Maybe of No Significance
It's just a change or two in the rule book. But why now?
Loo
We experience in our dreams and our games the narratives we live in our daily lives. That is, our games, whether as players or spectators, enact the essential traumas and unfinished hopes of our lives. We play out in another dimension our personal struggles and enjoy for the moment a more ideal world. Never a perfect world as it retains the struggle of our own battles against the odds. But it allows winning.
Baseball in its different forms has been a consistent American “game.” From agrarian to urban. From frontier to immigrant struggle in has mirrored our lives.
So it is interesting to examine rule changes. What might they tell us about the turns and twists that we are experiencing in modern America?
I’m thinking about appeals to “experts” to reverse umpire calls, or a “robot” calling balls and strikes. What does this tell us about either the drift of social reality or the myths of social reality, or the fears we face in our daily lives?
Baseball has embodied uncertainty. The chances of human error. The fortune of luck. There is no certainty that the ball will bounce straight. There is no certainty that the umpire will call a strike a strike.
If the odds are balanced, that is if the umpire calls it the same way for both teams, then we accept the game. So too we accept our fate in life?
Now we demand greater certainty. Why? Are we facing greater uncertainty in today’s world, more than we can handle? Or do we no longer need the gifts of luck? It’s one of the ways in which “underdogs” in a society that promises more than it delivers and always puts more cards in one hand than in another, gives hope. The underdog sometime wins when the Umpire makes the wrong call. Or say that the teams with less money to spend on superstars need a break to say “alive.” Winning one game out of three is enough for most people. At least for me. It keeps us loyal to a system. Which is good, I argue, most of the time.
Or is it that the advantaged teams simply want to win all the time? And I’m thinking, of course, of more than baseball.
I guess I’m one of the old-timers that remember Bill Klem, the stern larger than life man in black, the arbiter of the game, the determiner of my fate. Who gives me four swings at Walter Johnson’s fast ball. Because he’s human and I need the extra strike some of the time because I’m human.