COLUMN: The death of our pastime

From Jeff Wieland's "Peanuts and Cracker Jacks," Fall '95 Not because of some silly strike, or because a guy like Ricky Jordan gets paid one million dollars a year to pinch hit, or because of Astroturf and the designated hitter. Those are the popular sentiments -- the ones you hear if you ask a guy walking down Broad Street in a beer-stained Mike Schmidt jersey what he thinks of baseball in the '90s. Or the ones you hear from hometown broadcasters pining away for the days of Willie Mays, manual scoreboards and collusion. But like all popular sentiments, these excuses are only a cover, stitched tightly into place by years of rehashing over Budweiser and Bavarian pretzels. At its solid core, our national pastime is dying because we simply no longer have time to pass. Baseball is a relic from an era when we hung our laundry out to dry, and we were willing to spend a weekday summer afternoon down at the ballpark. It was born in an era of patience when time was a plentiful commodity, not a scarce one. Baseball fit that era. There is no clock in the grand old game. It drags on at a casual pace with breaks between innings, between outs, between pitches. It leaves time to be savored, time for conversation, time to get a beer and hot dog at your own discretion without missing anything on the field. It leaves time to build memories. Today baseball is an anachronism. We live in an accelerated culture in which images aren't so much appreciated anymore as they are absorbed. We like things condensed, summarized and briefed. We like USA Today, MTV and McDonald's. Our lives have become too cluttered for baseball's loping pace. We live in a culture more conducive to basketball, which bombards us with a stream of explosive images and shuffles us in and out of the arena inside of two hours. This is not to suggest baseball has not tried to change with the times. It has, but only to succeed in destroying those parts of the game that made it original in the first place. Major League Baseball scrapped day games because people were too busy to make it to the ballpark or flip on their televisions in the afternoons. They recently encouraged umpires to speed up games. But we need not look as far as professional sports to view baseball's decline. It is decaying right here on the Penn campus. We canonize Jerome Allen and Matt Maloney, Miles Macik and Terrence Stokes, but how many fans bow in homage to Mike Shannon and Allen Fischer? We pack ourselves by the thousands into the Palestra and crowd our way into Franklin Field every other weekend, but how many sunny Saturday afternoons do we spend down at Bower Field? At Penn, we are very much products of our culture. The charged electricity of the Palestra draws us to our basketball team, while the concentrated, exhaustive effort of our football team brings us to Franklin Field on a weekly basis. They are pre-packaged excitement and we can conveniently pencil them into our frenetic lifestyles. It is a miniseries, not a sitcom. It is an experience, not a snapshot. It is the past, not the future. Don't misunderstand. Baseball may not be the timeless piece of Americana we first thought and later hoped it would be, but it won't die out completely either. At least not anytime soon. Rather it will become something like George Foreman -- a shell of its former self surviving solely on its sheer size and a reputation for having a unique personality. And on the day it does, I'll be the first one to shed a tear.