Baseball Time

Joseph Bottum ponders why inductions into the Baseball Hall of Fame are so full of sepia-hued nostalgia. One reason has to do with the life-spans of baseball players: “football players are so short. . . . Great baseball players, by contrast, tend to have careers half again as long, with a graceful arc in the rise and decline of their statistics as they age (or, at least, they did before the generation of performance-enhancing-druggies skewed the right side of the parabola). And the key to baseball is the sheer amount of time it encompasses—as a sport (the oldest and best recorded professional game in America) and as a showcase for careers that feel as long as Rabbit Maranville’s or as short as Sandy Koufax’s.”

The long stretch of a baseball career reflects the unique time of the game itself: “Back in 1976, an American philosopher named Roland Garrett published a curious little essay called ‘The Metaphysics of Baseball’—a text worth hunting down, if you don’t know it. Treating space and time as the proper subjects of metaphysics, he notes how strangely space is organized by the game (baseball being one of the few games in which the team on defense is the team with the ball) and how strangely time passes within baseball, measured in outs. . . . Baseball is a game of failure. It’s a sport in which a glorious season sees a batter put out for two-thirds of his at-bats—and a god-like season shows us a player failing 60 percent of the time. For all that the highlight reels of sports-shows have tried to turn baseball into a game of discrete victorious moments, like football, it’s a actually a game of the long arc and the slow flow of time across it.”