not least among them the ability to watch all or as many baseball and football games as I would like.) Technology is now duty-bound to absorb the other major players on the stage of “power”—and this includes the magic of sport—and conform them to its own wishes and ways. Magic is always liable to the judgment of the technical.
And where and how do we see this judgment at work? Look at the rampant technologization of sport. The same guy who sold the education system on the paramount importance of a smartboard in every classroom and an iPad or Chromebook (not playing favorites) in every student’s hand also got to the powers-that-be in football. In the NFL, you get a Microsoft Surface to watch your own greatest mistakes and/or work out your rage over the same. The NCAA doesn’t allow for on-field technology, but no need to worry: your coach up in the box can ring you up on the phone after you throw the interception and let you know just how bad it looks on instant replay. Joking aside, the advancement of analytical mind over the intuitive touch of the game in football is palpable. To feel it, you need only watch one game.
In baseball, the assault of technology on the spirit of the game is in full force. Sabermetrics has been joined by the legion measurements of Statcast. From the mouth of the MLB itself: “Statcast is a state-of-the-art tracking technology that allows for the collection and analysis of a massive amount of baseball data, in ways that were never possible in the past.… Statcast can be considered the next step in the evolution of how we consume and think about the sport of baseball.”
Armed with the innovative measurements of Statcast, I can see how many “Batted Ball Events” a given player produced and know how likely he is to put the ball into play. The “Catch Probability” allows me to assess how likely a ball hit into play, but only in the outfield, will be caught. Or, my personal favorite, the “Hard-Hit Ball,” a hit with an exit velocity of 95 mph or higher, and the “Hard-Hit Rate,” the percentage of batted balls that were hit at 95 mph or more. Yes, yes, they know what we would be thinking. Why 95 mph?
Because…that’s when exit velocity begins to “matter.” Another way of saying that is that balls hit at 40 mph or 70 mph will affect your average exit velocity differently, but in terms of outcomes, they’re just two varieties of weakly hit balls. For true production, you need to get to 95 mph.
And what does this “improvement” get the players of the game? More and better ways to “quantify” skills and predict outcomes. What does it get us, the fans? Supposedly unprecedented new ways of consuming and thinking about the game.
Note, however, how these new ways are presented to us. Not as an interruption of our participation in or enjoyment of baseball, but as the “next step in the evolution” of how we do so. In reality, they prey upon a primary element in the magic of baseball—our power to participate in it. We love baseball, in part, because we feel part of it; they offer us the evident means of becoming Ever-More-So part of it, but in fact we become less part of it, the magic weakens, obscured by the fog of WAR (Wins-Above-Replacement).
Now, how is it the case that this is an actual problem for sport, for baseball, and not simply a curmudgeonly grievance from some Luddite publisher used to backing a losing team? The ever-expanding reach of technology into sport, into baseball, is a problem because it spells the end of sport as we know it and love it. It evacuates the very purpose of sport. And that purpose is that there is no purpose. Despite well-intentioned, well-researched arguments to the contrary, our impulse to watch sports is not, in essence, the product of sublimated spiritual desires, the re-ordering of our loves away from God, family, and country, and toward a mega-complex of entertainment or emotional manipulation. Our obsession with melding science to sport, however, does push us towards into that treacherous territory. The tree of knowledge dealt us death and destruction; adding its fruit to sport, especially baseball, won’t have a different outcome.
The very premise of the Statcast (less the sabermetric) phenomenon is that it’s possible for us to predict the outcome of the game. In no sport is this premise more incongruous than baseball. Baseball is the one sport where the adage, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” actually applies in full force. In football, a game can easily be over—absolutely, positively, guaranteed mathematically over—while the game is still going on. Why? There’s not enough time to change the outcome. Baseball has no time. The game isn’t over until the last out is made. And we all know that. Sure, you can walk out when it’s 8–1 in the sixth inning, but you can’t do so infallibly. You never know what is going to happen. Modeling, analytics, forecasts claim to countermand this assertion; but as every true baseball fan knows, watching and hoping and praying for a hit, for a comeback, for a win, their claim is folly. It’s never over till it’s over.
Ours is an amnesiac age. I understand this perfectly well. But have our memories really failed us to the extent that we have forgotten these wise words of Yogi Berra? “In baseball, you don’t know nothing.” Of course, we do know some-thing; but we don’t know everything. Statcast, sabermetrics, Surface Pros, the whole lot of it: they promise to make that something into something more. Our eyes will be opened: seeing more, knowing more, we will thereby enjoy more. But all of those increases take place only on the level of quantity, never on that of quality. The deeper magic, the mystery, of sport is the keeper of its quality. No technology we devise can change that; but it could destroy it.
In a good game “we near what is best in ourselves, for we are spectators not for any selfish reason, not for anything we might get out of the game, money or exercise or glory, but just because the game is there and we lose ourselves in its playing.” True. But I’ll go one farther than the good Fr. Schall.
The men, women, and children jumping up and down and yelling at the runner to hit the dirt, the cut-off man to throw, the batter to swing—these are men, women, and children unconsciously jumping up and down and yelling for God. And He doubtless hears them. That is the deeper magic of sport. It matters little the myriad tools that technology can array against it. If we keep believing, they can’t take it away from us.
One of the greatest innings in baseball.
* The former contingency did indeed come to fruition. The Mariners fell to the Astros in three games, losing the decisive Game 3 at home by a score of 1–0 after a marathon eighteen-inning contest. “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, It might have been.”
But just wait till next year.
Credits: Seattle Mariners vs. New York Yankees, October 8, 1995, “Ken Griffey, Jr., et al.,” AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, via ESPN.com; “Mariners Fans,” Ben VanHouten/Seattle Mariners, via ESPN.com.