Baseball and Global Warming

"Ah," I exclaimed. "I see some cross-linkage to greenhouse gasses! What are baseball gloves made of?"

"Cowhide."

"Can't have cowhide without cows. Can't have cows without cow farts. More baseball, more cow farts."

As our discussion proceeded, I began to see baseball as a specific instance of a more general phenomenon. "What about cricket, which evolved from the same roots? Cricket's played in Australia, South Asia, and Africa. All hot regions."

"Good point," Mike agreed. "But it's also played in Britain. It's cold there."

"A minor anomaly," I waved dismissively. "Just like Canada has the Toronto Blue Jays. Not statistically significant."

So, it's clear that the world is coming to a slow boil because of the ever-increasing popularity of baseball and cricket. It's not the Greenhouse Effect, it's the Infield Fry Rule. This is as plausible an explanation as has come out of the present US administration.

Now, Mike and I were educated on the government's dime, but we don't just have training in the physical sciences, we're also policy wonks, so now that we had characterized the problem, we had to look for solutions. "We need to reduce our baseball emissions," Mike said. "We need to go back to a 154-game schedule."

"A prudent response," I agreed, "But I wonder if that would be enough. There are so many more teams now than in the old days, and much larger stadiums. And I think it would be a tough sell at the White House. The Boss used to own a team, and he probably still has friends in the business."

Mike chewed on this. "Well, he certainly wouldn't want the US to cut back unilaterally. There would have to be an international treaty. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Europeans, all of them would have to agree on reductions. Same with Australia, South Asia, and Africa. They have to cut back on cricket."

"The international agreement could be signed in Rangers Ballpark."

"Move over, Kyoto, we got the Arlington Protocol."

"But getting that agreement would take years, possibly decades. Is a baseball emission unit the same as a cricket emission unit? What's the conversion factor? That has to be negotiated. Meanwhile, the problem gets worse." Then I took a different tack. "Now, suppose Nature is also a football fan? Football is mostly played in cold weather. Hell, they even play it in summer in Canada, and it's a lot cooler in Canada."

"Interesting!"

"Suppose we radically expanded the National Football League and lengthened the season. This would be a robust response, and it would offset the economic losses from shortening the baseball season, if that became necessary, but I think NFL expansion is our best first response."

"Expand NFL Europe, too. The CFL can stay about like it is, a couple of new teams at most. You don't want to make Canada a whole lot colder."

"I don't know. If you put teams in Yellowknife and Whitehorse, it could save the polar bears. Just for a few years until the pack ice comes back"

"I think we can brief this," Mike nodded hopefully. "It's proactive."

And this really is how national policy is made. How else can you make sense of it?

Thomas Gangale is an aerospace engineer and a former Air Force officer. He is currently the executive director at OPS-Alaska, a think tank based in Petaluma, where he manages projects in political science and international relations. He is the author of From the Primaries to the Polls: How to Repair America's Broken Presidential Nomination Process, available for pre-order at Amazon.