Here’s a
tidbit about me that some of you might find quite surprising: I love baseball.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m a huge fanatic – I don’t follow any teams
besides the ones I actually root for (Go Nats and Rangers!) or spend my free
time pouring over obscure stats for random players whose names not even the
team’s fans remember, and I admittedly know about as much history as a
six-year-old – but I’d also be lying if I said that watching and talking about
baseball doesn’t take up a significant amount of my time, at least between the
months of April and October.
Normally, I have to
be content with ranting and raving about games with my dad, who is probably the
main reason for my current enjoyment of the sport, because the majority of my
friends find baseball as interesting as an accounting class, which is to say
they’d probably sooner be dead than listen to me gush about how amazing it was
when Henry Rodriguez struck out the side in the seventh inning of last night’s
game. And I understand that; everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and
even if I wanted to, I can’t force people to enjoy something that simply
doesn’t interest them (though, seriously, how
awesome is this? The correct answer is, very awesome). But that’s the great
thing about Internet blogs – you can prattle on about whatever you want, and it
doesn’t matter if anyone listens. So, because the upcoming baseball season is
starting today and I feel like it, allow me to take this chance to talk
about why I love this game and why it’s much more than just a game.
Or,
if you don’t want to read my ramblings,
just watch this movie.
just watch this movie.
At one point
during Moneyball, Brad Pitt’s
character, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, wistfully asks, “How can
you not be romantic about baseball?” The truth is, at least for fans, it’s
impossible not to be. It may not be as popular as football, but arguably more
than any other sport, baseball lends itself to flights of fancy, as deeply
ingrained in our collective imagination as fireworks on the Fourth of July or
spur-of-the-moment cross-country road trips; after all, it is America’s
national pastime. For children, it’s a rite of passage, and for adults, it’s a
comforting whiff of nostalgia, an opportunity to revisit those blissful,
long-lost days of youth. When people go to a baseball game, they’re not going
just to see the game. They’re going for the grease-laden hotdogs, the
overpriced drinks, the trademark memorabilia, the ceremonial singing of “The
Star-Spangled Banner”, the scent of grass, dirt and sweat that clings to the
air, the memories of lazy summer nights that never seem to end and carefree
weekends spent frolicking outdoors with friends and bonding with family over sizzling
barbeque. When you step through that turnstile, you leave the outside world
behind and lose yourself in a fantasyland buzzing with chatter and giddy
anticipation. For those few hours, nothing exists besides the here and now –
it’s just you, the players on the field and the crowd cheering in the stadium
seats.
Of course,
baseball isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. As I’m sure any fan will tell you,
it’s a roller-coaster ride of emotions, full of joy, exhilaration, suspense,
frustration, bitterness and anguish. One second, you can be jumping up and down
in euphoria, and the next, you’re fighting back the urge to fling your
television set out the window. One part of you knows that it’s just a game,
that individual wins and losses don’t matter in the grand scheme of things and
there are worse tragedies in the world than your team not making the play-offs,
but at the same time, in the heat of the moment, when you’re watching the game
unfold before your eyes, it’s hard not to let yourself get carried away.
Victory feels like a blast of adrenaline, and defeat feels like a 100-mph
fastball to the head.
I won’t lie:
being a baseball fan is a disillusioning experience. If you expected life to be
fair before, I can guarantee that after a year of following baseball, you won’t
anymore. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve started questioning my
faith in humanity and the universe after watching the Nationals throw away
seemingly insurmountable leads the way most people toss bread crumbs at ducks
or discovering that certain players behave in certain ways not because they’re
overly aggressive and competitive but because they’re just dicks. The fact is,
most of the time, things don’t go the way you hope they will. Even the best
teams lose on occasion. Players get traded, bought and discarded like
furniture. Umpires make shitty calls, and fans can be petty, belligerent
assholes. Rookies don’t always fulfill their promise; in fact, more often than
not, they end up floundering once they reach the majors, and even if they do
turn out to be everything you’d expected, their careers can end in the blink of
an eye due to injury or some other twist of fate. I know that by now,
especially as a Nats fan, I should have accepted all this, and I suppose this
is another reason why I don’t count myself as a real baseball fanatic. Seasoned
devotees learn to keep things in perspective, to stop treating each game as a
matter of life and death and to appreciate the little things instead of staking
everything on whether their team wins. In the end, one person’s triumph is
another’s suffering – ask Cardinals and Rangers fans about Game 6 of the 2011
World Series, and you’re liable to get radically different reactions (i.e. one
will enthuse about how it was one of the most exciting games in recent history,
and the other will glare at you as if you killed his or her pet dog).
We
were thisfuckingclose, goddamn it.
And yet,
somehow, every second is still worth it. Baseball is like a long-term
relationship: despite all the anger, disappointment and heartache, you can’t
bear to let it go. There’s something exhilarating about the sight of a ball
soaring through the night sky, the sharp crack of a bat, the sensation of
standing and cheering along with hundreds of people whom you’ve never met yet
with whom you were connected, if only for that one extended moment. At the back
of your mind, there’s always the threat of failure, the possibility that everything
could come crashing down, but right now, you’re suspended in the present, your
stomach knotted with tension. That’s the thing about baseball. Unlike most
other sports, there’s no clock, so up until the last out, anything is possible.
And then,
there are the times, rare but not unheard of, when everything goes exactly
right. Imagine this scenario: the Washington Nationals are playing the
Philadelphia Phillies, a rival team that has dominated the Nats so thoroughly
in the past that its fans have dubbed the Nationals’ stadium “Citizens Bank
Park South”. Predictably, even though the Nationals are the home team, it
sounds as though the majority of the audience consists of Phillies fans. The
game is tied at 4-4. It’s the bottom of the ninth inning, bases loaded, two
outs, and third baseman Ryan Zimmerman steps up to the plate. Several pitches
go by, and Zimmerman works it up to a full count: three balls, two strikes.
Deep down, everyone in the stadium senses what’s going to happen next; it seems
all but inevitable. The pitcher goes into his wind-up, releases the ball,
Zimmerman swings – and crushes the ball. I still remember the thrill of pure,
delirious ecstasy that rushed through me as I watched that ball land in the
seats on the far side of the field, lost amid a sea of fans, their arms raised
in celebration. Just one minute of raw, hysterical, indescribable joy and
disbelief. It is moments like that (and this) that make
me proud to be a baseball fan.
Picture Reference:
No comments:
Post a Comment