Baseball

Today I went with two friends to see the Yankees play the Texas Rangers at Yankee Stadium. It was great. There was strong pitching on both sides, and the game went to 12 innings. The high point was the bottom of the ninth when, the game tied 2 to 2, the Yankees with a walk filled up the bases with one out and were one ball away from winning the game on a base on balls, and the Rangers pitcher, on the verge of total personal humiliation, through sheer guts got out of the inning alive. But the Rangers never got anything going in the extra innings, and the Yankees finally won in the bottom of the 12th with a single, a batter struck by a pitch, and another single.

As one of my friends, who is a former baseball coach and an expert in the game, said afterward, “We need to get away from reality from time to time. Michael Bloomberg is reality. We need to get away from that.”

UPDATE, June 17: The Yankees starting pitcher in the game was Brian Gordon, who had just been brought up from the Minor Leagues. He did a very good job, and the crowd gave him a big standing ovation when he was taken out of the game in the sixth inning. Our seats were above the Yankee dugout, and as Gordon headed for the dugout you could see how moved he was by the applause. Today’s New York Times has an article about him.

- end of initial entry -

June 17

Greg W. writes:

What if your break from reality included having to watch the Houston Astros, like me? (I’m an Astros fan, and they are one of the worst teams in baseball right now). To get away from reality, I have to watch my team play like a bunch of Little League softball girls.

On a more serious note, baseball is the ONLY sport I can bare to watch anymore. It is a more conservative game. You do not have thugs running into the stands and fighting fans. Sure, there’s an occasional fight, but it’s nothing compared to basketball and football. Baseball is the one American sport (save hockey, which is not watched much in the South) in which blacks are the minority. The blacks who do play baseball are not your thugs like in basketball and football. I suspect this is because baseball is not a poor man’s sport in America. You have to have equipment, a field, and a lot of players in order to play. You cannot practice baseball by yourself. Therefore, baseball is a middle-class dominated sport, so blacks do not make up a large percentage.

Hispanics make up a large percentage of MLB players, mostly foreign born. In the third world countries they come from, baseball and soccer are huge. They have plenty of open space and people to play pick up games in dirt lots and the likes. [LA replies: It’s not that simple, not at all. According to one view, the reason for the huge number of Latin Americans in Major League Baseball is that the teams have set up academies in Latin American countries where promising boys are trained and prepared from a young age as ball players. Baseball has gotten insanely expensive (Alex Rodriguez gets $32 million this year, for example, and good tickets at Yankee Stadium cost over $100), and this has put pressure on the teams to find ways to save money. One way to do that is to produce players in these Latin American academies, which costs less than producing themin the U.S. via the minor leagues system. This is why white Americans are being pushed aside by Latin Americans in Major League ball. That at least is the idea. Further research is needed to back up this idea with facts.]

In America, basketball is of course the sport of choice for blacks. If you ever watch an NBA basketball game, you will see that the majority of blacks are tattooed up to their necks. They have a thuggish swagger and attitude, and can barely speak coherent English. Most grew up poor, and all you need to play basketball is one ball and a hoop. This is much easier than getting people together to play baseball. These players go on to college on basketball scholarships, most of whom do not graduate, nor could they; they are passed by professors in order to play. Duke is one of the few that actually picks intelligent blacks and intelligent and talented whites.

You do not see baseball stars dancing after a good play, taunting another player, etc. Again, this is because baseball attracts people from more affluent communities, which means more intelligent people. Want proof? Watch a post game interview with the average basketball star, then a baseball star, and compare the language and syntax.

The point of my story is of course that baseball is more conservative, less thuggish, precisely because it does not have many black players.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 16, 2011 07:34 PM | Send