A Yankees baseball game can be regarded as an artistic performance.
The chief argument against this point of view is that sports are not art. Or that there isn’t deliberation of intentionality in a baseball game and that sports are jockish, not high culture or bourgeoisie. That there is nothing poetic about the phrase, “It’s a grand salami!”
And all of this is a matter of opinion, an editorial, so let me preface the review of this game on Mother’s Day with my own, condensed editorialization: sports are artforms.
Before the game on Sunday, which was the last game in a set of four games against the Orioles, the game on Sunday was rehearsed. There were two different versions being practiced: one by the Orioles in which they wrote lines and beats and actions that had them winning the ballgame, and one by the Yankees in which they composed a similar game, with a the same plot structure, the same characters, but ending instead with them winning. On Mother’s day, these two teams got together to perform simultaneously the stories that they had written. But because of the dissonance of their narratives, the play struck an entirely different chord and it became impossible to tell the original of either story.
Like an exquisite corpse story, the action of this story passed between multiple participants. The narrative began between Machado of the Orioles and Pineda, pitcher for the Yankees. Here, Machado struck out, and this narrative resembled the Yankees original screenplay. But when Adam Jones, an outfielder for the Orioles, hits a double, suddenly the script doesn’t resemble either teams.
Now, truth be told, neither of these original scripts were very interesting anyways. Mostly the composed of one team, (the writing team) scoring as many points as possible every inning before admitting that they probably couldn’t be that good and writing the other team being struck out over and over again without so much as a hit. There is not a lot of originality in that piece. It seems more a plan and less a play. But that’s why this is not a defense of baseball strategy and a defense of the game itself as art. Because what is really beautiful is when those two conflicted screenplays explode against each other in magnificent ways.
At the top of the second, J. Hardy scored a homer for the Orioles and then there was real struggle. The fans, the home team fans were distraught, were losing. This was not the play that they wanted to see. But that conflict was powerful enough so that at the bottom of the fourth when Carlos Beltran hit a run on a line drive to right field, tying the game, there was a cathartic release. Tension was alleviated, but at the same time also increased. The Yankees weren’t losing but it was still anybody’s game. The plot, as is often said, thickened.
So when three more runs are batted in that inning, everyone feel some how more profound and a new plot is taking shape, one that isn’t an underdog plot for the Yankees, but of dominance. And here, I think, is the mistake in the writing. If the game is to continue for five more innings there must still be mistakes in order to hold an audience’s interest, and not on the losing side, but on the winning side. A plot is strong when conflict lasts until the end and the ending feels earned instead of expected. So the rest of the game wasn’t interesting in that respect.
Cheers from the crowd were half hearted, even when the Yankees hit two more runs, and the Orioles only hit one. There was never a fear that the Yankees would lose, everything was secured already. People were leaving before the seventh inning.
But hey, art isn’t for everyone.
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