A timeless tradition

Baseball’s doing just fine, thanks.

The best World Series of the past two decades, including one of the greatest single Series games ever, the St. Louis Cardinals crowned champions following their 6-2 win over the Texas Rangers on Friday night, and if not all, at least most is right with the planet.

Not that you would have known at times during the past week or two, as the Rangers and Cards went the distance, and as baseball endured the same kind of "whither the game" scrutiny normally reserved for Canada and hockey.

Lots of talk about television ratings, about how minus the Yankees or Red Sox no one much cared, about how it sure isn’t the way it used to be.

No kidding. It’s not. Kids aren’t sneaking transistor radios into school so they can surreptitiously listen. People aren’t heading down to the telegraph office, waiting for the scores to come in, either.

There are a whole bunch of television channels beyond the Original Twelve. And there’s something called the internet. Families no longer gather around great big wooden consoles to watch the only thing worth watching in what they used to called prime time, because if they missed it, it would be gone forever.

Yes, it’s different now.

There are only rare events, in sports and elsewhere that can captivate a true mass audience. The National Football League has done a miraculous job of keeping the Super Bowl a destination, the World Cup final grabs the attention of much of the planet, the Grey Cup is still is a once-a-year occasion for a whole lot of Canadians, and if you can put guys wearing a red maple leaf into a gold medal hockey game on home soil, nearly every one in this country is going to watch.

Beyond that, though, we have fragmented in our passions. There are no more final episodes of MASH, there is no more can’t miss TV of any sort. When two teams are playing for the Stanley Cup next spring, if one of them isn’t Canadian – check that; if one of them isn’t from Toronto or Montreal or perhaps Vancouver – a nation will not stand still on a lovely June evening to watch the deciding game.

Baseball tends to get all kinds of kneejerk grief at this time of year because it’s a 19th Century game, because it isn’t bound to a clock, because it never fully capitulated to the biff-bam-pow game packaging that once made people think that David Stern was a genius, because it is best appreciated by those who invest a bit of time in trying to understand its nuances. During all of those moments when nothing much is happening, you have to engage, to use your brain and your imagination, and the easy response is that people don’t or won’t do that in these short attention/endless alternatives times.

What gets lost in that tired line of thinking is that Major League Baseball was, in fact, a pioneer in employing and exploiting new media, that both in pushing out games on the net and adding an array of high tech do-dads, they were ahead of the competition. Bud Selig may indeed come off like a rube, but under his watch, MLB has been cutting edge.

And there is a new generation of young, supersmart baseball nuts out there, who love numbers, love the possibilities of advanced statistical analysis and simply love the game. Among other things, they’re producing some of the best and most entertaining sports writing and analysis of the moment – though you won’t find it in newspapers (yep, that’s changed too.)

Not that baseball doesn’t have issues. In an era when it will be harder and harder to get fans out to the arena or the stadium, 162 game seasons represent an enormous amount of inventory to move. It’s certainly not ideal to have the best game of the year finish at 12:30 in the morning in the east (though if you want to talk ratings, a whole lot of people seem to have stayed up to watch David Freese’s walk off home run), and there are troubling signs at the grassroots - fewer and fewer North American kids are playing baseball, and the African American community has all but abandoned the game.

But you could similarly pick holes in the future of professional football, or basketball or hockey, and you could similarly argue that none of them have the power to capture the attention of everyone as they once did.

All true. And also true that baseball has unique virtues, that in a world in which you can watch anything, anytime, in which it all tends to blur together, what we saw these past few days was unique to that single sport. Other games can deliver other thrills, but none could have replicated the complex pleasures of this World Series.

If you tuned in, you understand.