Why I Ditched Baseball For Football In Order To Improve My Mind And Increase My Knowledge

I always liked baseball more than any other sport because I thought it was the thinking person’s game (and was the only game in which I wasn’t the last person chosen to fill out a team).

Would a pitcher out fox a batter by throwing a curve ball when the hitter was expecting a fast ball? Would a pitcher’s change-up motion make a batter think a fastball was on the way? Would a slugger surprise the infielders by bunting for a base hit? Would a manager maneuver his line-up in a way that his counterpart didn’t expect? These and many other situations that occur in every game convinced me that baseball is the thinking person’s game (and because it was the only game in which I wasn’t the last person chosen to fill out a team). 

There is also a professional reason that I liked baseball more than any other sport. That’s because throughout my two careers – first as a journalist and then as a PR practitioner –“baseball has been very, very good to me,” a phrase that initially was said by several former Major League players.

As a young sportswriter, I was able to see any game without paying a penny. At Burson-Marsteller, for eight years while managing Gillette’s All-Star Game fan balloting program, each December I had to leave cold and snowy New York and travel to locations like Miami, and Hawaii, sites of baseball’s almost week-long Winter Meetings with Gillette executives so I could arrange media interviews and/or inform reporters about our plans for the coming season. Then, in February, I was forced to depart my snowy and cold office in Manhattan and travel to cities like Tampa and Phoenix to present our program to the PR directors of the Major League clubs. Having to travel to these warm city locations broke up the long and cold snowy New York City winters. If that not a reason for baseball being my favorite game, what is? Okay. Maybe it was because it was the only game in which I wasn’t the last person chosen to fill out a team.

When G.E. sponsored the U.S. baseball team that competed in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, I also escaped some of the bone chilling New York Winter days, traveling to G.E.’s Major Appliance Division in Louisville, which sponsored the team, to discuss media outreach plans.  

Being the key player on those accounts also saved me from a career of trying to convince journalists that a #9 pencil was superior to the #8 one.

That’s why I always told people that “baseball has been very, very good to me.” 

For years, baseball was also instrumental in my quest to continually improve my knowledge of things not in the news. I did so by reading the works of renowned philosophers and authors, past and present, permitting me when in certain company, to sound like the intellectual I aint.

But all that changed last year, in baseball’s 2023 season. I no longer had the time to spend at least three hours a night, sometime much more, trying to improve my mind by reading the classics, while ignoring the repetitive commentary of game day broadcasters and their analysts. And I blame that on baseball -- specifically its rule changes to speed up the game, which shortened it by almost a half-hour.

Before the rule changes went into affect, I could read three or four pages of a complicated book in between pitches. I was never afraid of missing anything because almost every play is repeated in order to keep viewers from taking a non-baseball walk in the then prolonged intervals prior to the next play.

I once read three pages of War and Peace, in Russian, (not one of my strong languages) by the author Leo Tolstoy while waiting for a batter to adjust his batting gloves before getting into the batter’s box. Another time, a slow walking pitching coach visited the mound so many times that I was able to leave the room and concoct a hot fudge sundae, complete with a cherry and wet walnuts. When I returned to the TV, the manager had replaced the pitching coach in visiting the pitcher.

Another time I easily read “À la Recherche du temps perdu.” by Marcel Proust, a 4215 page book containing 1.5 million words in between the time it took a pitcher to throw a pitch. In French. (In English it’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” which I’m certain all you hits, runs and errors fanatics know.)

Even though the time of a baseball game exceeded three hours and the ball was actually in play only for about 20 minutes, according to a Wall Street Journal article, (other stories say its closer to ll minutes) the length of the game and the long wait between pitches never bothered me because I always could always read a book. Now, because of the new rules, that’s almost impossible and I blame Major League Baseball for preventing me from improving my mind.

I’ve looked at other sports – basketball, hockey and soccer – to see if they could provide me with the down time necessary to read several pages of a book between plays. The problem was that the action during those games is so continuous that I didn’t even have enough time to read the blurbs saying how great a book is by the author’s friends. (As we in the public relations business know, third party endorsements of a client’s work or positions can’t be bought – yeah, sure – even though it can be through friendships or honorariums.)

My wife said that I should consider the Olympics and Super Bowl as a replacement for my baseball reading time. The problem is that the announcers on those events scream so loud and often that it would break my concentration and reading The Odyssey by Homer in Greek is difficult enough for me, I replied. “Then try The Iliad” she said, unsympathetically as she again solved Wordle in one for the 334th time in row.

The two daily newspapers that I subscribe to are the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It was an article in the WSJ that was worth the price of my yearly subscription. The article said that in a football game the average time a ball is in play is about 11 minutes. That’s because, as the article said, “There's very little actual football in a football game.”

So by default, football became my favorite game and I’m enthusiastically looking forward to the month of September, when football once again becomes the dominant sport and provides me with enough time to read more pages between plays than ever before.

The sad part is that while the time between action in a football game will provide me with more than enough time to improve my mind by reading multiple pages of “Tongwan City” in Mandaran Chinese, a language that I mastered during commercial breaks during last year’s Super Bowl, concussions destroy the minds of many of its players.

And even though this is April 1, brain damage in football is no joke.