A Pastime For Modern Times
SPORTS: Why I Watch Baseball
Move fast, break shit. Change. Go forward. Disrupt. All words synonymous with today’s way of being. Be honest, 40% of you will quit reading once you figure out that this has more than 3 paragraphs of text — TLDR. The other 50% already left as soon as they saw the word “baseball” in the title.
To the remaining 10% — congratulations for lasting this long. I’m about to take you out to the ballgame. Buy your own peanuts and crackerjacks (a bit of feminist history right here). Here is the actual song — it will be stuck in your head forever. Thank me later for linking the Cubs version, you golden-voiced bastard, Eddie Vedder you.
In Croatia, watching American sports is…well…foreign. Being a baseball fan? Let’s just say you can be labeled a village idiot if you talk about it too much. Back here, nobody tries to understand the game and ones crazy enough to give it a shot (because they stupidly describe themselves as my friends who “want to understand why you like the stuff you like” or because they are simply curious) usually have one label for it — B O R I N G. “Like watching grass grow, only slower.”
So why f*cking baseball? Because it’s beautiful, man.
It’s out of touch. A game that isn’t meant for this century. Compared to most modern things, it takes way too long. Sometimes, it takes 3 hours for that one special moment to happen. A pitch, a swing. Strike. Ball. Foul ball. Rinse, repeat. Yawn. It hadn’t changed much for over two centuries and involves a former (quite-recent) championship winning team that cheated by banging metal lids and buckets to signal pitch-types about to be thrown to their batters. Batshit, I know.
But baseball is an unbelievably great game. By the end of this article, I’ll do my best to convince you of that.
Baseball. A gentleman’s game where fistfights happen. It’s a statistician’s dream, with a ton of variables that make it completely unpredictable. It’s mathematically perfect by design. It’s a team game that features a singled-out individual 1-on-1 duel. And, because it looks and feels so familiar, played by people who, for the most part, look like you and me (“I left my six pack in the fridge”) it almost feels attainable. “What’s so hard about catching a ball? I could be that guy.”
It’s a game unbound by time. One game that can theoretically last as long as you can consistently hit a ball. So, even if you’re leading 100–0 at the top of the last inning, the other team still has a chance to come back and win the game. Baseball — where hope is not limited by the final buzzer.
It’s a game where the defense has the ball.
All baseball fields are unique. Imagine basketball, but played on a court where one basket is way taller than the other. Then another one that doesn’t have a three point line. Wherever you play, you have to adapt to different conditions. Weather, roof, no roof, field dimensions etc. It’s different, yet remarkably familiar wherever it’s being played.
It’s a game where the best players are successful only 30% of the time.
In an era where athletes are expected to be robots, lead perfect lives and constantly perform at their peak, baseball still offers the best bunch of colorful characters, insane rituals and guys just having a blast playing catch while being paid insane amounts of money. While the latter is true for most popular sports, nobody has more fun than baseball players. Seeing my Braves smile ear to ear after a home run, doing all kinds of crazy celebrations puts a smile on my face as well. It’s still a game.
One does not simply watch baseball.
That’s where most people trying to get into it make their biggest mistake. Most people don’t enjoy it because they expect to find things that make other sports appealing, sports that usually involve a bigger ball and goals or baskets. If you expect this from baseball, you’ll be greatly disappointed.
Listen, not even Americans label baseball as a sport — it’s something greater. A pastime.
You don’t watch baseball. You enjoy your time with baseball. You talk to your friends and check stats during baseball, you go and buy a hot dog during baseball. You ponder life during baseball because it gives you time to do so, serving as a captivating backdrop you take a look at every now and then. In a time where we don’t focus on anything, because we focus on everything — all the time, baseball offers an ability to slow down and appreciate the time between greatness.
Your three hours playing out to the perfect beat for conversation or contemplation, broken by moments where everything stops and your jaw drops. Here comes the pitch, and with it, the excitement held within a crack of a bat. It’s a game of micro moments that lasts 3+ hours.
Imagine sitting by some railroad tracks, looking at a perfect green field in the distance, having a nice conversation with your friends while you eat, drink and discuss life — when suddenly a giant, mesmerizing freight train, the likes of which you’ve never seen before, rushes past, obscuring that field for just a moment. You and your friends watch in amazement thinking “This was cool as hell!!!!” before getting back to the conversation at hand. Only the freight train is Mike Trout destroying a sloppy fastball or Francisco Lindor making a wildly acrobatic catch to end the inning.
That’s baseball. It’s long, it’s slow, it’s lightning quick. It takes dedication, company, conversation and… time. A game that changed history, it’s perfect (just like #42), and it’s everything we’ve forgotten today.
SPORTS NOTE: I hate when teams that win a US-based championship (the NBA, for example) be crowned or referred to as “World Champions”. Or the latest moronic moniker — the “NBA World Champions”. I can even tolerate it for sports like baseball or American football because, ok — nobody would beat the reigning NFL champ if there was a World Club Cup of American Football. But basketball? Still a long shot but until you ACTUALLY play the top basketball teams around the world and emerge victorious let’s stick to “NBA Champions”. Thank you.
This is one of the reasons I actually love Greg Popovich. Pop and I are one mind.
LIFE: My Kindle For A Horse? Never.
No bloatware. As a consumer, I value this feature above everything else. I would call it the greatest feature. THE GREATEST.
I’ll quote myself from an earlier article criticizing Twitter for bloatware copycatism to define bloatware:
“Unnecessary features added to apps and web services that negatively affect their ability to stand out in a sea of similarly evolving apps and services.”
No, I don’t want my Beats headphones to talk to me or make me breakfast in the morning. I need them to do two things, and two things only. One — reproduce a top quality sound and two, cancel all noise while I’m vibing to Purple Rain. I don’t care if the world is ending, I just want to enjoy one of the greatest songs of all time while some alien purple lava swallows me whole. Thank you, Beats — you’ve made the apocalypse that much more enjoyable.
The absolute king of no bloatware/FocuswareTM has to be Amazon Kindle. It does exactly what it needs to, offers no distraction while it’s doing the stuff it needs to be doing.
The battery lasts for ages, it has the perfectly lit screen to mimic paper and not strain your eyes. Even the low memory version still has enough space on it to store a gazillion books and the Amazon store offers access to all the books I can’t find in Croatia.
No notifications, no ads (regardless of which version you buy, just contact Amazon support and they will turn off your ads — thank me later) no distractions. Night mode, audiobook support, letter sizes and spacing options. A perfect example of less is more.
Too many apps nowadays use updates to turn into something original users didn’t want to begin with. We bought the product to do what was originally advertised. With Kindle, the lack of other features, even its relatively slow loading time, works to improve my reading experience, which is already near and dear to my heart. I don’t need it to be my second phone. I don’t want the aggravation.
Kindle isn’t trying to be anything other than your handy reader. And that’s why it works.
MUSIC: This Chick Absolutely Obliterating The Drums On Avenged Sevenfold’s Critical Acclaim. Peace out.
