A Suicide Squeeze

I'm hesitant to write about baseball as it seems to be the one thing in American media specifically proven to drive viewership consistently away. We're living in an age where the more repugnant and awful a thing is, the more reliably it will draw eyeballs, or at least measurable clicks: animals trapped in things, bum fights, explosions in populated areas, sharks, whatever the fuck it is Sean Hannity thinks he's doing... Moral turpitude is no longer a factor in the calculus when considering consumption, but this is not an old-man's complaint about the deterioration of societal standards and our slow collective crumbling toward a relativist dystopia. Part of that is just my basic default side-eye for all society-wide moral panics. The other part is haha, we've been in full dystopia since at least 2016 (relativist or otherwise), where's the value in diagnosing the other looming one(s)? I'm not sure if there are degrees of dystopia. It was 101 degrees in Anaheim today. I'm not sure what else you're looking for.

I don't want to be alarmist as not everything is bad all the time, even though it sure felt like it after all those people died from a pandemic just about every other place in the world did a better job than we did at controlling. But we decided a month or two ago I guess that COVID is over and everything is fine so we're working through the processes of restitching our society together with normal shit we used to do like infrastructure failure, mass shootings and a full season of full-stadium baseball.

There's an easy joke there where we pretend to figure out which of those three things is least desirable to the American public, but I have more respect for you and for myself to reach down to pick it up. The interest in televised baseball has been declining precipitously for basically the entirety of my life, which I'm supposed to believe is a societal crisis having something to do with Millennials, the sustained assault on American masculinity (see also the proportionate rise in interest in the Euro-fied metrosexual sport of soccer) and, I don't know, probably immigrants?

But like "woke-ism" and "cancel culture," the impending demise of baseball is a thing that has been lamented and warned against for as far back as people have been writing. Every single generation has the same complaints: you can't get away with saying what you used to, politics is irretrievably broken by unprecedented divisiveness and baseball is on the verge of collapse.

Humans are crisis creatures. Part of it, I think, is just leftover Darwinian vigilance leftover in our animal memory from the time when we were way more the size and shape to be snatched up by some kind of hybrid proto-lizard-snake with nothing better to do than wait all day in the tall grass. When you're a warm, fuzzy, delicious mammal, you gotta have your fur-covered head on a swivel. The other part is just the narcissism of the Protagonist Interpretation of History. Sure, all the other generations before this might have talked about everything going to shit, but then they died and everyone forgot about what their voices sounded like, what they looked like and, finally, what their names were. Obviously they were losers. But us, we're alive right now, which is evidence of our eternal and historical importance. So all the bad stuff up to and including the collapse of all civilization is probably going to happen while we are alive. Otherwise we're forgettable people whose gravestones will someday become anonymous decorations no one visits which is, frankly, inconceivable.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is I still like baseball. I'm watching it with my son right now, on opening day. Fewer people watch it, but fewer people watch everything because more of us are fractured and scattered amongst a media landscape that has expanded from a slender window into three national networks to EVERY SECOND OF YOUR LIFE watching nonstop TikToks of people reacting to other TikToks. I will say it is an objective historical fact that we lost a million potential viewers when we did that thing with the pandemic I was talking about a few paragraphs ago. But that's a problem I don't think introducing the designated hitter to the National League is going to fix.