Opinion: End baseball’s beauty scams

The following admission may come as a shock to those who know me: I am now a conservative. When it comes to baseball, that is.

I watched the missed check-swing call that allowed the Dodgers to win a game against the Rockies last month in an unlikely return and to the fury of Colorado fans. The referee’s clear error will only increase demands that check-swing calls be included in the instant replay protocol.

But the subjectivity of the check-swing is a fundamental part of the way baseball is supposed to work: humanly, in sublime, sometimes maddening imperfection. MLB interventions to “fix” this – bigger bases, the ghost runner on second base in extra innings, hitters limited to one timeout per hit, and worst of all, the pitch clock – are blows against the beauty of the game.

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Admittedly, these changes seem to be quite popular. Games went on longer and longer, with incessant pitch changes, slow hitters and, yes, replay analysis. But what monstrous arrogance to think we know better than baseball’s Original Builders! Ninety feet between the bases, 60 feet, 6 inches between the pitching rubber and the home plate – these are divinely induced measurements. Start messing with the lore and the core of the game gets lost to the hyper-regulated “reality.”

Baseball is not reality. It is a myth carried out by real bodies. And imperfection, which is also the unexpected, beyond the reach of metrics, is where magic comes from – magical triumph and magical heartbreak, larger than life, operatic.

There is no doubt that football is the “beautiful game,” but baseball gives it a run for its money. Its very beauty resulted from the gradual addition of tradition, which gave us a poetics.

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Languor is one of the essential characteristics of baseball. Apparently nothing happens for long minutes; no one scores, there are no “bang-bang” double plays, just lazy fly balls and ground dribbles; you are led by the lullaby of sun and beer into a somnambulistic state.

And then, “just like that,” as Vin Scully used to say, there is a majestic home run, a leaping catch, a fierce duel between pitcher and batter, a spectacular strikeout. The outburst of affection is all the more powerful for emerging so suddenly from the caesura. (Football fans experience a version of these symphonic rhythm changes on the field.)

The temporality of baseball is inseparable from its physical dimensions, the space-time of the game. The vast swath of grass between the outfielders, the spots closest to the infielders, the focus tunnel that connects pitcher, batter, catcher and umpire.

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The imperfection of the referees is indispensable in the gestalt. Video appeals rob us of the opportunity to yell at the referee to get glasses or suffer far worse. A failed call can lead to simultaneous jubilation and heartbreak, with the losers tearing off their clothes and suffering the insult of being “robbed”.

Everything as it should be.

I say bring smaller bags and keep stealing a base, a rare art! I say: Enough with the ghost runner (what did he do to deserve to be there?) and spend all night with drunk players, if that’s what the game requires. And above all I say: break the course clock with an Adirondack club. The shot clock is an abomination beneath the baseball paradise, depriving us of the organic crescendo of tension in an epic hit in the final innings of a close World Series game (Kirk Gibson, 1988).

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When I interviewed Scully after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, I asked him what he had said on air about the chaos that unfolded that first night when a game was taking place at Dodger Stadium. “I didn’t say a word,” he told me. He thought first of his responsibility to the fans and their safety – what if he caused panic? And he added: “There should be a place where the rest of the world doesn’t intrude.”

He might as well have said that baseball is sacred. It must not be disturbed. Not even (as if that were possible) by the story itself.

In all of this, I consider myself much more conservative than, say, old-school, bow-tie traditionalist George Will, who for the first time endorses “progressive” in the form of the new rules that he thinks augur a baseball comeback to its unique status as a national pastime. The game, packed with game metrics, Will arguedit is bloated not by poetic languor but by analytical tedium.

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It’s true, Mr. Will. We agree about baseball’s slow death by numbers. At the end of the day, all measurements miss the mark – the ineffable beauty of a summer afternoon that slowly turns into night at the stadium.

Some of us know when a cure is worse than the disease.

There’s a reason why baseball was famously the sport of choice for American literati in the middle of the 20th century. And the field clock was not part of the poetry.

Rubén Martínez is a professor of literature at Loyola Marymount University, author of several books, and co-creator and executive producer of the performance piece “Little Central America, 1984.”

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This story originally appeared on Los Angeles Times.