An Unashamed Love Letter to the Sport of Baseball

January is all about the pigskin, February falls within the heart of the NBA season, March is obviously madness, but April — April is baseball’s.

America’s former pastime, which once captivated hearts month after month, now sits as the country’s forgotten son, considered far too boring to sit through for nine innings, much less 162 games.

The sport doesn’t fit with the Internet age. It’s a game born from the pre-Civil War era North, and its popularity predates that of basketball or American football. There is no clock; time holds little relevance.

Today our lives are run by The Clock. We all have those nagging mental checklists, the anxiety of planning out our days, months and years, the stress of multitasking and the ever-present feeling we probably aren’t productive enough.

So it’s natural that people have moved past baseball. It requires precious time and — worse — attention to truly appreciate it.

Football and basketball require next to nothing. Don’t know the quarterback’s name? Or the cost-benefit of a 3–4 defense? You can still enjoy that Hail Mary into the endzone. The same can be said of basketball.

That’s the beauty of those sports. They hold lean-back appeal. You’re allowed to watch them with the same mental investment you would with the Fast & Furious series. Sure, many NBA and NFL fans know plenty about their leagues, from the Xs and Os to salary cap concerns to players’ Twitter feuds, but the games themselves can usually be at least tolerated by the most casual of viewer.

I had been chomping at the bit to watch the Cards-Cubs game last night. Being Easter Sunday, my roommates and I invited over a few friends for a poultry-heavy potluck. As the others piled their plates sky high and chatted in the dining room, I peeled away to the living room to catch the first inning.

Gradually my friends found their seats around me, and it wasn’t long before I noticed a look of displeasure from across the room. Not everyone in attendance knew it was Opening Day.

By the third inning I could tell boredom was setting in. By the sixth I was the lone tentpole supporting our evening of baseball. Finally, after our collective food coma was shaken and a weirdly heated debate about the Goodyear Blimp was settled, I heard the words I’d been expecting all night.

“Can we watch something else? Baseball’s really boring.”

Everyone turned to me, a confirmation I was the linchpin in our MLB motion. I threw out a “but it’s Opening Day and this is my favorite team,” but I knew the score.

We turned on The Big Lebowski.

Baseball’s a lean-forward game. It does demand your time and patience. It’s horribly mismatched with our society’s current values.

But there’s something lovable about that, isn’t there? When the rest of the world is scrolling through Twitter feeds and absorbing 24–7 content, baseball’s there, waiting to be studied and enjoyed, just doing what it’s always done.

When Internet fads explode into virality, baseball’s there. When we’re sick of them, yep, baseball’s still there. It’s 162 games of endurance, a tax paid by both player and fan.

As a society we embrace the new and the next. Baseball mostly doesn’t, and it gets a good deal of flack for it. Ask a die-hard baseball fan why they love the sport and there’s a good chance you’ll get a smile, maybe even a far off look. Words like romantic and beautiful might get spoken.

That’s because so much of baseball is nostalgia. When I comb over my feelings of baseball I’m hit with a lot, memories flowing in like a flood. I think of all my little league games and their unfortunate placement next to the city sewer. I think of chewing on my glove in center field, yelling chants from the dugout, and ordering bizarre soda pop concoctions with my team after a win.

I think of time with my dad. Like that time he took me to a Diamondbacks game and I got an autograph from, of all people, Steve Young. Or the kind of man I saw him be time and again as my coach, breaking up the occasional parent fight and opting to start players because he knew they needed it.

I remember Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest and trading baseball cards with my best friend. Lunchroom debates and inside jokes formed during high school practices.

And baseball, more than any other sport, serves as a relic, a connection to our collective past, with statistic acting as our baton. That emphasis on numbers allows us to compare the greats, to put ourselves in the shoes of fans who caught a glimpse of the Hank Aarons and Ty Cobbs of the sport.

Baseball just feels American. And feeling that, giving ourselves the time to feel connected, that’s a very valuable thing.

Maybe we don’t have the patience for nostalgia anymore. Perhaps our lives are just too hectic to sit down, watch nine innings of a game and reflect. But ask me what my favorite month of the year is and I will most certainly say April. It’s the month people remember baseball, a beautiful game from a simpler time.