Baseball’s playing surface is also much larger than those of other sports. The larger the surface, the higher the potential for the unexpected thing.
This game survives the stupidity of its schism over the designated hitter, especially in the World Series. Only baseball could get away with having two different games within one game. Yes, baseball takes longer than it seems it should. During the season, that can be a bore, but in a close game in October, the hours only heighten the tension, because there’s no clock ticking off the minutes and the seconds.
It’s not like that in other sports. In football, is there anything more dull than a Super Bowl quarterback taking the snap and kneeling to run out the clock in the final minutes? In basketball, is there anything duller than a losing team fouling simply to prolong the agony? In hockey, is there anything duller than a winning team icing the puck to protect a lead?
In baseball, no clock means no kneeling, no fouls, no icing. No clock means a team always has a chance to win. Sometimes that chance is remote, as the Pittsburgh Pirates realized after losing three games in the 1960 World Series to the Yankees by scores of 16–3, 10–0, and 12–0. But that chance was still there until the Yankees got the 27th out.
Bill Mazeroski didn’t allow them to when he became the only player in baseball history to end the seventh game of the World Series with a home run.
Time didn’t run out. It never does. That’s baseball. That’s why, in October, it’s the best game.
No matter how hard they try, the people who run baseball cannot destroy this great game.
They can shut it down for months on end with strikes and lockouts. They can even cancel the World Series, casually walking away from their biggest showcase. And baseball survives.
They can dilute the product with expanded play-offs and wild-card teams, gimmickry borrowed from basketball, football, and hockey. And baseball survives. They can order postseason games to be played in the middle of the night at the end of October (or, in the case of 2009, early November), guaranteeing dwindling audiences and frigid temperatures. And, baseball survives.
At every turn, they test the sport’s resiliency, challenging it to overcome one burden after another. Arrogant players demanding to be paid for autographs and forgetting simple, common courtesy, issuing statements instead of sitting still for interviews.
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