Title/Author:
“Why Baseball Matters” by Susan Jacoby
Tags:
Baseball, Mets, history,
society, politics
Publish date:
March 20, 2018
Length:
224 pages
Rating:
5 of 5 stars (outstanding)
Review:
The state of baseball
today is either excellent, since revenues in the sport are at an all-time high,
or on life support, since many feel the games are too long and it is losing its
appeal to young people. Both arguments have their merits and this book by best-selling
author Susan Jacoby offers several explanations for the latter beliefs.
The basic premise of the book is that Jacoby, a woman who fell in love with the game as a child in Chicago going to White Sox games with her father, believes the sport has to realize that thanks to digital advances, the attention span of fans is shorter than ever. Baseball has to find ways to attract younger fans who have grown up in this age. She both criticizes and praises the game in the attempts to do so.
This sounds
contradictory, but a reader will realize how Jacoby does this. First she explains how “baseball is a game in
which one must wait, pay attention, and wait again for startling, defining
moments of action.” Thus, the distractions that younger fans have in today’s
digital world (beautifully explained by a young female fan) will mean that the “defining”
moments will have to be powerful to keep the attention of these fans.
This doesn’t mean she
necessarily agrees with baseball’s response.
Indeed, she is critical of the attempts by Commissioner Rob Manfred to
speed up the game and believes that is misguided as the length of the games is
not the true source of the lack of younger, female and African-American
fans. She also pointed to readers of the
New York Times who wrote to the newspaper who believed that baseball’s woes
could be addressed not by speeding up the game but instead to make it more like
football. Needless to say, she wasn’t totally on board with this idea either.
She also believes that
the game doesn’t make much effort to attract fans of color and female
fans. Since the game doesn’t have the
same transition from generation to generation as it did in the middle of the 20th
century, she shows that other sports, especially football, are gaining these
fans and baseball needs to step up its efforts to appeal to these fans.
This makes it sound
like the book is negative and critical of the game, but that is not the case. Jacoby
shares many wonderful stories about the game and her adopted team, the New York
Mets. She sounds off about the designated hitter (hates it), baseball movies
(doesn’t like “Field of Dreams” or Robert Redford cast as Roy Hobbs in “The
Natural”) and why fans love the game the way they do (“…we love it precisely
because it is not like life.”) Her stories, along with her suggestions for
making the game better for all fans, are compelling reading that every person
interested in the game of baseball will enjoy.
A quick and easy read
that will make the reader think, “Why Baseball Matters” is the type of book
that not only makes a critical examination of the game, it offers wonderful
opportunities to not only attract new fans, but also illustrate why fans of the
game love it the way they do with a passion not easily seen in other sports.
I wish to thank Yale
University Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for
an honest review.
Book Format Read:
E-book (Kindle)
Buying Links:
I can't read any book by an author who thinks Robert Redford was miscast.
ReplyDeleteActually, I thought she made a good argument. I would not have agreed had I not read the book - but to me, Redford just didn't come across as the same Roy Hobbs in the book. His character seemed cleansed. Good for the movie if that is what they wanted, but as the same character as the book - not really. When I saw the movie, I hadn't read the book, so I didn't know any better. At that time, I would have had the same reaction as you did.
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