TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Monday, August 16, 2004

We Are Family

I Got All My Sisters With Me, etc. etc.

I've been watching the US women's softball team at the Olympics, because that's the only baseball-like game being covered thus far on US television, and as much as I'm wary of the fast pitch game as a TV spectator sport, it's still our game and our team. I've also been watching the regionals for the Little League World Series, and the Bronco World Series has just wrapped up here in Monterey, California. (The Bronco World Series is sort of the lower-key Little League World Series -- still no TV contract, although alas that may be changing).

What's always striking about these two types of baseball sports is the way on-field celebrations and the team unity concepts are demonstrated. In the majors, if you celebrate excessively during a home-run trot, the opposing pitcher is going to hit one of your batters, or possibly you'll just get into a fight right then and there. There's a lot of alpha-male aggression, pack loyalty (the entire team must clear the bench), and puffing up surrounding the issue of how and how hard one celebrates an achievement. At the end of the game, hands are shook -- among the winning team only. The losers are left to go out on their own; in the post-season there seem to be a lot of players on the losing side of the last game who choose to stay on the bench, staring disconsolately at the celebration of the winning team.

In Little League, teams still shake hands at the end of the game, winners shaking losers' hands. My recollection of this as a participant was that it was a tough thing to do graciously as a winner and tough to take as a loser (remember the last scene of the "The Bad News Bears"?) but that as a forced gesture of reconciliation, it had the appropriate effect of defusing lingering tensions over the conduct of a mere game. With the official Little League World Series becoming more high-profile, and thus by extension more full of tension for the participants, this ritual seems to be more and more strained.

In Little League, too, the excessive celebration is frowned upon. One of the interesting cultural divides of a couple of years ago was when the Harlem, NY, team couldn't help itself from really going nutso when one of its own did something good. A couple of times home run trots became more like NBA slamma jammas or NFL touchdown dances than the more restrained examples (traditionally) of the major leagues. This became controversial because, in part, some of the critical comments from opposing team coaches and parents had racial and class issues that intruded in this perceived issue of how much celebration is enough and how much is excessive. The very idea of excessive celebration, of course, is a cultural construct.

Still, in Little League games when a player hits a homer, the entire team comes out to the plate to celebrate -- something you see in the big leagues only, and I mean only, in the event of a "walk off" homer that ends the game. (This may be changing: remember Sammy hugging Big Mac after home run number 62? But I confess I was personally appalled by this: they were opponents in the heat of a pennant race, and this gesture seemed to me to be exalting individual achievement well over that of the team. But a trend may still be developing.) You'll see a lot of "attaboys" and imprecations to chatter up the infield in the youth leagues, something absent from the pros and mostly absent from the upper reaches of high school and college ball.

In fast-pitch competitive women's softball, we get even further down the spectrum of mutual on-field real-time while-the-game-is-happening we-are-a-team support. The women all come out to the plate to greet the hitter of a home run, just like little league and unlike the majors. But they also come together for congratulations after every out. The infielders and pitcher will get together and give one another high-fives after a routine ground-out. You'll see outfielders convering on a ball giving one another slaps after a catch. With all this celebration, there are no bench-clearing brawls (at least that I've ever seen). It's considered part of the ethos of how the sport is played, the same way not celebrating is part of the ethos of the majors.

One could do a lot of anthropological, psychological, and sociological pondering about the differing celebration styles of men, women, and children, but I'll spare you. It may be that it's just easier to do on the reduced dimensions of the softball diamond, or that the types of celebration are proportionate to the level of amateurism of each type of ball game.

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Speaking of Olympic softball...softball is, far and away, among the ball-and-bat sports, the one with the highest number of amateur participants. I remember reading someplace that one in four adult Canadians is in an organized softball league, and that softball injuries in the US are still the number one source of sports injuries. Cricket is played in more countries, of course, but organized cricket is deucedly hard to keep up compared to a beer softball league.

What's kind of odd about softball is it represents two extremes of the baseball-style-game. The fast pitch game, the kind they play at the Olympics, I frankly find boring as a spectator and as a player. The game is dominated by the pitching, the plays are short and fast, the geometries limiting and the ratio of action to anticipation much lower than baseball. The infield is usually all dirt, there's no mound. The games end up looking a lot like those of the extreme-pitching "scientific" era of baseball from the 1890s to 1920, the only serious period of decline in baseball's popularity in its history (attendance went down from 1912 on to when the Ruth era began; despite baseball's canonical popularity as a professional sport, bicycle racing and sculling, among other sports, regularly drew far larger crowds in those days.)

The slow-pitch variety is about anything but pitching, which may be why it's the more popular variant. The purpose of pitching is to put the ball in play. The game thus becomes an offensive one, but one where fielding -- getting those precious outs -- is at a premium. Infielders play farther back, paradoxically, than the fast pitch infielders, and you get that lovely creation, the short-fielder, the roving fielder, who replicates the original flexible positioning of the original short stops. The game seems to me about the closest one could get to 1845-1870s-era baseball, more democratic since the requirements oof specialist skills are less intense and more forgiving. Virtually anybody can play slow-pitch softball.

That's the big paradox we face as Olympic viewers. Softball is something that seemingly everybody can play, and thus it's attractive because it's easier to imagine one playing. But the fast-pitch variant is an extreme in the other direction, and the lack of action and distance is alienating, at least to me. I'm going to continue to watch the US women with as much interest as I can muster, but I will also probably sneak over to ESPN2 for some Little League games and stick to the MLB Extra Innings games for the most part. I suspect I will be among the few viewers of the US softball games in Athens, though. The pity is the women clearly have the talent to make a good baseball club, were the baseball rules modified slightly the same way WNBA rules and dimensions are modified to make the sport a bit better adapted to the baseline physiological differences between adult males and females. The whole history of the AAGPBA certainly demonstrates it would be an entertaining and competitive sport, the Silver Bullets notwithstanding, in a way "competitive" softball can never hope to approach.

posted by The Crank 10:47 AM