KD^3C^3 - 20250615 You like Bollywood, snow machines, daguerreotypes
Did I mention I went to a baseball game? I honestly cant recall the last time I went to a game before that. Probably before going to college. I'm still in this period of my life where I'm trying to figure out how to like sports. I can watch sports just fine, and I have absorbed enough of the rules for most of the major professional sports that I usually don't have trouble following what is happening. It also helps that most of the big ones (baseball excluded) are variations of "get the ball through a goal" and the specifics are in how each team goes a bout doing that.
Baseball is a different sort though, instead of getting a ball somewhere specific, baseball is a game of not letting the ball go to very specific places. The only way you can score points in baseball is if you can keep the ball away from players on the opposing team for long enough to make at least partial progress towards running in a circle of a designated radius.
Ok, I think that's about as abstract as I can make baseball sound. At least on a first pass. Baseball's a fine game, but as best as I can tell, it's a game with lots of subtext. What happens in a given moment of baseball (short of the spectacular exceptions) isn't just about the moment you're in, but also five other things that happened before now. But I, as a newcomer to the sport, don't know which specific five things I should be holding in my head.
I have encountered glimpses of this complex web of interactions, but, as perhaps is all to typical for me, I found it not in the game itself, but in reading about baseball in a manga series. I don't read a lot of manga, but for a while in 2021 I picked a couple of new series in Weekly Shonen Jump, the manga anthology magazine that posts a lot of it's content for free. On any given series, you can read the first three chapters and the most recent three chapters for free. Which means if you catch a series from the beginning and keep up with it regularly, you can read the whole thing for free. Or you could pay the three bucks a month to unlock the archive. But in the spring of 2021 I tried to manage reading a few different series for free weekly. One of those series was Nine Dragons' Ball Parade which was about a rag-tag group of high school baseball players trying to go up against the best of their peers. THe comic did a great job of explaining to me import aspects of the game that are not at all visible to the naked eye if one is just casually watching a game. The comic was a short-runner, getting cancelled after only a few months, and I had actually fell off reading it even before the series concluded, but while reading it I felt like I could start understanding the game. I have since forgotten most of those things and once again my knowledge of obscure comics failed me when it counted, as I didn't really understand anything beyond the surface level when watching a recent game in person.
Something that has come up in almost every conversation I have had about going to see a baseball game recently has been the Savannah Bananas. The Bananas are an independent exposition baseball team, who travel the country playing a modified version of baseball called bananaball. Bananaball is designed to appeal to the sorts of people who don't like baseball. The games have a time limit, trick plays are common, and everything is designed to be a show. There's still a real sport being played under the glitz and glam, but not in a way that highlights the depth and complexity of the original sport.
The technique is working, though. Bananaball games sell out almost everywhere the team goes, and the "league" has expanded to 4 teams, which means they can twice as many games as they would otherwise. I've watched a couple livestream games as well, and I can confirm they are more entertaining than not, even as the entertainment sometimes feels lik I'm a baby being distracted by someone jangling keys in front of my face. I'm not above being distracted by shiny objects after all.
I hope that the majority of hardcore baseball fans aren't bothered by the existence of bananaball, since that latter is mostly built on the idea that baseball is boring and should be fixed. I think there's room for both and it's not like the MLB is going anywhere.
Ooh, I forgot to mention my favorite part of the game! There was an app where you could order food and beverages (from a limited menu) and someone would bring them right to your seat. No waiting for a guy to wander by with a tray of hot dogs or beer and trying to flag them down. 10/10 app experience. No notes.
Baseball is a different sort though, instead of getting a ball somewhere specific, baseball is a game of not letting the ball go to very specific places. The only way you can score points in baseball is if you can keep the ball away from players on the opposing team for long enough to make at least partial progress towards running in a circle of a designated radius.
Ok, I think that's about as abstract as I can make baseball sound. At least on a first pass. Baseball's a fine game, but as best as I can tell, it's a game with lots of subtext. What happens in a given moment of baseball (short of the spectacular exceptions) isn't just about the moment you're in, but also five other things that happened before now. But I, as a newcomer to the sport, don't know which specific five things I should be holding in my head.
I have encountered glimpses of this complex web of interactions, but, as perhaps is all to typical for me, I found it not in the game itself, but in reading about baseball in a manga series. I don't read a lot of manga, but for a while in 2021 I picked a couple of new series in Weekly Shonen Jump, the manga anthology magazine that posts a lot of it's content for free. On any given series, you can read the first three chapters and the most recent three chapters for free. Which means if you catch a series from the beginning and keep up with it regularly, you can read the whole thing for free. Or you could pay the three bucks a month to unlock the archive. But in the spring of 2021 I tried to manage reading a few different series for free weekly. One of those series was Nine Dragons' Ball Parade which was about a rag-tag group of high school baseball players trying to go up against the best of their peers. THe comic did a great job of explaining to me import aspects of the game that are not at all visible to the naked eye if one is just casually watching a game. The comic was a short-runner, getting cancelled after only a few months, and I had actually fell off reading it even before the series concluded, but while reading it I felt like I could start understanding the game. I have since forgotten most of those things and once again my knowledge of obscure comics failed me when it counted, as I didn't really understand anything beyond the surface level when watching a recent game in person.
Something that has come up in almost every conversation I have had about going to see a baseball game recently has been the Savannah Bananas. The Bananas are an independent exposition baseball team, who travel the country playing a modified version of baseball called bananaball. Bananaball is designed to appeal to the sorts of people who don't like baseball. The games have a time limit, trick plays are common, and everything is designed to be a show. There's still a real sport being played under the glitz and glam, but not in a way that highlights the depth and complexity of the original sport.
The technique is working, though. Bananaball games sell out almost everywhere the team goes, and the "league" has expanded to 4 teams, which means they can twice as many games as they would otherwise. I've watched a couple livestream games as well, and I can confirm they are more entertaining than not, even as the entertainment sometimes feels lik I'm a baby being distracted by someone jangling keys in front of my face. I'm not above being distracted by shiny objects after all.
I hope that the majority of hardcore baseball fans aren't bothered by the existence of bananaball, since that latter is mostly built on the idea that baseball is boring and should be fixed. I think there's room for both and it's not like the MLB is going anywhere.
Ooh, I forgot to mention my favorite part of the game! There was an app where you could order food and beverages (from a limited menu) and someone would bring them right to your seat. No waiting for a guy to wander by with a tray of hot dogs or beer and trying to flag them down. 10/10 app experience. No notes.