I never thought I would make this statement in my entire
adult life, but here goes: I am now a fan of baseball.
For full effect, download “Satellite” by Dave Mathews
Band, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.
I would like to state that my opinions on this sport are
not being influenced by the 10-day road trip I have just endured that included
late night runs to Red Lobster, Root beer and Horchata concoctions, midnight
showings of Godzirra, romantic dreams
staring off into the moonlight, and 27 hours in a car with the great C.J.
Ferguson. This is my life as a college recruiter, and it’s ending one
registered student at a time.
Road trips like these do some screwy things to your head,
however I would like to make it perfectly clear that I was not influenced by
any type of hallucinogens, narcotics, alcohol binges, seizure aftermaths, or
reruns of Breaking Bad that have changed the way I view the sport of baseball.
Never mind the fact that my internal clock is operating on the same time zone
as Fiji, I was 100% completely stone cold coherent when I adjusted my stance.
Now I know I have ripped this sport to shreds in the past.
I know I have compared it to getting a canker while eating Captain Crunch. I
know I have hated this sport for dragging on so long that it doesn’t seem there
is ever an offseason. Yes Drew, I know, there are still 118 more games to go. But
what I didn’t know is that baseball on TV, is completely different from
baseball four rows up on the first base line at Angels Stadium.
That my fellow FB colleagues, that is a whole different
ballpark.
When you’re watching a baseball game on TV all you see is
two guys playing catch with each other, with some steroid-induced monster
swinging away every so often. You see shots of managers nodding their heads,
designated hitters spitting their chew, and relief pitchers scratching their
crotch. Baseball on TV is a sport where if your brain cells move slower than
the bowel movements of a constipated sloth, you will still be able to keep
pace, that’s how piss-poor awful it is.
But when you’re watching baseball live in-person,
suddenly everything gets a little rose-colored tint glossed over the top of it.
You don’t care about 18 guys in uniforms that look like pajamas throwing a ball
around a field, you care about the real show going on. You get excited when a
foul ball gets hit your direction, and what lucky lottery winner will get the
chance to grab it out of the air. You make friends with a quartet of drunks who
intoxicatingly make fun of the church you signed up for. You stuff yourself
silly with an 18-dollar dump of dirty nachos served to you in an upside down
batter’s helmet. You make fun of the Asian couple who pop up on the kiss cam
and refuse to slobber over one another.
That my friends, that right there is baseball. Two and a
half hours of bench seats, pop flies, four-dollar churros, sunflower seeds, double
plays, and random people in the upper bleachers waving their arms up and down
in the bottom of the ninth recreating the dramatic scene from Angels in the
Outfield. Yeah, so what if there was a bunch of millionaires playing catch with
each other for nine innings. We didn’t care. The 5-2 loss to the Astros was
just background noise to the rest of the entertainment going on all around us.
I never thought I would say that I appreciate the sport
of baseball. Keep in mind I am still going to make fun of it to no end, and
often use it as a hypnotic rhythm to shut my brain down into a massive coma. I
will still never care who wins the World Series, and I will never get a tattoo
with my team’s logo embedded in to my pecs. I will still hold this sport in the
same category as daytime talk shows and chocolate-covered cinnamon bears, but
for those few hours on Monday night, one thing was certain.
I was in L-word.
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