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The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
When the World Series rolls around, as it has again this year, there are statistics (wins, losses, E.R.A.s, strikeouts, errors) — and there are statistics (Nielsen viewer ratings, advertising revenue). It is this second type that has caused some discussion this year about the state of the game of baseball and its appeal to its many millions of fans.
Baseball has always had a different relation to space and time than any other sport.
As of Game 6, viewership of this year’s series between the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants, has been modest by most standards (averaging about 12 million viewers per game). On Sunday night, a regular season N.F.L. game outstripped the World Series Game 5, with some 7 million more viewers.
While audience figures like these are larger than, say, the number of hits on a YouTube video of a Noam Chomsky speech (which can get pretty high, mind you), they’re sure to have baseball officials asking why. One common explanation is that in an age of ever increasing speed and shrinking attention spans, the pace of baseball games is just too slow.
In August, The Times’s Tyler Kepner wrote, “The fundamental problem facing Major League Baseball and its next commissioner, Rob Manfred, is that attention spans are getting shorter while games are getting longer. Confronting these clashing realities may be Manfred’s top priority when he takes office in January.” So now that the season is coming to a close, it might be time to start asking again, why not speed it up?
For more than 50 years, games have been getting steadily longer. In 1950 the average major league baseball game was about two and a half hours. In 2014, games ran a little more than 3 hours on average. One contributing factor has been artificially imposed on the game: broadcast and stadium advertising requires a certain amount of time between innings. At the stadium, what had once been a quiet interlude has become a noisy multimedia show with music blaring and images, videos and ads flashing on Jumbotrons — incessant interruptions that distract fans and disrupt the flow of the game.
But the languid, almost meditative pace of baseball is built into its DNA, and to cure that supposed defect, baseball officials have proposed remedies. The most drastic of these, which seems to have widespread support, is to put pitchers on the clock. Just as there is a shot clock in basketball so, too, would there be a pitch clock in baseball. (Though not widely known, Major League Baseball already has a rule that limits the time between pitches to 12 seconds but it is almost always ignored.) If the proponents of speed had their way, the rule would be enforced and the time between pitches shortened.
Baseball has always had a different relation to space and time than any other sport. In football, basketball, hockey and soccer, the dimensions of the field, court, rink and pitch are standard; they are the same in every stadium. And while the size of the diamond is the same on every major league field, the shape of each ballpark varies and requires different tactics and strategies. More important, all these other sports have fixed time limits for each match, but baseball does not — it can, in principle, go on forever.
It has perhaps become commonplace to claim that sports have acquired the status of religion in the United States. But the deeper implications of this insight are rarely recognized. Religion is about more than belief and fanatic devotion; there can be no vital religion without rituals. Rituals, religious and otherwise, are designed to change the pace and interrupt the rhythms of our daily lives. This is what makes them special and, when effective, allows participants to return to everyday life renewed.
What critics of baseball often dismiss as a waste of time that slows the pace of the game are actually the rituals (and rituals within rituals) that make baseball so timely: the catcher sending too many signals to the pitcher, the pitcher repeatedly backing off the mound and checking the runner on first base, the batter constantly stepping out of the batter’s box to adjust and spit on his gloves, coaches and managers visiting the mound far too often, the seventh-inning stretch, breaks between innings. I miss the days when pitchers took long, leisurely strolls from the bullpen to the mound, while players stood idly by, sometimes chatting with one another. The relief these pitchers offered was for fans as much as teammates. When players take their time, fans must slow down to stay in the game. All these seemingly pointless rituals do have a purpose: They keep the frenetic pace of the everyday life outside the sacred precincts of the game.
We live in a world that is obsessed with speed. Fast is never fast enough, everything must be done now, instantly. To pause, delay, stop, slow down is to miss an opportunity and to give a competitor the edge. Speed has become the measure of success — faster chips, faster computers, faster food, faster networks, faster connectivity, faster news, faster communications, faster transactions, faster deals, faster product cycles, faster brains, faster games.
In this fast-paced world children are wired at a very young age. From 2-year-olds playing with their parents’ iPhone and iPad to teenagers playing high-speed video games, children are taught the virtues of quickness, agility and adaptability. Playing or watching fast games is not considered a waste of time; it is rather seen as efficient training for a fast life.
In the Darwinian culture of fast food, fast fashion and high-speed finance, the rule governing success seems to be adapt or perish. Baseball officials are concerned that if they do not adapt to the increasing speed of life and the decreasing patience and attention span of fans, baseball will become extinct. But what if the values that speed promotes have become counterproductive? To adapt to a system teetering on the brink of meltdown — as I believe our technological society is today — is not a good survival strategy.
Faster is not always better — speed has limits. Acceleration cannot continue forever. But when people are afraid to unplug because they will miss a deal or lose their job, a leisure activity like a three-hour baseball game can seem to be a luxury no one can afford.
The only way to break this cycle is to call a time out. This is precisely the possibility rituals create. To enter the space and time of ritual is to participate in an alternative reality that allows one to see the world differently. As traditionally played, baseball encourages a sense of leisure and cultivates the virtues of caution, delay, deliberation, patience and reflection. These values are important precisely because they stand in critical tension with the revved up pace of everyday life. To increase the speed of the game would make it an extension of, and not an alternative to the high-speed world that never leaves people enough time for themselves and for others. Far from a threat to its viability, the slow pace of the game is what makes baseball increasingly valuable in a world that is moving too fast for us ever to catch up.
![Mark C. Taylor](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/dentonfracking/20141030003414im_/http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/10/29/opinion/stone-mark-taylor/stone-mark-taylor-thumbStandard.jpg)
Mark C. Taylor is the chairman of the department of religion at Columbia University and the author of “Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left.”