Baseball and the Allotment of Hope

6 May, 2009

Baseball is unique among the popular American sports – it is older, it is pastoral, it is untimed.

But, perhaps, its most significant quirk is that in being an untimed game there are specified times when a team simply cannot score. The separation of the game into innings creates this – compare the defensive half of an inning of baseball to defense in basketball or football. In either of these sports the defensive team can create a sudden change: an interception in football or a steal and the accompanying fast break can lead to points directly related to the defensive play. In a football game, either team can score as many as 6 points on any given play, in hockey or basketball possessions are fluid and can lead to changes in offensive team in rapid succession.

But in baseball, no matter how well (or poorly) either team plays defensively there are always three outs per half an inning. A team cannot steal a possession; they cannot get out of an inning with only two outs, or sneak in a fourth. Needless to say this can mess with the head of neurotic baseball fans.

Baseball fans almost have to be more neurotic than those of other sports – likely because the game is untimed. Any inning can turn into a disaster and there is no clock to save you. A “1-2-3 inning” can get stuck at two outs and become a 12 run catastrophe. A complete game no-hit bid can be ruined and turn into a loss with one bad pitch in the ninth…. its happened before, it will happen again.

And that’s what gets us. When your team is on defense you can never really relax. Because nothing good can happen (at least score-wise), the best that can happen is preventing bad things – think about that.

(Perhaps that’s why a ballplayer can get away with failing two out of every three times to the plate and still be considered great; the fans don’t notice because we’re all trying to regain our composure after holding our breath.)

But, this is why baseball has better fans than other sports, to truly respect baseball a fan needs to be able to handle ½ of a game where only bad things can happen.

Of course, this peculiarity of baseball also leads to a false hope for the home team.

But, there’s always hope (when you're the home team)

Unlike some other sports baseball has a tangible home field advantage beyond drunks yelling at an opposing player. The last at-bat creates a unique scenario in baseball. In timed sports like football towards the end of a game there is no guarantee of another possession, let alone enough chances for a team to win in every single circumstance. But with baseball, there is.

Even some other untimed sports cannot claim this – bowling for example. Even though frames resemble innings in some ways, there are a finite number of pins one can knock down in each one. In bowling a game can be literally decided after the ninth frame, but with baseball the winner is not decided until the home team has received their final at-bat.

This is what can play with the mind of a fan, because every fan has turned off a game after their team had it’s at bat in the eighth when they were down by seven only to be asked the following day “did you see that comeback??” And in the mind of a fan this is a terrible thing to accept, that their team, in fact, did not need their subliminal backing.

Beyond the guilt of abandoning their team this also creates the possibility of a comeback in nearly every situation, cruelly injecting hope into the heart of the most abysmal situations (your author was a fan of the 2003 Tigers, yes the 119 loss Tigers, so he knows about abysmal situations).

Football fans can leave when their team is down by 25 points with one minute left because, mathematically they cannot comeback to win, it’s literally impossible. But baseball does not allow this luxury – we have to sit and watch until the last out in the ninth is recorded.

Of course, it never happens, until that one time you don't watch then...

“did you see that comeback??”