Shohei Ohtani with the Los Angeles Dodgers' strikes out in the third inning against the Los Angeles Angels at Angel Stadium on March 26.Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Reuters
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.
It’s an annual rite of spring, like the equinox, Mother’s Day, and apocalyptic weather events. Baseball starts its new season and, as Thomas Boswell wrote, time begins again. Spring training is done, and the best players on the planet commence 162 games of regular-season beauty.
Nowadays, though, such bucolic glories come marked with complaint and darkness. A betting scandal involving the interpreter of baseball’s best player, Shohei Ohtani – all too predictable in a blowhard-dominated sports world that’s basically become televised gambling – risks tainting the superstar. (Mr. Ohtani denies any involvement.) Renewed efforts at rule changes, meanwhile, are advanced in the name of making the game less boring.
The adjustments of the past few years have succeeded, if one accepts that a shorter game, with more hits and runs, is always a better game. You can be in and out of a major league ball game now in a shorter span than an Oscar-winning film. But the tweakers are not satisfied: Despite the fact that more people attend baseball games than any other major sport – the nearly daily schedule helps, to be sure – the sport’s overlords are always looking for more.
Rule changes will continue, and purists like me will continue to grumble. So it goes. But recently came a new suggestion: Encourage more trash talk. The writer Rafi Kohan, a student of baseball’s heckling tradition, recently argued that “bench-jockeying,” as it was once known, deserves a greater place in the sport. “It’s not just athletes who become more invested by such bluster and abuse, though,” Mr. Kohan noted. “We all do. That’s why trash talk is such a reliable tool for marketers in the sports world and beyond.” Miked-up badmouthing would offer a clear value-add.
To put it in civil terms, the way Duke basketball fans heckle bad calls: I beg to differ. This proposal demands scrutiny on both premises and conclusion. Is baseball really boring? Even assuming it is, would more trash talk actually make the game less so? And, most searchingly, is a less boring game really a better one?
The assumption that baseball is boring is widely held, but as with many “common sense” views, it is open to question. Baseball is full of drama but its sweep is elegant, punctuated by riveting bursts of action. Sure, it’s more like opera than a Michael Bay movie, but both have their place.
Other sports can likewise fare poorly when analyzed in the same terms. Few things are more punishing and dull than the endless pauses of a pro football game or the extended slow-motion nonsense of the final minutes of a close basketball tilt. Even soccer, the beautiful game, can be slowed to a deadening crawl by Barcelona-style precision passing.
But I don’t expect to convince anyone so easily. Let’s assume, then, that baseball is boring and needs fixing. Is trash talk the way to go?
Yeah, no. Trash talk is already the bane of the age, a debased currency that generates toxic downward spirals in everything from stand-up comedy to politics. Mr. Kohan is right that it is an effective marketing strategy, in part because it speaks to our baser natures. But do we want baseball to be more Trump-like, studded with stupid nicknames, routine misogyny, gay-bashing, and sandbox insults? Because I can predict with some certainty that more trash talk will not be executed with the wit of Frasier Crane – or even his sportscaster nemesis, Bob (Bulldog) Briscoe.
Then there’s the central unasked question: Why do we fear boredom so much? There is good evidence to suggest that boredom enables sharpened curiosity and a deeper appreciation of life’s good things. That’s all part of what might be called, as in the title of Andrew Forbes’s excellent book about baseball, “the utility of boredom.”
Even this defence feels slightly off-kilter. Boredom doesn’t need to be rescued by way of hidden utility, the way university presidents sheepishly defend their beleaguered humanities programs. Instrumental defences of human things give the game away; such arguments assume that the useful must always be the valuable, and vice versa.
Instead, let’s shift the terms of debate. Humanities are valuable precisely because they are useless, just as baseball’s boredom is a gift rather than a burden. The game is reflection made flesh. It stands outside of all demands of interest and use. Its infliction of boredom, so called, is actually an invitation to confront your soul’s work. Lean in!
You know what’s really boring? Incessant chest-thumping, gleeful profit-taking, and endless jockeying for position. We can’t avoid all that in life, alas, but we can take a break from it at the park. The longer the better.