Bombs away

Ballpark fireworks should be limited to July 4th

I'm glad it's the Fourth of July holiday so we can get fireworks back to where they belong. There have come to be entirely too many pyrotechnics at baseball games.

This is all the fault of my dear, departed old friend, Bill Veeck -- the greatest sports promoter who ever lived. Bill loved fireworks possibly only less than he loved beer. He was child when it came to fireworks; he would glow just talking about them. And so he instituted postgame fireworks and then the exploding scoreboard for in-game fireworks. Unfortunately, everybody liked fireworks almost as much as Bill did, and soon they became an integral part of baseball. Now all scoreboards explode. Boom, boom, boom.

We Americans will reportedly spend three-quarters of a billion dollars on fireworks this year, and it seems to me that most of that expense will come at the ballpark.

It is also my conspiracy theory that the popularity for exploding scoreboards was what accounted for more home runs, inasmuch as scoreboards only explode for home runs. They don't explode for two-hit shutouts and beautiful 6-4-3 double plays. As a matter of fact, when a team scores a lot of runs, the announcer often seems to say, "There's fireworks here tonight." Maybe we wouldn't have so many brutes all slamming homers if Bill Veeck hadn't liked fireworks so much. Things can spin out of control, can't they?

Also, for example, since you can't shoot off explosives indoors, basketball has substituted lasers for fireworks, with the requisite loud music. Then baseball, not to be outdone in the noise department, added loud music, too. The cacophony at sports events is now deafening. All because Bill Veeck liked fireworks. Oh, what you have wrought, Bill.

I know this is difficult to imagine, but once upon a time the only loud orchestrated noise in American sports was marching bands at football games. And this was kept at a reasonable decibel level, with only kettle drums and tubas being bothersome. Plus, most marching bands had routines and spelled things out on the field, so they made for a fine full sensory performance.

It continually amazes me that, despite all the incredible modern digital stuff -- where planets and dinosaurs run wild and creatures morph into monsters on the movie screen -- Americans are still delighted to sit back and look up at simple fireworks, which, essentially explode in the same sun bursts as they did when I was a child. In many ways, I guess fireworks and baseball are our most sustaining innocent summer delights. So in that sense, maybe Bill Veeck knew what he was talking about. He usually did.

Still, I don't ever want fireworks to become so commonplace at baseball games that they're no longer special come July 4th. Many countries blast off fireworks for the New Year, but we've always reserved holiday blasts for our Independence Day -- no less than we limit turkeys to Thanksgiving and Cupids to Valentines. At the very least, let's put a moratorium on exploding scoreboards for the week or so around the Fourth of July so that when we see the rockets' red glare we're reminded that, in the course of human events, home runs can be cheap but independence is always dear.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. His new novel, The Other Adonis (Sourcebooks Landmark), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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