Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I could write a long, ponderous post explaining how thinking people should all love football (and be proud of it!). That’s because football is by far the most complex major, not too mention the most physically impressive. But, there isn’t a great “in” here, so I’ll just link to this piece in the Toronto Star that defends the sport to a Canadian audience.

I’ll just add that baseball is much less impressive game that football. The weird thing is that I suspect everyone knows this. That’s because baseball is a slow, horribly discrete game, with only individuals facing off against each other, and very few instances of high-level group coordination.

Also, the entire Moneyball snafu put another dent in baseball’s reputation, or at least exposed what most knew to be true. On one hand, the fact that baseball was so easily reduced to some batting and pitching statistics (after all, that’s basically all the sport is) showed just how simple and old fashioned the game was. (As a quick aside, there are very few statistics in football that are good predictors of how good a single player will be. The best defensive backs, for instance, get the fewest interceptions and it’s damn near impossible to tell how good a running back will be based on his performence with a single offensive line.) Even worse, the luddite reaction to the uncontroversial points raised by Beane, Lewis and others put on full display how weirdly anachronistic and cranky many baseball observers were.

The essential nostalgia that underlies the odd fascination with baseball also belied the notion that baseball players – unlike those (black) freaks in football and basketball – were somehow like us. Although baseballers may have better hand eye coordination than we do, someone like Derek Jeter or David Eckstein doesn’t look all that much different from an athletic 28 year old. But this fascination with the supposed averageness of baseball players (or the sub-averageness – David Wells) was really just a facade for what people really liked: home runs. And so McGwire and Sosa started juicing, so that their 50 home run seasons could turn into 60, while Bonds gave up his career as the best five tool player since Willie Mays and became an offensive Superman. The resulting meldorama, which ended up involving Congress and the President, further exposed the lameness of baseball. Not only were all the details of juicy might tawdry (thanks Jose), the results were not all that impressive. Sure, more homeruns were hit, but the essential boringness remained.

All the while, everyone knows that football players are juicing – Shawn Merriman, the 2004 Super Bowl losing Panthers, many New Orleans Saints – and people don’t much care. That’s because football players don’t chemically alter their bodies (and have officials overlook it) in a desperate attempt to make their game something that displays true physical greatness, but instead to make a game which already places absurd mental and physical demands on the world’s most impressive physical specimens all that more impressive. Because football is already such an otherwordly endeavor, just making that much more marginally more unnatural is not something that will bother or surprise anyone.

You, fair reader, will not be blamed for thinking that this is a bunch of hifallutin hand waiving for my own subjective taste. And, in a way, you’re right. The starting point of this rhetorical wandering is that I love football. The next question is whether I’m just creating all sorts of justifications for what is just how I feel, or if there actually is some bundle of clearly delianable reasons for why I love football so. I may also be engaging in the same misleading exercise of John Rawls when he explained what supposedly made baseball so great. The reasons he gives for why baseball is the best of all game merely strike me as reasons why baseball is different from other sports, not necessarily better.