I’m not positive just when I became a fan. In truth, I never feel any one ever chooses to do it. I do not assume any person ever woke up on a Saturday morning and mentioned to themselves, “Now is the day I study anything about baseball.” Baseball is not like that. Baseball, it appears to me, chooses you.
I know this: most of what I discovered about baseball is thanks to my dad. And I suspect that most baseball-loving people today more than the past one hundred years would say the very same thing. Baseball is like your wonderful-grandfather’s pocket watch handed down to you with care. A kind of inheritance, if you will, from your father, grandfather, uncle usually – but not always – a male authority figure.
Baseball fans are a distinctive breed. While your typical baseball fan can discuss the finer points of the game in wonderful detail, the true really like the sport engenders in the avid fan is not quick to define. If you devote any time about baseball, it seeps into you in a difficult-to-clarify way. It is a connecting thread in the linens of one’s life. Somehow, game by game, inning by inning, it gets in your blood, and after you’ve got it there is no cure. Once seriously exposed to baseball, it will be, for now and often, a superb infection, deeply ingrained in your psyche. If all of this metaphor talk about baseball sounds maudlin or overly-sentimental, you are not a baseball fan. But never worry, there’s nonetheless hope for you.
My initial exposure to baseball, as I described, was thanks to my dad. Specifically, by means of the games we would go see played by Portland’s minor league group, the Beavers. I suppose I was about eight or nine when I saw my initially game. I don’t recall the score or who the opposing group was. Possibly surprisingly, I never even try to remember whether or not our beloved Beavers won or lost. Being so new to the game, I did not fully grasp strikes, balls, outs, steals, or something else that seemed to be happening in some odd mixture of quiet, deliberate order counterbalanced by sudden, riotous chaos. There had been cheers, boos, some operating, some dust kicked up, some ball throwing, even some stealing (when my father stated that a runner stole 2nd base, I recall pointing out the clear: “No he did not. It really is nevertheless there.”)
I didn’t know any of the players, and could not tell the catcher from the mascot. I truly had no notion what was going on down there on that big green and brown expanse. I was a baseball newborn, seeing, hearing, smelling the myriad of sensory experiences distinctive to this bizarre game for the quite initial time.
I can only recall elements of the game that genuinely do not have something to do with sports or statistics.
I will by no means neglect my first sight of the baseball outfield as we entered the stadium, nearly blindingly green. I don’t forget the foreign bittersweet smell of beer. I bear in mind the loose crackle of peanut shells beneath foot. I keep in mind the musky smell of sod and moistened dirt, and of course, the tantalizing scent of hotdogs, and salty popcorn. There is a perfume to a baseball stadium, and it can be discovered nowhere else. I don’t forget the crack of a 33 ounce bat against a 5 ounce leathery sphere that sounded like a gunshot echoing in the stadium even though the players took batting practice ahead of the game. Most of all, I don’t forget the ever-present noise of the fans, like an ocean, sometimes a quiet drone, occasionally a raucous tidal wave of cheers or boos interspersed with yells of “Get your glasses on, ump!” or, “He’s gonna bunt!” or, “Pull that pitcher, he’s accomplished!” None of this produced any sense to me whatsoever.
While I was a smaller boy, experiencing a hundred utterly alien and weird issues on that day over 30 years ago, I was overcome with an unexpected feeling – not of getting in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar place, but of getting at household.
I know that this experience of mine is not exclusive. In fact it’s just about a cliche. Speak to anybody who loves the game and they will probably have a comparable story to inform. But even though baseball has not been my life’s passion, my appreciation of the Grand Old Game has reached a point with me where I have no choice but to appear a small deeper at this odd phenomenon and explore the game in my own way.
“I see great factors in baseball. It’s our game – the American game. It will take our men and women out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a bigger physical stoicism. Have a tendency to relieve us from getting a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.” ~Walt Whitman
In 1979, the Pittsburgh Pirates, led by Dave Parker and Willie Stargell, won the National League pennant. Anytime I hear their theme song, “We Are Loved ones,” by Sister Sledge, I can’t enable but envision Stargell rounding the bases in his black and yellow Pirate uniform, like some exuberant bumblebee, just after one of his renowned mammoth household runs.
As it happened, our local minor league team, the Portland Beavers, were the farm team for the Pirates at that time. This resulted in dad and me meeting each Stargell and Parker when they visited Portland for the duration of a Beavers exhibition game. Whatever they had been like in their personal lives, I recall that Stargell and Parker exhibited all the hallmarks of the gentlemanly demeanor the institution of baseball somehow seems to instill in so lots of of its stars. And I recall that each of them, when graciously smiling and autographing a nonstop supply of baseballs, seemed to have hands and arms of superheroes, which, in a sense, they seriously have been.
“When 都市対抗 start out the game, they never yell, “Work ball.” They say, “Play ball.”‘ ~Willie Stargell
It was then – having met some of its legends – that I started to spend attention to baseball. Although I was currently a fan of basketball and football, I located myself continually mesmerized – if not downright confused – by baseball and its intricacies. That seeming contradiction in between simplicity and complexity is but a single of the enigmas of the game. Baseball is, immediately after all, unique. Let’s remember a couple of factors about baseball that, in my mind anyway, set it apart from other sports.
First, the game is set upon a field arranged in a rather unusual geometric shape. Rather than obtaining a aim of some sort on each finish of an elongated field (as most other sports) there is no such purpose. No basket, no objective, no net. There is no linear movement from 1 endzone to the other.
Even though the distinct dimensions and configuration of the lines and bases on the field are constant in significant and minor league baseball, the fields themselves can vary in size and shape. The distance from home plate to the center field fence, for instance, can differ as considerably as 35 feet from park to park.
Second, baseball is not a game depending so substantially on continuous action as it is on moments that can unfold in a split second fastball strike, or a single swing that sends a ball more than the fence and brings a dwelling crowd to its feet (or leaves them cursing in despair). Once the pitcher fires the ball toward property plate – a journey that requires the ball about half a second – virtually anything can come about. Anything.
Critics of baseball say the game lacks athleticism and tough play. This is a tiny like complaining that tennis lacks enough slam dunks, or that golf doesn’t involve enough tackling. But as any person who has played or paid close interest to the game can attest, there’s lots of physicality in baseball. The energy it requires to smack a ball more than a fence 410 feet away may well only be eclipsed by the sheer superhuman effort it requires to launch a fist-sized hardball into a space the size of a hubcap sixty feet away…at nearly one hundred miles an hour…one hundred instances a evening…accurately.
Still, say critics, the game is slow, not enough action to satisfy the quick attention spans of the contemporary sports fan. Although the criticism appears misplaced to us baseball fans, do the critics have a point? Throughout an average game, how a great deal time elapses during which “something’s taking place?”
To get to the bottom of this question, Wall Street Journal reporter David Biderman recently analyzed the amount of time spent in action through an typical significant league baseball game. “Action,” includes the time it takes for a pitcher to throw the ball, as nicely as the far more apparent time a ball is in the air following a hit, or a player is stealing base, and so forth. Biderman determined that the typical game had about 14 minutes of action in it.
Having said that, as noted by Biderman, the time not spent in action during a game is not precisely time wasted. Amongst pitches, a myriad of decisions and strategic options might be weighed out. Managers may well be busy consulting the hitting chart on an opposing batter just before he even steps up to the plate. Catchers and pitchers are having a continuous silent dialogue concerning what kind of pitch to throw and where to spot that pitch, based on a range of elements. And fielders could shift positions based on the batter, or the game scenario to improve their chances of saving runs. Whilst the casual observer could grow frustrated by “all the standing about,” in baseball, the far more involved fan knows that this time spent between pitches is exactly where the true game of baseball is played. In brief, there is often “something taking place” during a baseball game.
But the critics who persist in impatiently drumming their fingers on their knees and yawning more than the “slow pace” of baseball may perhaps find it exciting to find out that Biderman also determined the quantity of play action through an typical skilled football game. Just 11 minutes.
When it really is fascinating to contemplate these aspects of time where baseball is concerned, most aficionados know that baseball has far much more to do with timing. To the novice fan, baseball appears like a sport centered on the pitcher attempting to strike out the batter, and the batter trying to prevent such a fate. But to the trained eye, the battle in between pitcher and hitter is one particular of keen decision-producing and split-second timing, and it really is not a very simple factor to analyze. Take pitching, for instance.
