Not Quite Nostalgia

* * *As for 25-year-olds, we have quite a few in our listening audience, many of whom grew up in public-radio homes and listened to the show, some willingly, others not so, but I keep running into them whenever I go talk at colleges. Some bright shiny-faced person says, "Hi, I grew up listening to you." This can be jarring, since I, in my innermost recesses, feel that I am more 25-like now than when I was 25 when I was actually more 50ish, but it's okay to be jarred, and then I ask them about what they're up to and that's always interesting. Inevitably, they're more mature, poised, articulate, FUNNIER, than people that age used to be, and I envy them that, but sometimes they seem to envy me my having lived in the bad old days of the Sixties and come right out and say so — they got a whiff of the era from listening to the Beatles and Dylan and reading Hunter Thompson and the Beats and Ken Kesey, and maybe are slightly nostalgic about it, what you might call pre-life nostalgia, and that's sweet.
--Garrison Keillor in “Post to the Host,” March, 2005.
* * *

Keillor’s not wrong about the pre-life nostalgia, which is a 2.5 word description that captures better what I’ve spent thousands of words trying to describe in essays and observations over the years. It’s this feeling that my generation has, which amounts to feeling that certain kinds of wonder are no longer possible. I read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for the first time several years ago, and it’s no exaggeration to say it changed my life because it changed how I thought about what is possible in life, but now I see that some of what I felt was nostalgia for a time that I would never experience. It showed up again last week when I thought about Bill Veeck sending up Eddie Gaedel, number 1/8, to bat.

(Bear with me a while, because I do have some more things to say here about baseball.)

Recently I’ve been obsessed with Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. I’ll spare you the reasons why, because they would take a long time to explain; but before that, I spent a lot of time over the summer with the Beatles’ Abbey Road. I’ve never read Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) but I know about how the narrator was inspired by an LSD hallucination, and how the Warlocks would play at his “Electric Kool-Aid” parties before they would go on to become the Grateful Dead. And for what it’s worth, I listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” archived shows quite often while I write, and then I always take a break for “The News From Lake Wobegan.” So, I'm a candidate for what Keillor describes.

I’ve decided to dwell on some of this because on Friday night, the subject of conversation turned to Empire Records. In college, I used to celebrate Rex Manning Day, which is not a real holiday of course, just a reference to when Rex Manning came to visit the record store. It was my nickname for syllabus day, that first day of classes when students go to their classes to pick up the syllabus and the professor says a few words and gives the first assignment, and that’s it -- everyone leaves after 10 minutes. For reasons I can no longer remember, I designated this Rex Manning Day and declared it an occasion to celebrate. Of course, out of everyone celebrating with me (several) maybe 3 people would get it without an explanation. I don't know what everyone else thought, and still don't care.

Last Friday, from there we moved to The Breakfast Club, and compared how Empire Records was to many from a sliver of my generation what The Breakfast Club was to the generation previous. I wondered, why are we all so nostalgic at such a young age? Of course, this is a hallmark of Generation X, and plenty of smart people have written both smart and stupid things explaining this phenomenon for the people now entering or enjoying their 30s or early 40s. But what about Generation Y? (What they call us because there’s nothing better yet... Lord help Generation Z, or Generation AA.) Why did we adopt or inherit some of this as well?

I could dwell on this topic for a long time, as I have before and will again in other arenas, but here I’d like to swing the focus mostly on baseball.

I’m not a Baseball Luddite, or a Baseball Conservative, or a Baseball Purist or whatever else people might call someone who dislikes several of the so-called innovations and improvements to the game. That’s not the premise from which my arguments or sentiments arise. Just like in politics, I’m a rather moderate independent as far as ideological allegiance. However, I am staunchly against the Wild Card, the Designated Hitter, and Interleague Play, to name a few. Rather than retread some of those arguments, though, I’d like to spend some time dwelling on the general mindset that influences how we think about these debates, and more germane, how we neglect to think about them.

If I were commissioner, I would launch a 7-year plan to extend the league to 32 teams. (Austin, TX would get one in the NL, of course, so I could easily watch the Cubs.) I would have eight 4-team pods, or divisions, and an 8 team playoff with the winner from each division making it, and no Wild Card. I would have each team play 22 intra-division games against each of the other 3 teams, and then have them play 8 games against each of the other 12 teams in their league. That’s 162, with no Interleague games. I would also include some scheduled double-headers, but that's neither here nor there.

I’m not sure whether I would try to abolish the Designated Hitter, however, which is odd since it is thinking about the DH that finally helped me figure out why I don't like some of the other stuff. I asked my father about whether he supports the DH a few months ago, and he said that he could see the arguments on both sides, and wasn’t sure where he came down. On the one hand there is the nuance, complexity and strategy of the NL, but on the other hand, in a normal at-bat, would you rather watch a pitcher hit than a good hitter? I realize that when you put it that way, I might very well be in a minority.

Here is the turn, though: Why is it about me? Why is it about whoever is watching? Why are they trying to accommodate fans in some of these respects? Of course it’s about money, which is also why they aren’t trying to accommodate us with lower ticket prices or concessions. If there wasn’t something external from the game itself to be gained, Baseball would never have bothered trying the DH experiment because the game was good enough (if not better) without it. In wide-ranging respects, my generation is living proof that people believe the status quo is just fine unless there is something obvious and tangible (and in our case, easy) to gain by change. So Baseball sought to gain revenue by increasing casual fan interest, via the DH, and then other stratagems.

What I think Baseball was playing on is a similar feeling to Generation X’s general sense of nostalgia. It’s this desire to feel in a comfort zone, to feel almost coddled, and to be a focus of attention. Everyone personalizes cultural artifacts from the past, and these artifacts -- TV Shows, video games, albums, whatever -- feel in some way his, as if each of us somehow owns stock in them in some way. It’s the same for baseball: teams cater to our desire to see a team as ours, and part of that is taking what the average fan will enjoy watching into consideration. Sometimes I think it’s been great, as when I visit one of the modern day baseball stadium renaissance cathedrals, and I sit in a seat with a fine view of the game. Other times, it’s like the debate I was thinking about with journalism the other week: sometimes it’s not a journalist’s noblest role to give the public what they want.

Towards that end, as culture tries to give us what we want, it’s worth asking: What might we be giving up? In general, it certainly seems that we are less interested in creating and engaging new, challenging ideas. In other words, our art is lame while our satire thrives. Culture is the set of beliefs, limits, patterns and traditions that we have in common. Art – literature, cinema, photography, paintings, television – is many of the mediums we use to convey and also question and occasionally adjust this set. When art is used only to give us what we want, or to reinforce what we already believe, there is a breakdown of the symbiosis between cultural stability and progress.

It might be the same for professional sports, I'm thinking. Sports is often another medium that both reflects and shapes what we believe in common, and sports certainly dictates many of our patterns and traditions. And in the case of baseball, I wonder whether the game is as good as it could be, and if not, whether this is a result of considering what the fan wants and giving it to him. Again, I’m not glorifying the past, or suggesting that we’ve abandoned the heritage and history of a golden age. A lot of changes in baseball have been unqualified progress. Others, though, perpetuate what I think of as a bigger cultural problem. Moreover, it's a problem that I don't think existed as strongly before, largely because there was less money at stake.

Interleague Series and the Wild Card were both objected to at first, not only by purists but by nearly everyone. Baseball knew, though, that we would give in or warm up to the thrills these innovations offered. Do-or-die games and exotic matchups are rather romantic, and one would have to be awful frumpy not to enjoy them when they happen. Consequently, now these are wildly celebrated.

Except, baseball is not thrilling, at least not in that way, not that often. The NFL, with its 16 games, each an extravaganza, is thrilling. Baseball, though, has at least 70 or 80 dull games every year, even for the good teams – the fun teams, the thrilling teams. That’s just how it is. There will be days in May when the Cubs lose 2-0 to the Pirates, and this will not be anywhere close to exciting for anyone.

I’m not suggesting that some of the Interleague matchups and Wild Card races haven’t been thrilling, because they have been. I’m just asking: is this sustainable for baseball? And maybe if it is, what will be the long term byproducts? Are we sacrificing even bigger thrills that only come from transcending the grind, which are rarer? For example, wouldn’t a Cubs / White Sox World Series be all the better if the teams hadn’t faced each other in decades? (centuries?) And of course, isn’t a divisional pennant much better than a Wild Card berth? Since when is “Just get in whatever way you can” a good way to approach anything, in particular the baseball playoffs, but also anything else? (I don't actually claim to know any different. I'm just asking.)

I guess what I’m saying is that perhaps baseball -- with Interleague Series and the Wild Card -- sacrificed the truly extraordinary in order to have lesser thrills more often. It’s not out of any feelings of conservatism or purism that I question this new climate. It’s a big picture desire: when the Cubs finally win a World Series, I want it to be as perfect as possible, and Wild Cards and Interleague Series perhaps make this less likely by diluting the rarity and thrilling-ness of the experience of the chase. I’d rather weather more boring years for the chance at something truly extraordinary. I think.

Quite simply, I wish they’d stop considering what I, as a fan, might want so much. Not that they should ignore me as a fan entirely, but it also shouldn't be about me, or us, or anyone. It's about baseball. Nothing exists in a cultural vacuum, but there is a spectrum, and I’m suggesting that baseball has been too far towards coddling in several respects. It’s been great sometimes -- don’t get me wrong -- but it also means that something else might have been lost.

We do this everywhere -- we forget that sometimes good things take decades to happen. Or, we decide this is unacceptable, and re-structure, to the point that the extraordinary happens too often. And there is still the matter of whether the thrills of the Wild Card race and Interleague Series are sustainable, or if people will get bored with these as well. What then?

Baseball’s greatest strength, I argue, is its narrative structure, the way stories unfold over long periods of time, and they’re trying to give us the Cliff Notes. Some stories take a really long time, so they’re trying to pacify our lack of patience with more action scenes. And I don't really like it. Maybe I’m alone here, but I wish Baseball had never given us so much of what we wanted. I'm not sure whether my position is consistent, let alone coherent, but there it is. It's just, as far as I can tell, they never owed me anything like what they gave me, but now after the fact it feels like they did.

How does that keep happening?