To my continual amazement baseball fans cling to the myth that one of the things that make baseball special, even great, is that the ball parks are different or as I describe it, they have non uniform playing areas.
It's not worth explaining why uniformity is fair. It just is. Down deep, even though they stand on their heads to prove and pretend otherwise, even baseball fans at their most irrational must know that it is inherently unfair for parks to have different dimensions, wall heights, etc. the usual blah, blah, blah.
The real question is why tradition is so ingrained that it trumps fairness, a quintessential America trait. Isn't that why we broke away from Great Britain and did not replace the British King George with an American King George Washington? We're not stuck on tradition. Or are we?
We pride ourselves on fairness. That's why some fans get apoplectic about steroid use. Their concern about steroids is almost exclusively about home runs. However, most of those same fans support non uniform playing areas, which undermine the integrity of home run records.
I could have framed this as reason v. emotion. I'll go with fairness/reason over tradition/emotion any time.
I'm convinced that traditionalists would oppose almost any change. For instance if ball parks had been symmetrical for 100 years and it was suggested that they be replaced with non uniform playing areas, traditionalists would be up in arms. Their cry would be: give me symmetry or give me death.
Does Rico Petrocelli make us stupid? Monday, June 3, 2013
Does baseball make us stupid or are we interested in baseball because we are already stupid?
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Most baseball fans take positions that make them seem stupid. There's really no other way to describe it.
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