Martin Schneider writes:
There’s been an interesting back and forth on the New Yorker blog pages about Adam Gopnik’s decision to forsake baseball. To recap: Gopnik announced that he no longer much likes baseball, Richard Brody and Ben McGrath responded, then Gopnik wrote again, and so forth. The exchange may not even be over. The best way to follow it all may be to go to the Sporting Scene section and read them in order.
All parties have been intelligent in their advocacy, and I write not so much to correct Brody and McGrath as to supplement them. I find Gopnik’s line of thinking not very convincing and even a bit disingenuous, and since I am a big baseball fan, I thought I would explain why.
Yesterday I attended the home opener for the Cleveland Indians in Progressive Park. The Rangers beat the Indians, 4 to 2, in 10 innings, alas. I was there with three friends, and we had a good time in our outfield seats. Along the way we discussed the unkillable “problem” of baseball losing popularity.
How shall I say this: unlike any endeavor I can think of, baseball is littered with testaments to why baseball is no longer what it once was and also attempts to understand why it will soon not be what it now is. That is to say, baseball fans are constantly telling you that baseball today sucks, and there are two possible offshoots to that premise: first, that the speaker is newly disenchanted (Gopnik); and second, that future generations may not sustain the passion for the sport that we are currently displaying.
I find such worries, to say the least, overdetermined. My position is, to put it bluntly, baseball is still a fine game, its problems are vastly overemphasized, and who really cares if you or some future generations don’t like it so much.
Baseball is incredibly popular. This is a fact. Millions of people attend the games, and millions of people watch the games on television. Millions of people play fantasy baseball (I do), and millions of people pay close attention to the pennant races, playoffs, and World Series. I heard it said on WFAN last week that the revenues for MLB recently passed those for the NFL for the first time in many years.
If this is failure, then I say, Three cheers for failure.
But even if there were serious flaws in the game that were to drastically diminish its popularity short of—I can’t believe I’m writing this phrase—threatening its existence, why should that bother anybody, really? I am not the Treasurer or Accountant for Major League Baseball, and if baseball were to suffer a profound decline in popularity/ratings/revenues of, say, 20 percent, I find it difficult to understand why this would affect me—since I would almost certainly still enjoy the game and derive pleasure from following it.
A hypothetical comes to mind. I am not a serious Star Wars fan. I was seven years old when the first one came out, I had a fairly normal childhood admiration over the first trilogy, and as an adult I’ve come to dislike the whole project quite a bit—yes, the whole thing. Call me the Gopnik of Star Wars, our positions here are probably pretty analogous.
Now, let’s say you, reading this, are a huge Star Wars nerd. What if I were to tell you that, for some imaginary reason, the 1977 gross receipts for Star Wars were, shall we say, 10 percent less impressive than anybody realized at the time? I would essentially be telling you that you have this picture in your mind that Star Wars had Impact X on our culture, and that you, if you were being scrupulous about the truth, would henceforth be forced to downgrade that Impact to something like 90 percent of what you had originally supposed.
Would you find this news distressing? I can certainly imagine that many people would be distressed by that news. The question I have is: Why? If you enjoyed the movie and its sequels as a child, and if you enjoy them today, I don’t really see what difference it makes that a few hundred thousand strangers did not like it as much as you had once thought. The whole concept is alien to me.
Baseball is not your favorite indie band that nobody you know has ever heard of. In that example, it’s sensible to root for the popularity of the project, because its very existence depends entirely on a spike in popularity. Baseball is not in that position.
When we raise the issue of pessimistic prospects for baseball, or investigate one individual’s decision to abandon the sport’s allures, that’s pretty much the situation we’re in. If baseball loses popularity in 2020, 2030, 2040 and there are still strong reasons for my interest to hold steady, I don’t really see what the fact of some unnamed demographic group deciding they like something else better has to do with me. It’s very likely that baseball will still be pretty popular in thirty years, and my desire to watch the World Series, no matter who is playing, will probably also remain. Similarly, I don’t really see why Adam Gopnik’s decision, at the age of 54 or so, to abandon what is after all a child’s game, should interest anybody, in and of itself.
Are we supposed to regard Gopnik’s decision as a canary in the coal mine? I think that is the unmistakable point of Gopnik’s first post, and let’s just say that I disagree with him that the post is actually serving that purpose in any meaningful way.
Having written “around” the problem of Gopnik’s manifesto for several paragraphs, let’s take a closer look at Gopnik’s first post. I don’t want to go through the argument or anything like that, but I did want to hit a couple of quick points.
Start with the opening line: “I am eager to become a baseball fan again.” Frankly, I don’t believe Gopnik when he writes this. The situation that baseball finds itself in is, in my opinion, not so dire that anybody genuinely wanting to love it would truly be barred from doing so. Furthermore, the statement is belied by the rest of what Gopnik writes, which smacks of rationalization, or, as McGrath puts it in the service of a slightly different point, “the use of the statistical record as a kind of moral ballast for what are essentially emotional arguments.”
Be that as it may. Let us now turn to the closing lines of Gopnik’s first post: “The dance of shared purpose and loyalty may be merely a mime—but what else but dancing and miming do we go to games for?”
I understand that it is unpleasantly bracing to realize that athletes are also businessmen, that the teams’ owners are not altruists, that fandom and commerce are intertwined. These are difficult things for an adult to accept about a fondness gained in childhood.
But I must ask: exactly how does Gopnik know that this “mime” is absent, or is being enacted to some insufficient degree? I have an image in my mind, from November of 2008, of a fellow—let us call him a “businessman”—named Chase Utley on a stage in the center of Philadelphia, proclaiming the Phillies the “World Fucking Champions,” to the cheers of many thousands of the city’s citizens.
I must say, his “mime,” which certainly seemed to express a level of jubilation over having won a championship, was a particularly shrewd bit of PR/mime/lying, that would probably have a positive impact on the portfolio of Chase Utley Inc.
But wait—could there be another explanation? Could it be that Utley meant it? Could it be that Utley was sincere in his joy? Is it actually possible that Utley takes pride not so much in his bank account but in his athletic prowess? That the kinship he felt with the other regulars of the “World Fucking Champion” 2008 Phillies was genuine? What if it wasn’t a mime at all?
Gopnik seems to rule out the possibility. Because if he did accept that premise, that Utley is first and foremost an athlete who desperately desires/desired a championship, and not first and foremost a businessman who coolly desires a robust array of assets, then I don’t see how he could have written what he did.
In 2007 I saw Gopnik on stage at the New Yorker Festival, debating with Malcolm Gladwell about the future of the Ivy League. I know from that experience that Gopnik has a subtle mind and can argue creatively and persuasively. For some reason, baseball has a singular tendency to cloud people’s ability to argue cogently. I look forward to a more tough-minded explanation for Gopnik’s new distaste for baseball and its relevance to baseball fans at large.