I Love Baseball

I love baseball.

Time is difficult. We age. Time passes. We sleep. Time passes. We work. Time passes. Time cannot be ignored even through the differences of knowledge, language, or experience. Time is experience. Essential as it is to our everyday life, time, a man-made construct that has bound us all to our fates; it is the one thing we've yet to harness for our own gain.

The clock of your life is forever turning. 5 seconds have passed as I type this sentence. Another 5 will be gone as I contemplate my next one. Tick Tock. Tick Tock. Etc. Etc. The big hand goes 'round on moments defined in increments. We cannot stop time. We cannot slow it. We cannot change it. We cannot defeat it. Except, we have baseball. The cow hide and cork stopping up an hourglass blown from rosin, consisting of sand, silt, and clay.

Baseball is timeless. Baseball is your game as much as it was your father's game and his father's game and his father's game and one and one thousand clichés from Hollywood tropes. From playing catch with dad, to walking out of the tunnel to see the field for the first time, to the onomatopoetic POP! of ball slapping into a glove. The peanuts, the Cracker Jacks. These sense-memories, those shared experiences. There's a reason for the bromide. The game of baseball is a time machine. We can go forward and backward in time because we all know what the crack of the bat sounds like on a ball hit the other way.

Baseball is not defined by a clock. Sure, there's an average length for a game in hours and minutes, but there is no finite rule. The game dictates the clock. The game challenges perception of duration. Innings are not determined by our conscious measurements of time. It is measured in the rules of a game. The third out is not represented on the face of a clock. There's no strike 3 o'clock in our sequential system. The only count that matters is the balls and strikes.

Why is this so? Why is baseball a sport without a clock counting down to zero? A theory might be because baseball was invented as a way to play a game as soon as you finished breakfast in the morning until you couldn't see the ball in the haze of dusk. Baseball is meant to be played until it is impossible to play anymore. Not because the buzzer sounds but because there has been resolution. Be it a satisfaction of the criteria of innings or by the divine intervention of the sun and the moon.

I love baseball. A box score is a relic. An imprint. It's hieroglyphics for man's future as much as cave drawings are a language of our past. Baseball cards are a child's currency. Are two Tony Gwynns and an Ozzie Smith worth a George Brett anymore than two Abraham Lincolns and an Alexander Hamilton are worth an Andrew Jackson? We learn to be spendthrift because who'd ever want to part with a Griffey Jr. rookie card no matter how enticing that stack of Bo Jackson cards might be? We learn to invest in futures, sometimes hitting on a Felix Hernandez, other times putting too much stock in Ryan Anderson.

I love baseball. It's art. I recognize the poetry of a well turned double play at second. Nothing is more aesthetically pleasing to these eyes than double to the gap. It's guttural. It's primal. You feel it when your little known middle reliever gets out of that bases loaded jam in the 7th. You feel it when the winning run gets on first on a Baltimore chop. How do you watch when they've got you first and third in the ninth? How do you turn away when your team's got their best guy up with two out, a man on second, and down a run? Every pitch a little life, every out a little death. It's tragedy and then it's triumph. And best of all, when it's over, there's another game to be played tomorrow. We get to live and die all over again.

I love baseball. I've loved it since I was a young boy. It is simple to understand baseball. It is impossible to master baseball. It is simple to throw a ball. It is simple to hit a ball with a bat. Somehow, however, they're the hardest things in the world to do well. The nuances, the details, they are what bring me back to the game. Baseball is a commitment. There are 162 games a year. I'll be damned if I miss even one of them. Baseball is a relationship. There will be 162 games next year, too. Baseball is an addiction. I feel the loss of the game when it is not with me every night in the winter like it is there in the summer. The withdrawals of winter are harsh. Are the tremors from the chill in the air or because baseball seems so far away? I crave it.

Baseball is a kinship. I feel connected to others that love the game too. I feel they are on the front lines of the war with me. 162 games. It's a battle. Baseball fans are my soldiers. We are brothers in arms. Some of us walk away wounded, some of us plant our flags in the ground proclaiming victory, but each year we'll gather again in spring to wage war anew. The battle damage easily covered with a proud ball cap of your platoon.

It is spring now. The troops are rallying. It is our time again, baseball fans. In our conversations about position battles and upcoming season predictions, let us not also forget the game itself. Let's pay homage to the game this year with renewed vigor. Perhaps our squad has a great year coming up. Perhaps it will be something special, never before seen. However, if it isn't, let's not lose sight of the fact that we're getting to enjoy the game of baseball, together, an experience in itself that is timeless.

EDIT: I created an audio file of myself reading the text for a podcast I am doing and thought I would share it on this post for those opposed to reading walls of text.