The Free Press
Opening Day is here, ushering in another season of America’s so-called national pastime.
Across the country, fans will don their jerseys, munch on overpriced hot dogs, and settle in for nine innings of what is—depending on who you ask—either poetry in motion or an excruciating slog.
For some, the sport elevates simple things, like throwing, hitting, and catching, to something close to a religion. For others, it’s a snoozefest out of step with an era of shortening attention spans that lacks the drama of football or basketball.
The benches were cleared over this question in The Free Press newsroom recently. And so we decided to settle things with a special Opening Day installment of Free Press Fight Club. Will Rahn believes that baseball is unlike any other sport—a transcendental experience, filled with drama, heartbreak and, occasionally, a miracle or two. Joe Nocera argues that the games are too slow, the richest teams too dominant, and that reforms to fix the sport are too little, too late.
So—does baseball deserve to be a national treasure, or should it go the way of rotary phones and dial-up internet? Play ball!
—The Editors
Stepping up to the plate first, Will Rahn:
Baseball is like love in that it’s essentially impossible to say something new about it. The crack of the bat, the smell of the field—that’s all been covered at length. Great writers, for whatever reason, tend to love baseball. Maybe it’s the rhythm, the slower pace that lets the mind wander. Watching a baseball game is a form of meditation—albeit one you hope will be interrupted by hugs and cheering and high-fiving strangers.
Let me tell you the story of one such interruption. I’m a Mets fan, a peculiar and unlucky denomination of the Church of Baseball. And for my Mets, last season was supposed to be a nothing year. Expectations were at rock bottom. They lost their first five games. By June, they looked snakebit, finished, over.
Fast-forward to October. The Mets had remarkably made the postseason. But by Game 3 of their Wild Card bout against the Brewers—a consistently good team despite their middling payroll—they once again looked lifeless, and were trailing 2–0.
I turned off the game somewhere around the seventh inning and took my dog for a walk. I tried to buck up by reminding myself that they’d made the playoffs against the odds, that the season should still be remembered as a success, that we had a great team to build on for 2025.
In other words, I was depressed as all hell.
But as I walked back to our apartment, I texted my wife and asked her to put the game back on. Mets baseball was a major part of our courtship and, last year, her pregnancy. Our then-unborn baby had already experienced some 20 games, which is a lot of emotional turbulence for a fetus to handle.
Now we were home, huddled on the couch, late in her third trimester, to watch the season end. It was the top of the ninth inning in an elimination game. Exhausted by travel, the Mets had yet to score a run, and still trailed the Brewers 2–0.
Up to the plate stepped Pete Alonso, a great slugger having an off year. The night before, he’d literally tripped over his bat, setting up a double play that lost the game for the Mets. Now he was facing Devin Williams, one of the best closing pitchers in the game today.
And then, a miracle: With two Mets on base, Alonso hit a home run, putting the Mets ahead 3–2. I briefly left my body—I think dissociation might be the clinical term—but quickly returned as my wife grabbed and kissed me. We felt like we had just witnessed something impossible. It was like watching the atom split or the sun explode.
There were few cheers in the ballpark. The game was in Milwaukee, the Brewers’ hometown, and in a matter of seconds Alonso had ended their season. He ran the bases and gave a chef’s kiss to the crowd. And when he was finished, the whole team was waiting for him by home plate, tears in their eyes, jumping for joy.
I think that’s what it’s like to go to heaven. You round the bases and suddenly, all your old friends are there, weeping with joy because you are back together again. Show me another sport that brings you so close to the divine.
The Mets went on to beat the hated Phillies, only to lose to the Dodgers, the best in the league, in the round right before the World Series. They had gone from an afterthought to one of the last teams standing. Baseball is funny like that. The season lasts 162 games. A lot of magic can happen in that time span.
Our son was born a few days later, during the World Series. We named him Peter, officially after my wife’s grandfather, a war hero and liberator of Buchenwald.
But we call him Pete.
Now batting, Joe Nocera:
I’m picturing myself in 1964, as a 12-year-old boy. I’m on the floor of my living room, the newspaper under my elbows, scouring the box scores of yesterday’s baseball games. I see my next-door neighbor, who covers the Boston Red Sox for The Providence Journal, and pepper him with questions: Is Carl Yastrzemski going to have a good year? When is third baseman Frank Malzone coming back from that injury? Who’s pitching tomorrow night?
The games aren’t on local TV, so I sneak a transistor radio under my pillow so I can listen to them, hoping that my mother won’t come upstairs and check on me. “Hi, neighbor, have a ’Gansett,” says Curt Gowdy, the announcer, selling Narragansett beer between innings. My Red Sox memories—my baseball memories—remain vivid, all these years later.
And yet that’s all they are now: memories. I can’t remember the last time I cared about baseball. (Actually, I can: in 2004, when the Red Sox overcame a 3–0 deficit to defeat the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. But that’s a singular exception.)
As American life sped up, baseball just seemed to get slower and slower. Batters kept stepping out of the box after every pitch. Pitchers threw over to first base 10 times in a row. Games went on forever, sometimes four hours or more. Yawn. Yes, dads, overcome with nostalgia, still took their kids to baseball games, but they spent the whole time on their cell phones.
When you attend a modern-day basketball or hockey game or a tennis match, you can’t look at your cell phone. You might miss something. Those sports are fast-moving, their rhythms more in sync with the rhythms of the country.
Thanks in part to ESPN’s nightly highlights, baseball has become almost entirely about home runs, and has lost its rich strategic underpinning. Of course, the sport didn’t help itself by introducing the idiotic designated hitter rule in the American League in 1973, which eliminated what was once a manager’s great strategic dilemma: whether to pinch-hit for a pitcher in a close game. (Sadly, the National League adopted the DH in 2022.)
My Red Sox–loving godmother said she swore off baseball after the players went on strike in 1994—she thought the players were simply being greedy. That didn’t bother me—I’m always on labor’s side—but what did bother me was what happened afterward. In 1998, Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs, and Mark McGwire, the St. Louis Cardinals’ great slugger, had a thrilling season-long home-run chase that ended with both men obliterating Yankee great Roger Maris’s old record of 61 home runs in a season.
But it turned out to be fraud perpetrated on baseball fans: Both men were likely juiced on steroids—something McGwire later admitted in tears. I found it hard to take the sport seriously after that.
Another thing: Baseball is the only major professional sport that doesn’t have a salary cap. That means that the teams in the biggest markets with the most money, like the Yankees and the Dodgers, can make offers to the best free agents that other teams just can’t match. The Dodgers, with superstars in a half-dozen positions, will have a 2025 payroll of around $350 million. By contrast, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ payroll won’t reach $90 million. It seems pointless to root for either team. Who needs moneyball when you have, you know, money?
I know that Major League Baseball has tried to speed up the game with a handful of new rules. There is a clock now to force pitchers to pitch more quickly. There are limits to how many times a pitcher can throw to first base to hold the runner. Batters have to get into the batter’s box more quickly. But from where I’m sitting, it’s too little, too late.
When baseball was America’s national pastime, it was partly because basketball and football hadn’t yet developed as professional sports. But it was also because, after World War II, Americans wanted a sport that relaxed them, that took them far away from the harried and difficult war years and instilled a sense of calm. Baseball did that. Today, attention spans are short, and things move quickly. Except baseball. For better or worse, its time has passed.
For another view on baseball history, read Freddie deBoer’s piece, “No, Jackie Robinson Was Not a DEI Hire.”