Accent on Living

FOR the past two or three baseball seasons the suspicion has been growing in me that television has added much to the time-consuming aspect of the game. It may be that one notices the small delays more on TV than amid the crowd in the ball park, but it may be equally true that an awareness of their roles as TV performers is aggravating that touch of the ham which seems to reside in many athletes, especially pitchers. I assume that sports announcers, who have surely become the most statistically-minded segment of the entertainment world, could tell us to a split second the average duration of the 1959 big-league game, and I offer an uneducated guess that TV has spun it out considerably.

The pitcher has always regarded himself as the star performer, but the histrionics which now precede every pitch look like the unabashed bid for more TV camera time. We see the same old cap-twitching, pants-hitching interval, the business with the rosin bag, and the scrutiny of the ball, in which the pitcher often acts as if he had never seen a baseball before.

Then comes the stare-down, which somehow resembles the walk-down in the TV Westerns when the marshal and the gunman are getting set to blast each other. For the staredown the pitcher leans forward, arms dangling apelike, and eyes the batter unwinkingly for what does seem an awfully long time. “ He’s getting his sign,” says the narrator. “ He’s got it.” But no, the pitcher wags his head from side to side. “He’s shaking it off.” More staring from the stooping posture ends with a barely perceptible nod by the pitcher. He straightens up. “ He’s got his sign,” says the narrator. That may very well be, but what follows is another brown study and, if first base is occupied, several throws to the first baseman. “He’s keeping an eye on that runner.” Uh-huh. The batter is fed up by this time and steps out of the box. Now it’s the batter who goes through the rosin bag business. There are rosin bags all over the place. In Boston there’s even one for the on-deck circle. The odd thing is that after handling the rosin bag and throwing it down the players all wipe their hands on their uniforms, which ought, it seems to me, to put them right back where they were in the first place. Eventually the pitcher pitches, and the batter knocks a series of fouls out of play into the stands. These procedures take a lot of time, most of it occupied by the stare-down.

The protective hard cap worn by batters is another new source of delay. To judge from the way these caps are tossed to a sort of valet, once a batter has reached base, they are not unduly heavy and are apparently made of some tough plastic material. But the convention has developed that the base runner, frail creature that he is, would be cruelly burdened by having to run while wearing the cap, as if it were made of armor plate or lead. So, more protocol and more delay attend its discarding. Caps are a great preoccupation with both pitchers and batters, who are forever tugging at them, taking them off and putting them on, sometimes just fingering the visor, or again taking the cap off and wiping the sweatband with the elbow. Is it against the rules for a player to carry a pocket handkerchief?

All the players are aware that most of the TV camera time is spent on the pitcher-batter activity, and if the pitcher has his stare-down to fatten his part, so does the batter still have his feet to keep him busy in a variety of footwork and foot maintenance, which the lens follows to the smallest detail.

We have the batter striding up to the box, a confident figure, swinging two or three bats and making, as heretofore, a fine show out ot discarding the spares. What follows next is more for the camera than for practical purposes: a quick, almost frantic scuffling in the dust. The batter stamps, kicks, and digs with his cleats as if to hollow out a regular foxhole for his stance. Breaking off suddenly in this effort, he carefully taps the side of each foot with his bat, ostensibly in order to remove any accumulation of dirt from his cleats.

The pitcher meanwhile is engrossed in other matters; he scans the heavens or looks at the outfield. He may just stand there, slapping the ball into his glove. But the batter, in this competitive dillydallying, has begun to shift the dust into little mounds with his feet; he makes a neat little hill with his right foot and moves it four inches to a new location with his left. There is nothing to stop the pitcher from doing the same thing with his dust, out on the mound, so he begins moving around little piles of dirt.

These phenomena are, of course, in addition to the routine plate pounding, wriggling, and practice swinging of the batter, and the pitcher’s standard items of delay. They will be presented in fine detail in the World Series, an occasion when television and baseball combine in full flower.