I love baseball. It’s as easy as that.
No matter the day of the year, it is always a great day to watch grown men running around a diamond. There’s nothing like sitting in a scalding plastic chair, clad in your team of choice attire for three hours as the players make fantastic catches and miss a few grounders.
Baseball is more than a sport; it is a stress relief. Once you walk into the stadium, you let out your breath that you didn’t realize you were holding.
There’s something about seeing thousands of people waiting to cheer for the same thing that you are. It seems like every day at the stadium is a beautiful day, no matter what the meteorologists say.
It provides a common ground between my problems of boys and school and my dad’s real estate drama.
During the months of April through September, the television is overrun with any team from either league. My dad and I like the same teams, the Red Sox and the Royals, and ultimately despise the Yankees as well. My brother and mom have never understood our deep love for the slow-paced game, but we don’t care.
They also don’t understand how we can cheer for a team that tends to lose every other game. The Royals are currently 11-19, a reason many Kansas City metropolitan residents turn toward other teams for their winning fulfillment, but we will sit at Kauffman Stadium and wait for a comeback that my dad swears will come but usually doesn’t.
Baseball has taught me to never give up because even if you are down four runs in the bottom of the ninth inning, one grand slam could tie the game.
As America’s national pastime, it is something that has been around since the 1800s. It has been through wars and droughts, stock market crashes and pandemics, but it has still survived.
Something about baseball makes everything right again; there is nothing that a good ballpark frank with extra ketchup can’t fix. It almost single-handedly ended sport segregation by adding Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers lineup in 1947.
It has survived with very few changes in its original form into the modern era. Some adjustments have been made, most noticeably the designated hitter being added to the American League, but for the most part, the game today is what it was 50 years ago.
It is a game in which physical ability combines with mental preparation and intuitiveness to create a thinking man’s contest.
Sometimes you’ll make amazing plays and sometimes you’ll get tagged out as you slide into home, but you’re always a part of a team. These reasons are why I love America’s national pastime.
