Spring is here! The sun is higher in the sky, the snow seems to have finally stopped for good, and green shoots are poking up out of the softening soil. (Well-fertilized soil, judging from all the dog poop everywhere.) Best of all, at least for those of us who love what’s best about America, baseball returns when the Cardinal play the Cubs on Sunday, opening day.

Sadly, though, the powers that be are conspiring to make it less pleasurable. Last year, in one of his last acts in office, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud “Let’s-ignore-this-steroid-thing-for-fifteen-years-and-maybe-it’ll-go-away-by-itself” Selig established a committee devoted to shortening the length of major league games. (The average game lasted just over three hours in 2014, up from two-and-a-half hours in 1980.) Suggested remedies have included limiting pitcher changes to two per inning and enforcing an official rule that says pitchers must deliver a pitch within 12 seconds of the batter stepping into the batter’s box.



I am opposed.

Baseball’s leisurely pace is one of its great joys. Unlike all the other major American team sports, there is no clock in baseball. The game ends when a task has been achieved, when the home team records the 27th out against the opposition. However long that takes. Pitch by pitch, out by out, inning by inning, this informs the entire tone of the endeavor, and rewards a particular type of watching. Paying half-attention, drifting in and out, appreciating the green of the grass, the clouds in the sky, the easy-drinkability of a watery, domestic beer, letting oneself be lulled into the rhythm of a sleepy summer afternoon.

Such slowness - hell, call it boringness, I don’t mind - runs counter to the frenetic rush of our 21st century existence. It exercises different brain muscles than the ones we use in our overworked, hyper-connected, deadline focused daily grind, and so offers the perfect escape.

Susan Sontag said: “Most of the interesting art in our time is boring”. I think she was getting at a similar notion. As modern life gets faster and faster and Faster (as James Gleick put it), things that draw us - force us, maybe - into a state of meditative reflection become more and more important. They are cherished pauses in the hustle-bustle all-the-time action. Think of Terrance Malick’s Tree of Life, or Paul Harding’s Tinkers, John Williams’s Stoner, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Baseball-toned works, all of them.

“It’s baseball”, said Jon Lester, a pitcher that likes to take his time, and who will likely start that opening day game for the Cubs. “It’s a beautiful sport. There’s no time limit, no shot clock ... there’s no nothing. ... Once you put a shot clock on a pitcher or the hitter or whatever … I feel like if you go from a three-hour game to a 2-hour, 50-minute game … is that really going to make a difference? If you do that it takes the beauty out of the game”.



I love that. “There’s no nothing”. Let’s contemplate the beauty of nothingness for a moment. (Right after we make fun of me for writing that sentence.) Baseball has often been described as the most “zen” of American sports. The idea behind zen meditation being that you basically bore yourself into a sleep-like but observant state where transcendent inspiration can more readily strike.

“It’s the stillness at the heart of the game that I love”, the San Diego Free Press’s Jim Miller wrote last year around this time. “The empty space out of which motion and grace emerge - the pregnant nothing that gives birth to the artful something. And baseball, like art, is gorgeously useless and inefficiently slow”.



Here’s to nothingness! If you really soak up that grass and those clouds, and drink just enough of that beer, the zen-like trance state that baseball affords can almost offer an escape from time itself.

