The Old Ball Game

Throughout my childhood, my friends and I talked about sports every day. This was understandable: I went to an all-boys school in Boston—a combination of two rather fanatical demographics.

There were always certain players that everyone loved—these were by and large one-team players who had never known anything but Boston as professionals. But more importantly, they had to possess a certain fighting quality, a renunciation of flash for a more blue-collar approach. We loved the players who persevered through losing seasons and injuries, who succeeded through hard work and determination rather than pure talent, who stepped up when it mattered most.

But now, most of these players—the idols of our childhood—are gone. Some have retired, but many have been traded; over the years, the various Boston teams have dealt away Nomar Garciaparra, Joe Thornton, Mike Vrabel, Paul Pierce, and Jon Lester, among others. After all, sports is a business, and players are simply commodities for the owners and general managers.

It’s not simply the players who have changed though; I’ve changed too. My friends and I—we view sports very differently now than we did in our youth. As we grew older, we developed a deeper understanding of professional sports, both on and off the field. But the increased knowledge that we gained was not perfect: it has made us more cynical, less innocent and it has shattered the romanticism of sports.

For the average fan, it is easier than ever to understand what happens off the field. Any fan can follow what happens in the front office, to understand the draft, trades, contract negotiations. After all, we do this ourselves everyday: Fantasy sports have allowed fans to mimic the construction of a team—we are each GM’s, building and improving our own rosters. Moreover, the explosion of advanced statistics in sports has even allowed us to evaluate the ability of players just as a professional team’s front office would.

And as a whole, this has improved the way we view sports; fans now have greater insight about what happens in and between games. We can now break the game down scientifically and consider the game at a higher intellectual level by mapping out patterns and tendencies. In truth, increased knowledge has always been the ideal—stats and fantasy teams simply provide a way to realize supporters’ desire to influence the decisions and outcomes of the team.

However, at the same time, this flood of information has its downsides. So much of the modern sports dialogue is not about the game itself, not about what actually happens on the field, not about the human narratives. Rather, we talk about advanced statistics, free agency, and the scientific dissection of a team’s performance. We ignore who a player is in favor of his stats; we are blinded by averages and points; we define and characterize players not by their personalities but rather by a collection of numbers.

And so, the idea of clutch has become a victim of small sample sizes; traits like desire, toughness, and character must be meaningless because they cannot be measured or quantified; even sentimentality and loyalty have no value that translates into wins. Somewhere along the line, we lost the essence of what made sports so wonderful.

Perhaps it is because I grew up just as advanced statistics in sports exploded, or because my earliest sports memories include a number of improbable Patriots and Red Sox seasons, but a part of me longs for the pure, unadulterated sports fandom of my youth.

I wish I still rooted for my teams with that same blissful lack of understanding; I wish I could still believe that my favorite players were simply better, that my teams were somehow inherently special.

I wish I could go back to 2004 and re-live that magical October at Fenway. No statistics, no fantasy teams, just the game itself—the national pastime in that little green painted park.

Franklin R. Li ’17 is a sophomore living in Cabot House.