Major League Baseball Is Back, and Maybe Worse Than Ever
On Thursday afternoon, in the overpriced and stratified city that I now call home, the San Francisco Giants will play their home opener against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Giants are among the favorites to win the World Series, which, if it happens, would be their fourth title in seven seasons. The Giants also play in what is widely regarded as baseball’s most picturesque stadium, a placid pitchers’ ballpark named after a telecommunications giant and set hard against the waterfront.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is seemingly very little wrong with baseball in San Francisco. The Giants are an exemplary franchise with exemplary leadership and a wealth of homegrown talent; the Giants signed a pair of high-priced free-agent pitchers in the offseason in an attempt to further the even-year numerology that has come to define this era. Until Stephen Curry began defying the space-time continuum, the Giants were the primary show in town, and because the Warriors still play in a no-frills Oakland arena for the moment, the Giants remain the most popular sporting experience in the city.
But then, I imagine you could also say there is very little wrong with baseball in cities like St. Louis and Chicago and Boston and Kansas City, where the sport still drives the cultural conversation and spurs sports-talk radio discourse throughout much of the year. From city to city (with the possible exception of the southern doldrums of Tampa Bay and Miami), baseball is as healthy as it has ever been. And yet this leads us to the paradox that baseball has long confronted, ever since football surpassed it as the national pastime (and even long before that): Every offseason, we find ourselves bandying about the notion of whether baseball itself might be slowly dying from the inside.
I don’t mean this literally, of course, because baseball is not literally dying, and baseball is in no danger of literally dying (well, sort of). It’s making far too much money, both through local attendance and through national television deals, for that to be the case. But as Ben McGrath pointed out in The New Yorker a couple of years back, every discussion of baseball’s health can essentially be peeled in a pair of directions: There is the economic, and there is the cultural. And it is the culture of baseball that has been the repeated source of the debate. And it is the culture of baseball that prompts the majority of the concern-trolling.
A few weeks ago, speaking to Tim Keown of ESPN the Magazine, Bryce Harper, the 23-year-old hipster-coiffed force of nature for the Washington Nationals, triggered yet another round of discussion. Harper declared baseball to be “a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair.” Harper was not the first person to point this out, but his quote was featured prominently in a national magazine, and so it prompted the kind of back-and-forth about baseball’s largely unwritten code of conduct that has been carrying on for decades.