Science & Tech Quote by John Leonard

Leonard’s line works because it sounds like a throwaway sports take and reads like a cultural diagnosis. “Cumulative tension” frames baseball as suspense you can measure in small increments: pitch by pitch, out by out, the long fuse of a summer night. It’s not that nothing happens; it’s that everything happens slowly enough for your nerves to notice themselves. The game’s drama is procedural, almost bureaucratic, which is precisely why it can feel so intimate. You’re given time to anticipate, to stew, to invent narratives between motions.

Then he snaps the metaphor into violence: other major American sports “played with hand grenades and machine guns.” The exaggeration is the point. Football’s collisions, hockey’s velocity, basketball’s constant scoring swings don’t just create action; they manufacture shock. Leonard isn’t arguing these sports are literally brutal so much as admitting how they’re consumed: as controlled detonations, a steady feed of impacts and rapid-fire reversals. The weaponry language also smuggles in a 1960s atmosphere, when mass media, militarized imagery, and a nation learning to watch war on screens were tightening their grip on everyday entertainment.

As a poet-critic, Leonard is mapping tempo to temperament. Baseball’s pauses invite reflection and argument; the “grenades” sports demand reaction and adrenaline. Underneath is a sly comment on attention itself: one game teaches you to live with waiting, the others train you to crave the hit.