Play ball

[Warning: Long post about baseball. Feel free to skip.]

Why baseball? Up in the nosebleeds in 50-degree weather on Sunday, watching two teams in which I have no personal investment, I couldn’t have been happier. Of all sports, why does only baseball hold a romantic allure for me? I could say it’s all those hours spent at the Little League fields while my brothers moved from tee ball to real ball to fall ball to all-stars. But I think it’s more than that.

Baseball has a wider appeal. It’s not just for the jocks who stuffed your skinny stepbrother into a locker. Your skinny stepbrother loves baseball, too. He brings a notepad to the ball field and crunches numbers. He knows batting averages, records, dates. He gets respect for this, because annotating the annals of this sport is important. Baseball has a history and a mythology of its own, deep and entire, yet inextricably tied to the history and mythology of America.

And baseball’s not just for rich folks or the incredibly tall or for ruffians. It’s for everyone. It requires minimal equipment. It can be played anywhere. Even professionally, it is not played under cover. Wind, rain, and beating sun affect the players just as they’d affect anyone else.

As for baseball players, they make mistakes. Heck, this is a sport with a statistical designation for “error,” right up there on the JumboTron for everyone to see. And so we understand baseball players—they’re like us somehow. Even with the major leagues, we feel like the players are boys we’ve known forever. We give them nicknames as if we used to share after-school milk and cookies. When we watch them play, they’re not covered in pads, strapped to skates, or otherwise burdened by equipment. They are men. First, foremost, visibly.

Baseball is not only mental or only physical; it’s both. It’s not just a team sport or just a solo sport; it’s both. Golf is a game of a guy with a stick and a ball; baseball holds more appeal for the showdown factor—a guy with a stick and another guy with a ball, and nine unfolding innings of the infinite possibilities of physics contained in the 60 feet between them.

So, why baseball? I guess the appeal lies mostly in the players. It is this factor, I suppose, that makes baseball steroid stories so upsetting. The game is then no longer real, the players no longer human. It’s Hollywood; reality-plus: a 65-year old person without laugh lines. Players who juice pollute the dreams of kids who believe the ball player's life is something to aspire to and ruin the romance for adults who like to believe that you can know a person. After all, we like our game built the way our country was: From the ground up, equal parts emotional fortitude and elbow grease.