I have been doing a lot of thinking about sports and especially baseball lately. American football is starting and it does show up on my algorithm that I’m interested. I played American football. I understand a little bit about American football. Do I like American football? Not like I did when I was growing up.
This is a complicated thought but at its root, it has something to do with a sarcastic remark My dad made to me one time. I was playing in a softball league and I suggested that perhaps he should come play with us. He was in ball player when he was younger. Maybe he still has some fire? The way he answered was interesting though. You want me to chase balls?
Trying to put a finger on it, this was a status thing. My dad had elevated himself away from baseball. He was a Red Sox fan for sure but it took a lot more amusement from football than baseball. He was a golfer most of his professional life.
But what he wasn’t was labor. That’s the thing about baseball. The game of baseball is about labor. It is a completely physical act and there’s nothing to it but to do it. All sports are exactly the same in this. You can dream about being a pro and have all the work done for you by others. You can think about it. You can play electronic versions or roll dice or makeup stories in your head of heroic moments but if you’re going to play it, you have to go out on the field and pick up balls. Or chase them down.
Or move the blocking sleds and all of the other gear they use to teach football players to hit each other. All of the cones and all of the goodies that you can buy now to really play the game. When I was a kid we could play American football if we had a ball. No helmets and no pads. If you think baseball is expensive, do you have any idea what a football uniform costs for just one player? And we’re not talking about breakage and replacements etc etc. Or injuries.
Right now I’m watching this really interesting slow pitch softball championship game.
Slow pitch softball is an amazing thing really. It’s big league baseball without pitching. The bases are a little shorter but these guys play on baseball diamonds so there is no 300 ft home run here. It’s a really strange game. They just keep blasting each other over and over again. Is it interesting to see these guys hit bombs? They don’t even run the bases after a home run. And I don’t mean to be you know body shaming but how many of these guys truly look like athletes? They can run and they play a good game. But how many beef eating beer drinking guys do we have to look at who know how to hit a ball 400 ft?
They play a version of baseball kind of like this in Finland. They also play without a pitcher but they do one interesting thing. There are no home runs. You can put plenty of fielders out there and you can make it easy to hit the ball but you must stay within the boundaries. I played a game like this one time. They made it specifically for me because I kept losing all of our balls. Just play within the rules. That’s all you have to do.
But seriously, wouldn’t this be an incredibly elegant solution to the Russian / Ukrainian war? This is the sport for fat alcoholics who live on pig fat. Let this thought ripple through the Kremlin: slow pitch softball for everyone who wears a suit! Keep them fat boys looking good. But seriously, has there ever been a better sport for fat drunk belligerence? How is slow pitch softball not a native Russian thought? I tell you, Doubleday was from here.
You need to think economically here. You know we have flies. I have a fly killer. It’s like a sado masochistic whip with a bunch of rope ends and a good long stick. You really get that whip going at a proper velocity and if it even so much is touches to fly, it is lights out. It also has an interesting property of making a very satisfying pop when it hits a piece of furniture. I am pretty accurate. It doesn’t take me long to clean out the vermin. But what I like is that you have the decision to kill, you have a satisfying pop and, if you’re accurate, you have one less fly bothering you. But it didn’t cost a penny. No bullet. No gun, no bullet and no maintenance. This DIY fly swatter will go on forever and it never cost a penny to use it. But now look at slow pitch softball. Bombs! Rockets! How much heart and muscle your guys have, please lob them suckers over the wall. Imagine the destruction caused when one of those balls hits a car traveling nearby. I’ve done that before. Talk about an elegant sound. A deep resonating thunk. This is the sound of the window caving in. God that was sexual.
Fight your battles like this well into the night. I’ll give you a secret. Drink a shot every inning. Play ball until you can’t stand up. And if your team has scored more runs and you are the only man standing in the warm summer night, you can give yourself around of applause on your way to a comfortable place to spend the night. That’s war in my book. That is such an excellent understanding of what war should be. If this was the army, I sign up. You mean I got to play baseball? Not even baseball? No pitching? Just whale away and get drunk? I’m a patriot. Where do I sign?
And you can use these! Just not on each other.
However, the natural economist in me has started to back off of baseball and American football. I have been thinking that it’s just too material intensive.
We can be straight about this though and say that there’s a difference between national sports or international level sports and the sports played in local communities. I could talk a bit about how daunting having something like national sports to have to measure up against to a community without really so much money. If you put nine kids out on the field and you have at least five or six others to make a team out of them, that’s a lot of money for balls and bats and gloves and uniforms and field times and umpires and maintenance of the facility and the grounds etc. Try putting a football team together. Same deal. Don’t even talk to me about hockey.
I think if you start comparing what it takes to put a sports team together, you get an interesting list of costs. If you actually want to have a baseball club, you’re going to need a lot of baseballs. And if you’re paying attention to how the game works, there are plenty of ways to lose a ball when you’re trying to hit it with a bat. You need a lot of baseballs to play baseball.
It’s difficult for me to compete with national brands. Years ago I considered going into business in town but decided against it. People would not allow us to be who we are. It’s always been true. The state has been the way to go and nobody is as big or as good as the state. They bow down to where the big money is and they believe in this. But this is not fair or enjoyable when it comes to being young and having the energy to go and play sports. What we need is that availability and we need this availability without the economic pressure that goes along with trying to look like a pro. I’m not really sure sports are about looking like a pro because of the clothes you wear or how you wear your uniform.
You also need this ridiculous field. You don’t necessarily need boundaries but it’s an interesting game without boundaries or with very short or very long boundaries. But you have to maintain this field. It’s true. You can just go out and play baseball in an open field and not really worry about it. You don’t need uniforms. If you promise not to hit home runs you really don’t need so many baseballs. But you need a glove. You can’t play baseball without a baseball glove.
Let me tell you something. If you ever play ball, playing catch with a baseball glove is so satisfying. It’s your ability to catch this quickly flying object. It’s an amazing adaptation. It takes the pain out of catching cannonballs. It extends your range. It makes you infallible. It’s like a lacrosse stick stuck to your arm. But if you’re going to get a quality mitt, you’re talking about hundreds of dollars. Even buying wooden bats which have a life expectancy of maybe five at bats will cost you more than $100. This is not sporting gear, this is art. This is bling.
And this is where I’ve started to think about football / soccer as being maybe the best game. Sure, it helps if you have shoes but you don’t really need them. It helps if you have the jerseys of your favorite players or your own team and it’s colors but it’s not really necessary. You don’t even really need to construct goals. You can just put two things down and say the goal is in between. Which means all you need is a ball. One ball. If you have a ball and some people who want to play, you can play football.
I found this guy on the internet and got a little fascinated at his style of speaking and creating. He hand makes soccer balls and is into the complexity of this bespoke hobby.
You’re welcome to check out many of his videos. He’s not a bad fellow to listen to. He seems to be in St Louis and he is pining for home. I don’t need to think too deeply into his personal life but he is obviously dreaming of a much more English world. Even the way he says the word ball is reverent. If you speak with an American accent, you have AH. Ball. If you are from London, you have OUGH. Boull. I don’t know how you would write it out but it means something to him to even say the word. I understand him.
The thing that he has going for him however is that he is trying desperately to do something to make money from this. He has a hobby, it is of course a very expensive hobby because he needs a lot of gear to put this together. He has to find a way to make this work. And as far as I can see, he hasn’t quite got the entire factory put together yet to sell balls. It’s an interesting thought to have a guy who hand makes his own balls and yet cannot sell them because he can’t produce them fast enough.
Meanwhile, how did he learn his craft?
There are plenty of videos about how to do a saddle stitch and plenty videos about the mathematics of putting together a ball. I’m not saying anything bad about this football maker. I’m just saying that this thing that his elevation to the point of awesomeness of personal experience and awareness is something that is done as an exploitation of worker skills abroad. You can probably file this in the same place as you file $12 loaves of bread from an artisan bake shop. Of course we buy factory bread for nothing but we make this by hand and we live in a developed country.
For what it’s worth, this hand stitching thing to improve your brand is also out there in different forms. You can fall in love with hand stitching a soccer ball but, again, DIY stuff with the potential of making money is just the food that drives the world.
I guess what I’m saying is that we definitely need sports. We definitely need the competition. And yes, that’s the thing about balls. It’s a lot of exercise to chase after them and find them and bring them back to the game. Forget about carrying it or kicking it or hitting it with a bat. Just making sure that the ball is there for the game to play is everything. It’s work. We work for these things.
I believe in martial arts. I believe a person has to have a way to physically defend themselves. I also think we need to live in a world where we don’t need this sort of thing. I don’t think we need a violent world just to remain healthy. And I don’t think we need a world that justifies becoming a massive bag of meat simply because the world you live in calls for a man who is super sized. There’s too many calories coming in. Too much free time and nothing really physically taxing to do except waiting for your next at bat. We don’t need the meat. We don’t need the violence. We don’t need war. We just need some sports to let guys blow off some steam and some education teaching them how to be something other than killers.
Can baseball survive? I played a lot of tackle football without pads. Not such a bad idea. They play rugby with full contact and no pads. Can we play bare-handed like cricket? It’s a much more offensive game if you don’t have that glove. And you can make a canvas/polymer cover and stitch it up like baseball over some ridiculously resilient polycore with a chip in it. You can’t hurt it and you can’t lose it. So we agree to the manufacturer of metal bats and we’re good to go. Who cares? Because we can’t continue to cut down forests for baseball bats and I’d prefer a life without the farm animals as far as the balls and gloves are concerned. I’m not even going to get into the plastic football padding. I’m just saying that it’s a grand old game to watch. I like watching Japanese baseball very much. I also like watching Little League too. I got one of my greatest thrills ever watching college baseball when I went to one of those colleges and we almost upset Stanford! Maybe we did. But it was close.
Yeah, I think the game of baseball survives and the game of American football survives and there is no contest. Field hockey. Ultimate frisbee. How about friendly martial arts like dancing? There’s always something to do if you have the energy to do it and there’s a game to play. That seems to be the most important thing growing up. That’s the motivation to get you into the group. They have a game going on and all you want is to play. I think we should build a system around this and then worry about what the most beautiful and the most elegant and the most expensive versions are.
By the way the cover picture was a boy who made himself a soccer ball by tying up plastic garbage with twine. Will there be thrills when he plays? I’m sure there will. That’s why he does it.
