Baseball: The Passion Revisited

On our sunny little island, I am part of an extremely rare group of people called baseball fans. While people are fussing over whether is it going to be AC Milan or Juve to win the Serie A, I am panicking when my team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, lost a four game series to the lowly Pirates. Perhaps other than Newcastle, I realise that I could not care less about football, other than knowing it makes a very good conversational topic with the rest of my football crazy mates (with their money on the line, it is little wonder they are slightly mad). Somehow I just could not find the same passion with football or any other sport that I have with baseball.

When the baseball season is on, there is a game virtually every single day of the year, with every game having some sort of effect throughout the league. It may in someway affect the standing of your team in one of the six divisions, which is of prime importance for deciding the playoff picture. I this way it is similar to football leagues when you are cursing the other team and hoping your team would pull off a victory. With the number of games however, a week can have a drastic effect on a team. Lose tract for a week, and your team which is leading your division may have went on a seven game losing streak and are now struggling to stay in contention. So you follow everyday, willing your team to just one more victory in a winning streak or hoping (often against hope: my team has a 51 - 111 record last year with losing streaks lasting seemingly forever) that they finally break out of a losing streak. The tension is often unbearable and you see me down for an entire day just because my team lost, or grinning like an idiot for just one miserly victory.

team having so many close games, the pain or elation is often multiplied many times because of the buildup of emotion. I enjoy close games in other sports as much as the next guy, but with a set time limit, some contests just becomes waiting for the game to end. Never baseball though, or like the great Yankee cather Yogi Berra says: " It's never over till it's over." There is simply no short cuts for one team still has to play the requisite innings, and a game is only over for a team who thinks its over since for every inning you have three outs to score as many runs to overcome any possible deficit. With around three years of following the sport, seeing a team come back from seemingly impossible is sports entertainment without parallel.

Even when your team loses however, following the statistics of your players is another reason why baseball has cast such a spell over me. No other sport is as conducive to statistics as baseball, and a player's performance can very easily be seen in black and white though certain on field factors still remain relevant. Baseball fantasy leagues, as being the grand daddy of fantasy leagues, is thus another way of enjoying the sport. Other pretenders (*cough*football*cough*) are just lame in comparison. From what I know of other sports (with the possible exception of cricket) the stats are just there for entertainment purposes. Not baseball, where stats are taken extremely seriously.

And if you want to talk about colourful history, baseball will simply dazzle you with the number of stories. In fact a documentary series about baseball spans several DVDs which I fully intend to buy when somehow I find enough money(read: never). The white sox scandal, the Noble experiment, the curse of the Babe, the curse of Billy Goat are just of the few historical episodes that almost all baseball fans would have heard of and add a degree of historical passion to the sport. And a rivalry that lasts more than 80 years? Top that all you football fanatics!

Somehow though baseball fans are also a very superstitious lot. Once something works, they will try to keep as many of the conditions the same till finally and inevitably it fails. Players will keep wearing the same pair of underwear for weeks during a winning streak for a more extreme example. Me? Somehow whenever I see RJC girls my team seems to lose... Which puts me in a spot since I have a soft spot for them in my heart... but that is another issue for another time.

We can't have everything now, can we?

Quote of the day

"Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand"

-Leo Durocher (1906 - 1991)