When the Rockies traded Ubaldo Jimenez, it reinforced my sense that Major League Baseball can no longer break a fan’s heart, for the simple reason that there’s no heart left to break. We live in the age of the team as Twitter feed. Players appear on the screen of fan consciousness only to flit away, replaced by another, himself replaced. Why mourn the transient tweet?
Baseball wasn’t always this way.
The first big league game I ever saw was a double header at Wrigley Field, the Chicago Cubs sweeping the Dodgers, July 28, 1968, three days after my 12th birthday. On the field that afternoon were four Hall of Famers: Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Don Drysdale and Don Sutton, plus a fifth who should be there: Ron Santo. Four stayed with teams their entire careers, Sutton leaving the Dodgers after merely 14 seasons.
Both teams had the same core lineups for years. Players came and went on the margins, and the rare trade happened, but proven players generally stayed with a team until retirement. As a fan, then, you reliably knew who was on first (or shortstop) last season, this, and the next, and you cared.
Sure, much stability owed to baseball’s reserve clause, which chained players to owners until the early 1970s. Instead of free agents, there were indentured servants.
But some, I have to believe, was due to how we then knew baseball. Those ancient days had but one Game of the Week, and it happened Saturday afternoon on NBC. There was local, maybe regional, television and radio play-by-play, but news about the Reds or Red Sox game came via wire service, passed on by announcers.
We live now in the world of churn. We want to know the score now, not just the score of who’s winning and losing but The Score, the state of affairs this minute, whether in baseball, Congress, Hollywood, or the vacation of that one guy Ned we don’t remember becoming our Facebook friend. I’m not saying that becoming a fan these days is exactly parallel to becoming a friend on a social network site, but it does seem to me there’s a direct relationship between the amount of time we spend paying attention to players in our fan feeds and the amount we care about them. The current business of baseball seems bent on shortening that time as much as possible, shuffling and dealing.
I saw my first Rockies game on July 3, 2006, with my son four days after moving to Denver. Of the Rockies’ starting nine that day, only two — Aaron Cook and Todd Helton — remain five years later.
I’ve probably been to 90 or so Rockies games in that stretch, even buying 25-game packages three years. As this year’s Twitter feed of players coming and going accelerated (Jose Lopez, we hardly knew ye), I find myself less engaged by my adopted team, and less often at Coors Field. I bear the Rockies no ill will, but neither do I bear them any emotional investment.
When I was 10, my favorite player of all time, Sandy Koufax, suddenly retired. He’d just finished a season when he went 27-9, with an ERA of 1.73. He was only 30, with the Dodgers since he was 19. I cried when I read the newspaper.
It may be that some 10-year-old in Limon shed tears at Ubaldo’s departure. In honor of innocence, I hope so. Time compresses for the young, and probably a kid at 10 cares for a player more quickly than a middle-aged man ever might. If that’s not true, though, I can’t see the future of tomorrow’s fans.
Doug Hesse is a professor of English at the University of Denver.
