Don’t get me wrong: I love baseball. Always have, always will.
But I have to say that baseball is, not to put to fine a point on it, boring. Long stretches of inactivity are integral components of the game’s charm — like all the players warming-up between every half-inning, or the pitcher throwing over to first five consecutive times to hold a baserunner close to the bag, or the batter backing out of the box to scratch himself right there on nationwide TV, or the lonely outfielder who’s never involved in a single play for the entire game, or the radio announcers babbling on and on to camouflage the fact that nothing is happening on the field.
Of course, baseball has its moments, and great moments they are, when everything happens at once: a hit-and-run play or a bases-loaded triple, for example. But those are the exceptions. (When’s the last time you saw a bases-loaded triple?) And I have to admit that sometmes the excitement becomes unbearable even when there’s virtually no real action: My most memorable in-person baseball experience was a no-hitter (i.e., nine innings of sustained immobility) that clinched the pennant (Mike Scott for the Astros).
To repeat: I love baseball, and I recognize that part of its pastoral essence is inaction. Still, over the years, for me the boring parts have gotten the upper hand; I’ve lost patience and can’t sit still long enough to watch a game. A couple of innings and I’m ready to move on. Like virtually everyone else’s, my attention span has shrunk. When I was growing up, I had a friend, Richard Krochock — sadly now deceased — who was so annoying that I used to say that I really liked him but I simply couldn’t stand spending any time with him. And that pretty well sums up my attitutde toward baseball these days.
Thus, when I read this in the Boston Globe‘s invariably-interesting “Ideas” section today the light bulb immediately lit up in my head. The point of the piece is that nothing really happens on ball two. After two strikes, for examples, batters change their strategy, choking up and trying to make instead of swinging from the heels. After one ball or three balls, odds on various things happening change perceptibly. Ball one matters. Ball three matters. Strikes one and two matters. But ball two is just sort of there, filling in the space and taking up the time between ball one and ball three.
bq. Ball two stands alone, above any of the other dull business on the diamond. The intentional walk at least adds a base runner to the game. The halfhearted throw to first to check the runner is a sign that the pitcher is feeling tension. But ball two signifies almost nothing.
Huh? Well, it turns out — according to sportswriter Joe Posnanski’s analysis of more than a million pitcher-batter matchups, that “Ball two is where the supposedly perfect tuning of baseball goes flat. As long as four is greater than three, there will be a slack moment at the heart of the game, when the hitter and pitcher are both content to put off the final reckoning.” That moment is ball two.
If you’ve ever tried to explain baseball to a neophyte, you’ll know that one of the first questions you’re likely to have gotten was why there are three strikes but four balls. Out of the mouths of babes sometimes come great insights. If ball two doesn’t really contribute anything to the dynamics of the game, if it’s just a time-wasting way station between ball one and ball three, then why not just relegate it to the bullpen, out of sight where it can’t hold things up? Just imagine how much more smoothly things would go if, with the count, say, 1-1, the pitcher threw a wide one and the count shot upward, not to 2-1 but to 3-1! It wouldn’t hurt a thing, and the quality of our lives (well, mine anyway) would be improved immeasurably. Why, I might even stick around for three innings, instead of just two, before changing the channel.