The Visual Sense, and Baseball Fandom

I’m going to leave the statistical artillery at home for this one, if you don’t mind….There has been a revolution in football fandom over the last few years that is quite different than the one that hit baseball in the first decade of the 21st century and the one that hit basketball in earnest about 10 years later. It has been different, but I’m not sure it has been any bit less profound.¹ Because its nature is different, it has affected me differently, too. I think I am really too old and too much of an outsider to have been properly part of the baseball statistical revolution, but you still might say that the shoe has been on the other foot with football. I now rather understand how traditionalists who aren’t statistically woke felt about the new zeitgeist that took hold in baseball, and the altered assumptions that came to predominate.

What has happened in football, it seems to me, is that first through the video games like Madden, and then through access to all-22 film, fans now actually study the game the way that coaches do, or they try to. I used to think these non-players couldn’t really do it, that they were inevitably speaking a second language as they assumed the visual analyst role. I thought that no matter how good they sounded, and how strongly they started off their soundbites, they were destined to come up short of the mark and reveal their outsider status. But I no longer have this opinion; I think the outsiders can become just as proficient as the natives. If you act like a duck enough and quack like a duck enough, I think you can become a duck.

As someone who has not embarked upon these studies and whose true interest level is probably betrayed by the nature of the prodding he gives himself (“I really should at least learn some of the terms — I’d enjoy the game so much more!”), the notable gulf is now not between the football community and the wannabes, but between the wannabes and me. This is mostly just a realization, not a painful one, but it has created a tiny bit of angst. Where is my place in the football fan world? I don’t quite feel like the Luddite I do when I can’t download a QR code, but I do sometimes feel cut off and lame, almost as if everyone has been lifting weights and I have not. There are some segments of fandom I just have to sit out and watch.

What made me feel better in reflecting about this today was the thought that not only did many sports fans not know what they were watching before 1950 or so, they weren’t watching, at all. Unless fans went to games, it wasn’t possible to watch, because games weren’t televised. These fans still felt dialed in, didn’t they? Fans from the old days often describe themselves as having been fanatical, and fanatics are usually not humble about their knowledge.

So, do we make too much of the visual component? Does one have a right to think she understands the game, even if she never actually sees it, or maybe if she can’t see it, in the case of someone with a visual impairment?

Even without television, to what degree there actually wasn’t access can be questioned, as can its perceived lack of importance. First, if someone wasn’t just interested in imbibing the players’ game totals and the ebb and flow of the contests, but wanted to really absorb and analyze the individual plays, I think she would need to take her outside knowledge of the game from playing and watching on the amateur level, and then assume that the same scenarios were happening in the games she was listening to. So I’m still skeptical that one could develop a thorough understanding from scratch. Then she would need to take the announcer’s word about the details that had transpired, and make some educated inferences about how players had executed, and what and whether there were unique aspects of that play were worth storing away. To do this sounds very, very hard, however, and to develop the whole architecture of a season this way, to integrate what one had heard in previous games, exponentially more difficult. I don’t doubt that it could be done well in the imagination, nor that it would be wonderful mental exercise, but that it could be done productively in reality, I do doubt.

My experience as a baseball player was pretty limited. I only played competitively, if you could even call it that, from maybe ages 10-14. But I still notice that I do talk the lingo, or think I do. I can’t see the nuances having become second nature to me with no more than just radio exposure, but of course that is conjecture. Having seen games is a critical aid, but I guess the extra effort I am describing that would be necessary for those having to rely on others for their pictures is no different than the challenge that confronts the visually impaired generally, a challenge that they famously often overcome.

Many fans did go to games, of course, when there was no television. Maybe the chasm that separates me and today’s Ben Solaks existed between your average diehard radio fan and a season ticket holder (or the equivalent, when there were no season tickets). Attendance data, rough as it surely is, goes way back into baseball history, and taking into account population, or some informed estimate of how many fans there were (radio ratings?), from those facts we could get a good idea of the number of games an average fan went to.

How many of these very lucky fans there were who knew their team as much by watching them in person as by listening on the radio, taking in delayed replays of games, or looking at box scores, etc, is a different question, however. The number of frequent, sometimes, and one-time attendees is not answered by average attendance, and may be something that has changed over the years. I don’t know how many of the radio-only fans there really were.² It’s also important to emphasize that many games gone to in person inevitably did not allow fans to really see well enough to evaluate the action. It is not just idle talk that you can often see the game better on television than live.

Just witnessing five or ten games a year might also have done wonders for a fan’s feeling that she knew the visual details of the game. I go to bed early, and it is not until the postseason that I really see a lot of games, particularly outside of my New York market (i.e., Mets and Yankees). I am very much data and box score driven. Yet it is amazing how those couple of weeks of a team I see in the postseason can make me feel like I know the team and have been watching them all season. For our visual sense of players, we may not need as large a sample size as we need in evaluating their data, or at least we might not think we do. After all, what have scouts historically done? They have felt they could find the ballplayers — even from a single game sometimes!

I do believe fans thought they were worthy and had a good opinion even if they lived and died only with the radio, but at the same time, perhaps it’s not a coincidence that fans thinking of themselves as equal partners, or as having even more sophistication than players and managers, has generally only come about with expanded access to games. If not being able to watch was the disadvantage I suggest, fans were only being honest with themselves if they deferred to sportswriters and those who saw games regularly. The weakness in this theory, however, is that fans respected the participants’ opinions more than they did the opinions of sportswriters, I think. So we can assume there was more behind the deference given players’ and managers’ opinions than just a concession that putting on the ballgames meant that you saw all of them, and thus were best positioned for ultimate knowledge.

My searching tone probably gives the impression that there are absolute answers here, but the truth is the broad questions at issue are, like most of those in the world, not conducive to satisfying that urge. Think of this more as a journal topic for rumination than a debate. Since baseball is such a codable game, that it had an intelligible but largely invisible history for some is of questionable relevance to the question of whether one can understand football well without studying film, or at least without actively watching it, since, unlike baseball, its density of action is overwhelming, and its plays are opaque.

Beyond just general intelligence, I think the nature of the aptitude needed to excel in the football revolution is in fact quite different than the aptitude that, defining the term narrowly, sports analytics rewards. But I think there is a similarity in the spirit of the revolutions, because the obsession with breaking down film, in my mind, has been motivated by a want to deal with football in how it actually is. It is an intellectual attitude, a Socratic attitude, actually, that informs The Football Film Revolution. And we all know that baseball and basketball analysis has been about seeing things just as they are, about cutting through vagueness and opinion.

Another preoccupation of this post, probably psychological in nature, has been my want to justify my fandom as crossing some theoretical line and qualifying as officially knowledgeable, as if fans were credentialed. But there are many kinds of knowledge, so a simple verdict is pointless. Knowledge is complex, and determining expertise no less so. Much of the sports conversation now at least tacitly acknowledges this, although averred prefaces of this kind are absent when they would be cleansing. But it was the absolute inability to even contemplate the diversity in the nature of sports questions that led to discussions shutting down whenever x Baseball Personage weighed in, no matter the subject.

1. Football has certainly found statistics in a new way as well, and the advances have been on many fronts, including a new atmosphere of sophistication and commonsense; better information; state-of-the-art measures; the advent of brilliant minds like Aaron Schatz. However, the staggering advancement in baseball and basketball, and football’s less easily categorized mean, I would argue, that football is still advancing analytically at a slower pace than the other two games did. I suppose this is a matter of definition. Football is behind, and perhaps hasn’t moved as fast, but it also started way behind, if not basketball. than certainly baseball

2. One gets the feeling many were children. Audio clips and written excerpts of grown-ups sharing their experience of listening to games on the radio in childhood seem much more abundant than adults reporting a lifetime of doing this.