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I am going to start this with a stipulation: I have never accepted the designated hitter. There, it’s out before I go on.

I am a baseball watcher. I began in the early 1950s, when Vin Scully was a rookie announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Ol’ Redhead — Red Barber — was still in the booth before he defected to the hated Bronx enemy. I can still name the lineup for the team back then: Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Junior Gilliam, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Billy Cox; and pitchers Johnny Podres, Preacher Roe, Carl Erskine, Clem Labine.

I was watching them on TV before I even went to kindergarten. So, yes, I am a codger now, and perhaps my take on the game can be discounted due to my fundamental inability to recognize the need to change a perfect game into something else.

But what I notice is a game that used to be the perfect embodiment of talent playing against the odds of the universe stacked against it, being turned into a pantomime of a video game. The original was about humans and nature. No time limits. Every physical measurement at the perfect distance to make even the simplest ground-ball play a matter of microseconds: safe or out. Every ballpark a different shape and dimension. Sunlight, grass, dirt, wood, horsehide, fallibility.

But now, a culture of regularity, precision and digital evidence have crept in. The game is asked to speed up, not bore us, not last too long, and the judgment of individuals is being required to measure up to computerized accuracy. This is, as far as I’m concerned, not baseball.

The trend to “update” the game for modern tastes risks losing its soul: slow, deliberate, played out not in nine innings, but over an entire season, through streaks and dry spells, through injuries and yips.

Let’s start with the ballpark itself. The new ones no longer care where the sun shines.

Once upon a time, ballparks were built so that the third-base foul line ran roughly north-south. That put north over the left-field wall, and as a result, put the afternoon sun where it could do the least harm.

Fenway Park, Boston

This is why a left-handed pitcher is called a “southpaw.” His hurling arm hangs to the south slope of the mound.

When Chase Field (then Bank One Ballpark) opened in 1998, however, it was designed so that its north-south axis runs directly from home plate through the pitcher’s mound and over the center-field fence, mathematically bisecting the angle of the foul lines. Any lefty the Diamonbacks fielded turned into an “eastpaw.”

Chase Field, Phoenix

This may seem like a small deal to you, but it marks a major shift in our cultural inheritance.

The majority of Americans used to live either on farms or in cities. Either way, they faced each day the essentials of life, milking cows or keeping warm in apartments. Our grandparents had a direct relationship with reality. Little came between them and the natural world. But today’s families are often suburban and don’t do anything with the land except mow it.

And as for today’s children: What they know of the world comes to them edited, photographed, glitzed up and transformed. And they would rather see something on TV than in the flesh. Indeed, to many of our children, it isn’t real unless it appears on TV. We live increasingly in a secondhand world.

The ballparks reflect this shift. When Fenway Park was built in 1912 in Boston, or Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1910, they were jimmied into existing city blocks. The idiosyncrasies that make them so beloved are capitulations to reality.

But they still aligned to the cosmos. Their builders were aware of the path of the sun, the changes of seasons and the place of the ballparks in the landscape that surrounded them. It is why, even though the game grew up in the cities, we think of baseball as a pastoral game.

But our once-analog world has gone digital: Now, instead of being aligned with the heavens, our ballparks are increasingly lined to an arbitrary “grid.” The experience of living on a planet has nothing to do with it. Ideas about things replace the things themselves, and those ideas are arbitrary: They have no reference but to themselves. The connections are sundered. The world is pulled apart into “bits” and they can be set next to each other in any calculated fashion.

The change began in earnest in the 1960s. During that era, a spate of “cookie-cutter” stadiums were built — concrete doughnuts, like Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Three-Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, and, what is probably the ugliest ballpark in history, Shea Stadium in New York.

Most sat in suburbia, their diamonds oriented every which way, the rotating hubs of a parking lot wheel that ate up space like a shopping mall — and not coincidentally, often replaced dwindling farmland.

One of the last of these to be built — the “new” Comiskey Park in Chicago — was probably the most perverse. Built as a mirror image of the old park, the third base line now faces east. Talk about bad mojo! Our culture was confused, and so were our ballparks.

We, as a culture, are losing touch with the world we inhabit. It isn’t just Chase Field: Coors Field in Denver and the Skydome in Toronto are all oriented straight north-south. But the grid is a poor substitute for the ecliptic. It is arbitrary, and therefore inimical to life.

I remember once flying at night into Providence, R.I. The plane swung low on its final approach and the thousand burning lights of the city were spread out in the grid one expects of modern cities. But interspersed among the streets were city parks, each with its ball field. From the air, you could see them, scores of them across the city, all aligned the same way. Despite the regularity of the streets, they were all turned the same way like a field of sunflowers with their heads bobbing, face-in to the sun. Those fields took their ultimate command not from the city planner, but from nature.

This same phenomenon can be seen in the old photographs of Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. Separated by the Harlem River and surrounded by a chaos of roads, they lined up like twin observatories watching the same stars, their allegiance to something larger. That something larger is the key.

For we all want to know our lives have value, that we belong to something bigger than our own tiny egos. It is the larger context that gives our lives meaning.

Baseball is inherently human. Which is why I hate all the new rules being experimented with in recent years. The trend to “update” the game for modern tastes risks losing its soul: slow, deliberate, played out not in nine innings, but over an entire season, through streaks and dry spells, through injuries and yips.

I hate the changes. I hate them all. (Or almost all. I don’t really have a gripe about the pitch clock. I don’t like any clock in the ball field, but the game had gotten rather slow, with pitchers taking forever on the mound, wiping down the ball and picking up the rosin bag, causing one sportswriter to question whether they think they are being paid by the hour, and worse for the batter, who kept stepping out of the box after every pitch and readjusting his batting gloves. Throw the damn ball!)

But shortening games by putting a free base runner on second to start the 10th inning in a tie game? Blasphemy. Part of the metaphysics of baseball is its embrace of eternity — that the game could theoretically go on for infinite innings. (The longest pro game happened in 1981 between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings and lasted for 33 innings over two days. In the major leagues, the longest was 26 innings, in 1920 between Brooklyn and Boston and ended in a 1-1 tie when the game was called for darkness. There have been a handful of games longer than 20 innings.) This is as unacceptable as the designated hitter.

I have a list of all the rules changes since 1950 and it prints out at 38 pages. Most of them are minor: clarifications or fixing typos. Some seem oddly fussy. In 2013, Amended Rule 1.15(a) declared the legal colors for fielders’ mitts must be no lighter that the current 14-Series of the PANTONE® color set. (Pantone being a proprietary color naming system used in by variety of industries to insure color consistency in branding, logos and packaging). So, no white leather gloves.

In 2007, the rules changed to allow an intentional walk with no pitches being thrown, with just a signal to the ump to award first base. Maybe it speeds up the game, minimally, but it also takes away an exciting possibility. The year before the new rule, Marlins star Miguel Cabrera was being thrown four balls. Rather than sit idly and watch pitches go by, he reached outside and swung at one, getting a hit and recording an RBI single.

Cabrera isn’t the only player to turn the tides on an intentional walk. Detroit Tigers legend Ty Cobb once hit a two-run triple during an intentional walk attempt in 1907. More recently in 2016, Gary Sanchez hit a sacrifice fly on an intentional walk attempt against the Tampa Bay Rays.

The general run of important updates make the game less human and more like Fortnite. It was a game, and now is becoming a digital bureaucracy.

I love the umpire, subject of hate and abuse, he is the final arbiter of each pitch and each out. Or was. The mistaken urge to make sure the call was “correct” has meant constant second-guessing the ump. “We have to make certain the call was correct.” Why? It is a game; a blown call is as much a part of the game as the misplayed bunt or the dropped fly ball.

Don Denkinger calling Jorge Orta safe in the 1985 World Series. Rich Garcia not calling fan interference on Jeffrey Maier in the 1996 ALCS. Jim Joyce imperfectly calling Jason Donald safe in what would have been been the defining final out of Armando Galarraga’s otherwise perfect game in 2010. You can argue that these moments are more indelible as-is than if the calls had gone the other way.

And so, the video replay and the challenge. The influence of NFL football is the baneful influence, a sport where most of the TV time is given to video replays. The replay is as much part of football’s televised show as the original pass or off-tackle run. (I once timed a three-hour NFL game with a stopwatch, and the total time spent on the actual play, from ball snap to ref’s whistle each down, added up to only 15 minutes. The remaining two hours and 45 minutes is commentary, commercials and lots of endless replay and slo-mo.) There is something industrial, corporate and machine-like to football that is out of place in baseball.

Which brings me to my chief gripe. The ABS challenge — automated balls and strikes calls. The strike zone has always been the custodial property of the home-plate umpire. Each ump was a bit different, and pitchers — and batters — knew that, and played accordingly. We watched Tommy Glavine stretch the strike zone further and further outside as a game went on, and umps gave him the call because of his consistency. Some umps had higher strike zones, others tended to call low pitches. But it was part of the game and the batters adjusted. That flexibility was an essential part of the game.

But a pettifogging influence has taken over; a legalistic mindset that stops the natural flow of the game to bring tape measure and calipers to the rules. It gives batter, catcher or pitcher the chance to tap his cap and ask to overrule the ump. Balls barely edging the strike zone, or a quarter inch outside are caught by computer and used to prove the umpire human.

The zone’s dimensions has been adjusted many times. In 1950, it was defined as running from armpits to the top of the knees. In 1963, It was changed to the top of the shoulders to the knees. In 1969, it reverted to armpit to knees; and in 1988, from middle point between the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants to the top of the knees. In 1996, it was stretched again to a point just below the kneecap. So, it has been a floating target, even beyond the umpire’s proclivities.

But for the precision of the computerized strike zone, something more technocratic was needed, and so, in 2025 the zone was declared to be 53.5 percent of the batter’s height at the top and 27 percent at the bottom. To accommodate Jose Altuve at 5-feet-6 inches and Shohei Ohtani at 6-feet-4 inches, requires a strike zone that changes for every batter stepping to the plate.

And so, ridiculous as this sounds, all position players in spring training camps had their heights measured standing up, without cleats by research technicians using biomechanical analysis. This information was loaded into the ABS computer database so that a different video box could be projected on home plate for each batter for the television broadcast.

This could be quite confusing for pitchers, to say nothing of for umpires.

“The hitter’s strike zone doesn’t change,” said Detroit right-hand pitcher Casey Mize. But, “I face nine different strike zones. The catcher sees nine different strike zones. The hitter just has his own.”

And the strike zone no longer covers the entirety of home plate, but rather a microtome-thin slice across the middle, so that a sharp curve ball or slider that catches the front corner of the plate no longer counts as a strike, if challenged by the batter.

We should remember that when we think to complain that the umpires are overturned and so must be poor umps. I’m surprised they are as consistent as they are.

I still watch baseball almost every day, and I see things in each game that I’ve never see before. I just saw Shohei Ohtani hit a bouncer into the foul-pole net that almost turned into an inside-the-park home run, but then scored as a triple and a throwing error. The run counted anyway. I had never seen that happen before.

Talent playing against the odds of the universe stacked against it. Human drama.

Time and the city buzzing

January 27, 2014

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A cityscape is also a timescape.

And a visit to New York City is time travel. Roll the tape forward and back, and see the time-lapse version of the city, from the hard antediluvian schist that crops up in Central Park to the latest high-rise office complex.

We tend to think of America as a place that eats up its past, tearing down the old and erecting the new with no regard for history. And New York certainly has an energy that feeds on tomorrow.

But it is surprising how much of the past is still there, just left alone, standing in a multi-era crowd, with a brownstone wedged between a modern glass tower and a Beaux Arts library.

I suppose all of us who love the city have our defining frames in the time-lapse film. There is the fedora-topped bustle of New York in the 1940s, the World’s Fair gleam fighting the decay of the 1960s, the rhinestone Trumpification of the 1990s.

The city you remember best depends on how old you are and which version you first came to love.

But all of the versions are still there.

I first knew the city in the 1950s, and my memories are of Con Ed steam erupting from the streets in winter, diesel fumes filling the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 42nd Street like color fills a Titian, the squeal of the AA train (now the C train) as it fought the big curve between 168th and 175th streets. When I was a boy, we ice-skated at Rockefeller Center and window-shopped at Macy’s.

When I go back now, the subway still squeals, and the fumes are still the glorious aroma of the city, the garlic in its stew.

My city is still there, a little buried maybe, its face turned away.

That is not to say there aren’t chunks missing: Penn Station is gone; the Horn & Hardart Automat is gone; the current Madison Square Garden is a generic shadow of the old one; the Coliseum has been replaced by the gaudy Time Warner Center. Others, such as the Edward Durrell Stone Gallery of Modern Art, at Columbus Circle, have been given a new set of clothes.

Even Yankee Stadium has been torn down — Yankee Stadium, which I expected to last as long as the Roman Colosseum. (No such longing for Shea Stadium.)

Although some of the carcasses still exist along the Hudson River, the great ocean-liner piers are dusty, sagging, hollow or demolished.

And these don’t include the most obvious loss.

When I flew cross-country in 2005, the plane passed over Manhattan, and, from 30,000 feet, the missing place of the World Trade Center looked like nothing so much as the empty socket of a pulled tooth.

Yet, much of what I knew of New York when I grew up is still there.

Four decades ago, I stopped at a coffeehouse just outside Columbia University. It was when coffeehouses, not Starbucks, were the natural accoutrements of student life. You had to step down from the sidewalk to the below-grade tables. Someone was playing folk songs on guitar. It was called Cafe Ole. Two years ago, I accidentally found the same spot when I stopped for breakfast. It’s now Camille’s, but the uneven brick floor was still there, and the steps. Forty years squeezed together like an accordion.

You didn’t have to be born there: New York has a historical presence for most of us. We saw it in the movies and newsreels, in gallery photographs and paintings.

The New York of the mind comes from seeing King Kong, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The French Connection.

Not to mention the best evocation of the city ever transmuted to celluloid: Woody Allen’s Manhattan, that cinematic mash note:

“He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion — er, no, make that: He romanticized it all out of proportion. Yes. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.”

That New York of the mind is largely black and white. Or shades of gray. Even the snow in winter is gray. Like statuary, New York expresses form more than color.

Times Square sits in the mind like the black and white of Alfred Eisenstaedt, who photographed the famous V-J Day kiss there in 1945. The Staten Island Ferry does, too, and the crowds of people you pass on Sixth Avenue. (It will always be Sixth Avenue.)

Enough people fill a block there, as lunch hour begins, to populate a ballpark, but most of them might as well be alone in the wilderness that Manhattan once was. People avoid colliding but never seem to make an effort to miss each other. There’s a subliminal awareness of the crowd, but you can see in their eyes that they aren’t primarily aware of the here and now: They are thinking of the meetings they are required to attend today or whether their husband has remembered to buy the potato salad for dinner tonight. Pairs or trios walk along talking, but they are leaves floating together downstream in a current.

In his tiny 1949 book, Here Is New York, E.B. White wrote, “New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities, it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants and needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”

Stop at a storefront McDonald’s on a rainy November day and see the hordes lined up, warm against the cold outside, rubbing their hands as 40 people wait in ill-defined lines to be served. It’s noisy, yet quiet: The heat is steamy, the floor is worn. The bustle is enough to keep your ears electrified, but there is not much language to be heard outside the giving of food orders. The din is a roar of accelerating buses on the street, car horns, subways below the sidewalk grates and the incoherent susurrus of private conversation at tables.

It’s surprising how well people get on in New York, given the wide variety of types, ethnicities, politics and interests. The city makes room for all of them. Or, more precisely, the city takes equal lack of notice of all, so there is a kind of equality built in, an equality of negligibility.

It hasn’t always been that way. In the 1960s, the city seemed to be coming apart at the seams. The tourism slogan was “New York Is a Summer Festival,” but everyone in the city remembers it as “New York Is a Summer Fistfight.”

But now, allowing for the fact that you have 8 million people squeezed onto 300 square miles of land, the city is notably amicable: It has the lowest crime rate of the 25 largest U.S. cities, according to FBI statistics.

It is a city of diversity, and one that enjoys that about itself.

The last time I left the city, the hotel concierge phoned for a cab to take me to the airport. The cabbie was a large, bearded man with a black suit and an Eastern Europe accent; he drove a shiny black limo. Two blocks from the hotel, he pulled over. Another cab pulled over in front of us.

“If you please, my brother take you rest of way,” he said in a thick Boris Badenov voice. We emptied my bags into a second black limo.

The “brother,” who spoke with a Spanish, not Russian accent, explained as we drove that only one car in their fleet of cabs was authorized to pick up customers at the hotel, and so the first cab spent his day going from hotel to hotel, picking up customers and then redistributing them like a kindergarten teacher handing out cookies.

You come to expect such things in the city. It has always been this way.

What single image can catch the essential persistence of New York? The subways, the cabbies, Mott Street? For me, it is the wooden water tanks on the roofs of high rises. One would think they would have been replaced by something modern, something in stainless steel, perhaps. But they haven’t: All over the city, roofs are defined by their wood-slat water tanks, sitting on the tops of buildings like the acroteria on Greek temples.

A tourist will never run out of things to catch his attention, or his dollar. But the Statue of Liberty, the Guggenheim and The Lion King are not the images that boil up in memory for me. It is the water tanks.

My essential New York is built of alleys between apartments on the upper West Side, their trash cans waiting to be emptied.

It is the elevated train station at 125th Street, looking like some obsolete, alien spacecraft landed on stilts in the gully called Manhattan Valley.

It is the George Washington Bridge, which my grandfather worked on as an engineer in the 1930s.

There is no better way to enter the city than to walk across the GWB. You get the sense of crossing some large space that defines the difference between the comfortable world you know and the beehive world of the city. The bridge is a behemoth, covered in a putty of silver paint, with leopard spots of rust. The noise of the traffic as it passes blots out awareness; it is a constant ear-splitting surf.

But you arrive at 178th Street, and the neighborhoods begin. It is important to recognize that New York isn’t a single city; it is hundreds of individual communities, each with their life-support drugstores, groceries, shoe stores, churches and pizzerias. The city may not be as medievally immobile as it used to be, when most New Yorkers rarely left their two- or three-block turf except to go to work, but those neighborhoods are still the hearts of local patriotisms, each an axis mundi.

The two-story 1920s frame houses that line the streets of Queens, the brownstones of Brooklyn, the awning-beaked apartments of 59th Street in Manhattan — each neighborhood has its flavor, its architecture, its private history.

I look at my life and I know that although I am a grayhair 6 decades old, the 10-year-old kid who watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is still there somewhere, and so is the college graduate who came back to the city, and the married man who vacationed there, and now the senex who encompasses them all. And just as my whole life is a single long memory — a single speck of meaning — the city is the same: Everything that ever happened there is still there.

—Richard Nilsen

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