Baseball is America’s game

Home Opinion Baseball is America’s game
Baseball is America’s game
Andrew Verbrugge pitches during a game last season. Courtesy | Trish Verbrugge

The average softball fan or player loves the game for what it is: an intense, fast-paced team game that is a good and exciting spectator sport. The average baseball fan or player loves the game for what it is: a complex game noted for its extraordinary difficulty, its uniqueness, and its profound impact on American history. 

I will not entirely discredit softball, a baseball-like game called “kitten ball” in its early days, but baseball and softball are not comparable games. One only has to look as far as stadiums, history, and actual performance to see this.

Look at the fields and stadiums that encompass softball and baseball. All college softball fields have to have outfield dimensions within a certain range, according to the NCAA’s official softball field diagram outline. On the contrary, college baseball fields only have “recommended” numbers for the outfield dimensions, and in Major League Baseball, no two stadiums are alike. 

Each MLB park reflects not only the uniqueness of the game, but also the uniqueness and character of the city in which it is being played. A drowsy fly ball could be a home run in the high-altitude Coors Field in Denver but an out in almost all other stadiums. A 375-foot line drive to right field at Chicago’s Wrigley Field could be an easy out because of Lake Michigan’s winds, but the same line drive could scream over Yankee Stadium’s 314-foot right field wall by 60 feet. The variety of stadiums alone make baseball strategically more difficult, architecturally more unique, and aesthetically more pleasing than all other sports.

Let’s zoom out. Baseball’s history is vast and important to America’s own history. The first mention of the word “baseball” in print was back in 1744. The oldest written rules date back to 1845. But go look up the major league players that contributed extensively to the world wars. One source says that 38% of major league players at the time fought in WWI, including future Hall of Fame players. Hank Greenberg and Bob Feller were the first professional athletes in America to be enlisted in the 1940 peacetime draft and the 1941 draft after Pearl Harbor respectively. Ted Williams, arguably the best hitter to ever live, gave up four years to fight in WWII and the Korean War, earning ten medals while doing so.

Baseball was a precursor to the civil rights movement. Go read about people in 1940s to 1960s baseball like Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, who helped break the color barrier in the MLB, Buck O’Neil, the first African-American manager in the MLB after playing in the Negro Leagues for 18 years, and Curt Flood, who was a pivotal figure in striking down the reserve clause and the MLB’s antitrust status in the 1970s and 1980s.

In terms of Hillsdale’s history, it may behoove the curious reader to go read two editions of the Hillsdale Collegian from early April 2009, which show what happened the last time someone made fun of baseball and the baseball players on this campus. (Hint: they deserved it.)

True sports fans know that the excellence of a sport extends beyond the stadiums in which the sport is played, perhaps the aforementioned incident aside. It is clear to see that baseball is America’s game, and America is the only place for baseball to be. 

Enough about history. Let’s look at the game itself. Baseball demands a variety of physicalities, unlike many other sports. Compare 5-foot-6-inch Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros to 6-foot-8-inch Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees to 6-foot, 285-pound “Big Sexy” Bartolo Colon himself, each worthy of the Hall of Fame after they retire. 

A baseball game contains swathes of time in which unconditioned eyes get bored. What those eyes miss is tension, suspense. Thankfully, some sports still have room for contemplation and conversation, which other sports might have if there was anything to talk about besides the game clock (which baseball doesn’t have), brute athletic force, and tactics better suited for war than art. This can make the action, when it happens, blisteringly fast — faster than the blink of an eye.

On the more physical level of hitting and pitching, the act of throwing a baseball is one of the most unnatural and violent momentary strains on the body in sports. While softball players might have slightly less time to react to a pitch (.1-.15 seconds, an eternity in these games), the longer distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate in baseball only makes pitches that move harder to hit. The highest single-season batting average between 2008 and 2018 in NCAA DII baseball averaged at .406. In DII softball, it averaged at .539 over the same time span. Softball pitchers, even great ones, cannot make their pitches move as much as baseball pitchers can. In the MLB, no one has had a higher single-season batting average than Ted Williams’ .406 in 1941, and nowadays it takes around a .340 batting average to be the best in the league. Success is harder to achieve because the expectation is higher because it is just more difficult.

The fields and stadiums are better. The history is richer. The players are more unique. Everything happens faster. It isn’t even close. 

Softball is hard. Baseball is harder. Almost all sports have something that they do well. Baseball just happens to be better at almost everything.

 

Marcus Lotti is a senior studying English.