Not long after I launched this Substack, I wrote a bit about baseball and my relationship to it. In the intervening not-quite-three years, I’ve watched a lot more baseball— The Pip had another rec baseball season plus three travel seasons (one of them on two teams, and now he’s on his middle school “modified” (seventh-and-eighth-grade) team, though he sprained his wrist in gym class the day before the first game, and is starting the season on the IL. I’ve been taking him to hitting lessons regularly, and doing a lot of baseball practice on our own in local parks or on campus (the Union softball team has a very convenient outdoor batting cage, and a field whose fence is about the same distance as the travel team’s). So it’s probably worth a re-visit…
On the youth-baseball front, I’ve learned a good deal more about the game than I knew before, though I remain fairly happy that he’s chosen to focus on a sport that I’m not good at. If he were attempting to play hoops, I would have a much harder time not being That Guy—I have Opinions about how basketball should be played— but with baseball there are still rules that I’m fuzzy on, let alone fine points of strategy. Half the things he discusses with his hitting coach involve details I can’t begin to see.
We have, to this point, mostly avoided the really problematic Youth Sports Experiences. Not completely— he’s not on the travel team associated with our town for dumb reasons, and we had a not-great experience with a coach at one point— but it’s generally been pretty good. The parents we’ve been around have generally been well-behaved, and we’ve been very happy with the organizations he’s been part of.
The start of this season has been tough, because The Pip got sick after the first day of school team tryouts, and missed the rest of that week with a weird stomach bug. I was afraid that was going to completely blow his shot, but the coach let him come to a couple practices once we got back. He was super nervous about going to the first of these, because he thought it would be awkward, but when I dropped him off the other kids there were all like “Hey, [The Pip]! You’re back!” and he visibly relaxed, then did well enough that they kept him on the team. He tried to play it cool, but he was incredibly psyched the day he got his uniform, and is really bummed about the hand injury.
This points out another thing that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by, which is that for the most part, the kids have been great. We’ve run into a few douchebags, of course— they’re inescapable— but by and large the teams he’s been on have been really friendly and supportive of one another. The level of intra-team asshole behavior is so much lower than the median back in the 80’s, and that’s a huge relief.
(The youth athletes of today are still douchebags in a relative sense— SteelyKid doesn’t do sports, and complains about the jocks in the high school— but whenever I get actual details of their behavior, my reaction as a certified Old Person is “Oh, honey, you have no idea…”)
This period has also seen a big uptick in the number of in-person baseball games I’ve seen. We’ve gone to the local minor-league team a few times, but also a couple of big family trips to Yankee Stadium (one win, one loss, Aaron Judge homered in both, so The Pip was ecstatic). More recently, we’ve taken in a couple of other ballparks— while visiting grandparents in Florida we went to see the Rangers play the Rays, and on my way back from Illinois this past weekend, I killed a few hours before my flight by catching a White Sox game with Jeff Terry. Posting photos of these accidentally convinced some colleagues that I’m doing one of those “visit every MLB stadium” sorts of deals, which isn’t the plan, though I’ve been to a decent fraction (both old and new Yankee Stadiums, the old Shea Stadium, Camden Yards when I was in grad school, and Wrigley Field on a weekend with my college friends, in addition to the two recent ones). We’ll be going to see the Savannah Bananas this summer in Buffalo (The Pip’s travel team got tickets), which probably ought to count for something, and I wouldn’t rule out some other game at some point.
Baseball remains a really high-quality in-person experience. It’s only played in good weather (or indoors), so the conditions are generally pleasant, and the pace of the game is slow enough that you don’t need to be super locked-in the whole time (as with basketball). The introduction of the pitch clock has drastically cut down on the filibustering that used to drive me nuts, so the games don’t feel like a total slog, either. And in the modern era, there’s generally a decent variety of beer and food (my one disappointment with the Chicago game was that I had had lunch before going to the stadium, and by the time I was hungry, they were shutting down the concessions, forcing me to eat incredibly disappointing food at Midway Airport). It’s pretty great.
Given both The Pip’s interest in the sport and my own recent enjoyment of it, then, it’s a bit of a bummer to read something like Ethan Strauss’s “Is Baseball Dying?” piece (which goes against journalistic tradition by answering in the affirmative). I’m not in a great position to assess his claim— the Yankees are obviously doing fine, and the two other teams I’ve seen in person are either awful or known for their poor turnout— but I suspect there are real issues there. The scandal-ish coverage of the recent stories about Ippei Mizuhara scamming Shohei Ohtani don’t help, either.
At the same time, Strauss is very much in the branch of journalism most prone to negativity bias. And there’s pretty clearly an audience out there that’s really passionate about baseball— the reception of the World Baseball Classic last year was amazing. Baseball has unquestionably lost its pre-eminent position in the sports world and broader public consciousness, but I doubt it’s in quite as dire a state as Strauss says. Given the algorithmic tailoring of everything these days, though, it’s hard to say anything meaningful.
What matters most to me, in the end, is that the game matters to The Pip. And as long as he’s into it, I will be, too, even if I’ll never really grasp the finer points. Though, who knows, if you come back here in the spring of 2027, I may have finally watched enough kid-baseball games to have Opinions to rival my basketball takes…
So, that’s where that stands. As the season ramps up, there will almost certainly end up being more baseball content here, so if you would like to see that, here’s a button:
And if you have thoughts about either the youth or professional levels of the game, the comments will be open:
Have ever read Stephen jay Gould essay about Joe DiMaggio called, “the streaks of streaks” that appeared in an 1988 issue of the New York review of books: this is probably my favorite part; “My son, uncoached by Dad, and given the chance that comes but once in a lifetime, asked DiMaggio as his only query about life and career: “Suppose you had walked every time up during one game of your fifty-six–game hitting streak? Would the streak have been over?” DiMaggio replied that, under 1941 rules, the streak would have ended, but that this unfair statute has since been revised, and such a game would not count today.” I think the idea about rules changing in sports I found really interesting.