In Which Your Blogger Affectionately Mocks Baseball on Opening Day

I don’t know which came first: April Fool’s day or this being the opening day of baseball. In any case, fans from 30 different teams all believe that their team has a chance to win the whole thing this year. On opening day, every team has a perfect record. This encourages a form of foolishness.

In baseball, the pitcher tries to keep anything from happening and the batter tries to change that. Most of the time, nothing happens and then suddenly it does. That’s also how life works.

No matter how great a hitter you are, you have to wait for 8 other guys to go to the plate before you get another turn. Imagine that sort of turn taking in basketball or football. “Pass me the ball!” “No. It’s not your turn.” 

They call time out in baseball and yet no one pays attention to the clock or can tell you how many minutes are left in the game.

It’s a weird game, too, in that when a team goes on offense, they literally (well, most of them anyway) retreat into the dugout. On defense, you go out into the field and stand around. On offense, you go into the dugout and sit down. Possibly they first made baseball players begin to wear uniforms because given their penchant for sitting down to watch the game people were having a hard time telling the players and fans apart.

Baseball fans are obsessive about small differences in batting averages, pitching counts, etc. It’s a game with strict rules but the distance you have to hit a ball for a homerun randomly changes from park to park. Can you imagine a football stadium where an announcer says, “Defenders love this field. It’s 111 yards long.”

It’s hard to tell whether baseball players are overly optimistic about speed or very pessimistic about risk. In either case, it seems odd that they wear helmets when running the bases.

Players are constantly called out in baseball. It’s the thing that happens most. But the umps are nice about it. They give you a little thumbs up when they call you out.

I’m still waiting for the first baseball coach to abandon the traditional zone defense (“You play third base, you play right field …”) to pioneer a man-to-man defense (“I don’t care if he is on the bench, you stay on Jenkins …”).

Baseball encourages a philosophical bent. The most dominating teams still lose more games than the athletes in other sports play in a season. And your best hitter gets out twice as often as he gets on. To watch a game is to watch failure. That alone may be a reason it has held our attention for more than a century, another way in which it is less an escape from reality than a way to closely study it.