According to Selena Roberts of the New York Times, football is up and baseball’s in decline. As a confirmed baseball fan who has zero interest in football, I am somewhat sanguine about this prediction, since, at my advanced age, I can recall similar predictions that were made 30 years ago. That being said, she has a point about these late night playoff games. The culprit is not the starting time so much as network greed. Baseball has discrete between innings pauses that can be stretched to any length to accomodate any number of commercials. It adds up. I confess I’m not watching the Sox, my theory being that if I watch I’ll make them lose. I might risk it, if I didn’t have to sit through interminable commercials. Saturday night I decided to watch a DVD after the first half inning. I watched the whole full length movie, then checked in on the game, which was only in the fourth inning.
Then again, maybe this perennial prediction will come true this time. I suppose football is more consistent with our national character. Baseball is a nineteenth century game, emphasizing both teamwork and individual skills. Football is simply a metaphor for war, in which skill consists of being able to bash your opponent harder than he can bash you. That’s American in the 21st century.
But this post is only partly about baseball. It’s also about logic and reasoning. In the course of her argument Ms. Roberts inserted this non sequitur:
Certainly baseball’s fat attendance is bursting with baby boomers. But the sport is an old flame for romantic types, as proved by numbers even sabermetric lords can wrap their seamheads around.
In baseball, there hasn’t just been the much-discussed flight of black players, but white flight, too. In the last 15 years, according to a recent study by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, the percentage of African-American major league baseball players has plunged to 8.4, from 18; the percentage of white players has slipped to 59.5, from 68.
Umm…, exactly what does this prove, other than that there are increasing percentages of Asians and Hispanics in the game? While she never identifies the races of the remaining 32% we must assume that this is how those folks are classified. These statistics don’t prove that whites and blacks are fleeing, they prove only that other “races” are producing better players that are driving down the percentages of whites and blacks. I.e. whites and blacks aren’t fleeing; they’re being pushed. Or is Ms. Roberts implying that Pedro Martinez would never have made it in the pro game but for the shortage of Americans willing to be paid ungodly sums of money to play a game? She goes on to compare those numbers to the relative percentages in college football, a comparison that makes no sense, since Asians and Latin Americans don’t, by and large, attend our colleges or play football.
I suppose this is trivial, but I do get discouraged by the innumeracy of our betters.
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