Can Baseball Keep Up With Us?

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Interested in the changes baseball’s making? Read Mark’s article on how Moneyball broke baseball — and how the same people who broke it are back, trying to save it.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, first question: Can you just list for me some rituals that baseball players do?

Mark Leibovich: Um, you know, spitting into their hands and rubbing their hands together, staring into space, slapping their chest, Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves, tipping their hat, balancing their hat, looking to the right field grandstand, looking to the left field grandstand, crossing themselves.

They invent new ones all the time. It’s completely dynamic. A pitcher might tug at his cap and wiggle his leg when going into a motion.

Rosin: Do people lick their bats?

Leibovich: Apparently Yasiel Puig does.

Rosin: Eww.

Leibovich: Yeah. But no, I think that’s a pretty rare thing. And sounds unsanitary too.

Rosin: And what do these rituals have to do with baseball?

Leibovich: Nothing, except that they have been there forever—and players have always had rituals. Oh, this is a big part of the problem in baseball. This is why the people in charge have moved to make it faster.

Rosin: That is my friend Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic who gets all the best assignments.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: I’ve known Mark for enough years to see all the fan gear faded. Red Sox hat, Red Sox T-shirts with holes in them. Red Sox socks. I’ve even seen a picture of little Mark at the game with his dad.

Leibovich: Oh my God. The first spring-training game—like, my friends and I would rush home from school to listen to the game on the radio.

Rosin: His love of this game … it was deep.

Leibovich: Every year, my birthday party was all my friends coming, and we would play a game of pickup baseball at the intersection near the little cul-de-sac I grew up on.

But it’s not necessarily like little 7-year-old Mark here. Mean, if you had seen me, I guess I