Opening Day in Major League Baseball is upon us. Summer is coming!

Baseball is the first love of my life. I fell in love with the game as at four years old, on July 24, 1983, primarily because this happened.

(video courtesy of MLB.com, by the way)

And I figured anything that inspired that kind of reaction, I needed to see more of. I remember making a fake baseball mitt out of a brown paper bag and pretending to be Graig Nettles, the Yankees’ third baseman at the time. Since then, Opening Day has been the day of the year I look most forward to. In the 80’s and 90’s, Opening Day signaled the imminent end of the school year, and baseball and summer went hand in hand. In the late 90’s, and early 2000’s, Opening Day was the beginning of another title defense or contention for my favorite team, and I would use my hard-earned money to buy tickets to as many games as I could in a season.

Baseball is an acquired taste. It’s slow, not a lot happens for a very long time (on TV, at least), and once you get past home runs and strikeouts, the game and its rules become somewhat difficult to explain. Because of this, baseball requires commitment. It’s very hard to be a casual fan of the game. It takes so much effort to learn, so much investment to understand, that it’s hard to be a fan of just the game, you’re a fan of a particular team. Your obsession for the team matches your love for the game.

Part of baseball’s appeal to me is the way it’s broken down. For instance, every other major sport is a timed thing: score the most points in x amount of time, and you win. Baseball is an untimed game: 3 outs and the other team gets to bat, nine innings and the game’s over, and however long it takes, that’s how long it lasts. Anything can happen in that format, and as long as the game goes on, no matter the score, no team is truly out of any given game. Yes, it makes the game slow, but it lends a bit of excitement and anticipation to the game that’s not possible with any other sport.

To attract fans, younger ones in particular, MLB has in recent years attempted to address some of the chief complaints of the game: its pace. Games routinely last more than three hours, and there is quite a bit of dead time, where nothing terribly productive is happening. This year’s big rule change concerns the Intentional Walk, where if a pitcher would prefer not to pitch to a certain batter in a certain situation, he can signal the catcher and throw four balls well outside the strike zone. With the new rule, a pitcher can signal the umpire and just award the batter the base without having to throw four waste pitches, thus saving a little time here. I feel the rule change is silly; it’s a highly situational play that happens – maybe – once a game at most.

I read an opinion article from the New York Daily News (here it is, actually) that makes a compelling case for not changing the Intentional Walk rule. It states that the very people that the Commissioner of Major League Baseball wants to attract – youth in their mid-20’s, aka millennials – seem to like the things that baseball is about, something that is “honest and analog.”

Baseball is a game of anticipation, of commitment. And every Opening Day, I feel that anticipation and I’ve been committed since I was four. It’s a game that signals the transition to warmth and life and all that is right and decent about the middle of the calendar year.

Except for the fact that the Yanks got smacked around on Opening Day, 7-3.

#2017 #Spring #baseball #Yankees #distractions #love