Two academics want to speed up baseball games.
Steven Brams and Aaron Isaksen proposed a fairly radical rule change. They claim their idea, tested on 100,000 games over the last 50 years, would reduce the average game time by nearly 30 minutes and make games more competitive by limiting one-sided “blowout” affairs.
I love baseball. I’m all for tightening things up, eliminating dead time, moving the game along. But by proposing a drastic change to a tradition-bound sport, Brams and Isaksen raise a more fundamental question.
Do we need a CliffsNotes version of baseball?
You remember CliffsNotes, right? Instead of reading the book, some students bought the CliffsNotes, hoping they could fake their way through the exam. The problem, of course, is you miss the experience. You don’t interact with the characters and get immersed in the story. Reading the CliffsNotes might get you past the exam, but it’s not a substitute for actually reading the book.
CliffsNotes lets you pretend you’ve had the experience without investing the time and effort to actually have the experience. Video games. Reality TV. Our culture seems determined to adopt CliffsNotes for just about every aspect of life.
I like baseball and cycling partly because they slow things down and create a bit of margin. There’s space for conversation, for reflection. The whitespace is a feature, not a bug.
In cycling and cycle tours, as in baseball, there’s no clock…it takes as long as it takes. The miles, the hills, they’re just there in front of you and it takes whatever time and effort it takes to ride them. In the empty spaces there’s room for relationships to grow and a place to remember the struggle of people trapped in modern-day slavery. There’s quiet, and perhaps an enhanced opportunity to hear God’s voice.
But too often folks want the experience without the sacrifice. They’d like to say they did a bike tour, but without investing the time and effort. They want shorter and quicker. And maybe easier.
They’d really like a CliffsNotes version., but CliffsNotes isn’t the real thing.
I don’t want a CliffsNotes version of baseball. Or the FREEDOM TOUR.
Or life.
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Check out George Carlin’s classic riff on Baseball Vs. Football