Everyone else: you also NEED to read this book.

And it is partly a function of this close– and distant-reading thing. Baseball works well when you’re really close (playing it, at the stadium, listening on the radio) or really far away (crunching stats). Football benefits from a top-down, middle-distance view.

But you can improvise baseball pretty well. This is actually why stickball works. My brother and I played one-on-one baseball every day between, say, 1987 and 1992. On other days we played two-on-two or three-on-three.

You can also play pickle or catch. It was our version of free-play soccer. Really, the game that is toughest to play without significant players and resources is American football.

Soccer is huge in Europe, Latin America, and many parts of Africa, but it doesn’t really penetrate into Asia all that well. Cricket is huge in India & Pakistan (West Indies, too), basketball in China. Hmm.

Baseball is a perfect fit for radio, and similarly, football is a fantastic sport for television, which can be presumed to be one of the reasons football has eclipsed baseball as the predominant sport in the US. The god’s eye of the television camera gives an illumination to the game and the replay perfectly fits in the negative space between downs. The play, replay, down after down structure of football is perfect for the reflexive nature of television. So, based on the relationship between media and the sports of generations, I wondered what would be the sport for the new media of the internet.

And, you know, it occurred to me after reading this that if baseball is for radio, and football is for television, fantasy sports is for the internet. How great of a fit is that? It is meta, built on data and about the interaction of small groups. If that isn’t the web, I don’t know what is.

The other thought I’ve been having in relation to sports is the scalability of certain sports in relation to their global popularity. One of the many reasons soccer is so globally precent (besides tradition) is its ability to reduce down easily with little materials. A game of baseball requires just about 18 people, a few balls, bats, and more for it to work. Feasibly one could make a soccer match work with 2 people, a ball, and rag-tag goals. Baseball changes dramatically with fewer than 18 players. Soccer is essentially the same with 4 players. This pattern of scalability might also explain the world-wide adoption of basketball as well—it requires the same material list: at least 2 people, goals, and a ball.