Bill-on-the-Hill

It should come as no surprise that I'm a baseball fan, and I'm glad to see that a growing number of people around the world are likewise. There is a beauty to a well-played ballgame that simply isn't there in any other team sport I know of, and I've played a lot and watched a lot more. But being forced to play the most important games of the (American) major-league season under conditions better suited for, say, skiing, just to keep the media moguls happy and in clover, well ... Soapbox time here, albeit with a personal travel overlay.

In fact, let's start with the overlay. On the way home from that Yellowstone National Park trip I've been writing about, Emily and I passed by Denver, Colorado where her brother R and sister A live with their respective families. Since the local major-league baseball team, the improbable Colorado Rockies (who have just achieved their first-ever trip to the World Series as I write this), was in town, we decided to treat the whole extended family to a trip to a ball game. This was a first for several of the people involved; R's delightful wife O was born in Russia, as were their two young and exuberant daughters, and none of these ladies had ever been to a major-league game before. They're all fluently bilingual in Russian and English and switch from one language to the other without even thinking about it, which got them some weird looks from fans in the stands around us ...

Denver, with two notable exceptions, is a very fine place to watch a baseball game. One down side has to do with the fact that highway access to the Rockies' home park, Coors Field (after the brewery and known as "Planet Coors" for its launching-pad tendencies), is aggravatingly difficult. On this trip, that wasn't much of a problem, as Emily and I piled into R's enormous SUV to barge our way through to a parking lot not far from the park, to rendezvous with A, her husband C, and their own daughters. The other down side, of which more shortly, also wasn't a problem; conditions for a ball game were practically perfect, we had great seats (you can get top-of-the-line seats at a Rockies game for considerably less money than at most major-league parks), the people helping us get seated and taken care of were unfailingly courteous, and generally a fine time was had by all. I'm not sure our nieces even noticed there was a sporting event in progress, they were so busy talking the talk of pre-adolescent and teenage girls, but that's OK too; a baseball game should be a fun outing, not something to be treated with solemnity appropriate for a concert or a religious mass. We adults, meanwhile, got to split our time between watching the game (of which I am a fairly serious student) and enjoying each other's company, and a grand time was had by all.

"Was." As in, "a month ago," when the weather in Denver was right in the heart of the city's glorious post-monsoon late summer; not too cool, but cool enough, and clear as a bell. Unfortunately, glorious September in Denver gives way to October, and the weather isn't the same, not at all. Baseball, unlike football, is a fair-weather sport. Get a little rain on the field (as in that previous note I made regarding Bonds' HR #755), and the pro athlete has no business being out there, because a slippery field just absolutely screams "HAMSTRING PULL!" whenever someone slips on a slick spot. Cold causes its own problems: muscle pulls, all sorts of weirdness for pitchers who can't get a good grip on the ball, and so on. Combine the two into freezing rain, and the experience is absolutely miserable.  And that's exactly the kind of weather you get in Denver in October.

Normally, this isn't a problem, because the major-league season wraps up around October 1, and except for the minority of teams that go on to the playoffs, everybody gets to go home and wait for spring training. But this year, the Rockies are in the World Series, and so they continue to play under conditions that are becoming downright Arctic. Some of the playoff games were at night, played in temperatures in the 30s (Fahrenheit), and with wet misery not far around the corner. Denverites are used to getting ready to ski when these conditions exist, not watch baseball.

So now to the soapbox, to rail on one of my favorite subjects to vent spleen on: the American media. Post-season baseball in October certainly isn't anything new, but this year it is extending deeper into the month than ever before. It is entirely credible that there may be post-season ball in November if the weather is singularly uncooperative. All observations about bad October weather in Denver apply in spades in November. This unfortunate state of affairs results from the unholy alliance that major-league baseball has formed with television, and it's exacerbated by the networks' insistence that as many post-season games as possible be played at night, in TV-viewing prime time. Daytime ball in Denver in October might be possible under comparatively friendly conditions. But it gets cold there in the fall after the sun goes down. It doesn't have to be this way; for most of baseball history, it wasn't, because the post season was conducted either earlier in the month (through flexible scheduling) or at least during the daytime. But the media contracts now require that it be so.

The irony of all this is that the broadcasters aren't getting what they wanted out of this experience, either. The league championship between the Rockies and their fellow dwellers in the Mountain States, the Arizona (Phoenix) Diamondbacks, started by getting the lowest ratings ever for a broadcast post-season baseball game. More people were watching test patterns than were watching those broadcasts. Of course, the media act as though there is something wrong with baseball or its fans; how could teams from the uninhabited wilderness states (<shudder> -- insert mental image of fans being chomped by rattlesnakes or devoured by grizzly bears) possibly be allowed to be good enough to knock out the media darlings, and there are none more darling than the teams of New York and Boston? There oughta be a law, but since there isn't one, the media will either provide the minimum possible coverage with the maximum possible condescension, or simply ignore what's going on. Yet, media darlings or not, they will also insist on the games being played under conditions they dictate, i.e., spread out in time (entirely contrary to the way regular-season ball is played) extending deep into the onset of winter, at least away from the coasts. It's grossly at odds with all the things that make baseball beautiful, and this particular baseball fan resents it deeply.

End of soapbox, but I'll have more thoughts on the stupidity of the mediots in reaching the fans of America's Pastime as the Series unfolds.