Ya gotta love baseball.
A child's game, played by millionaires on a field that cost 200 million to build, all to replicate a cow pasture, where citizens of one town gather to openly jeer, hate, and wish death upon the representatives of a neighboring township. A game where despite the well-paid athletes, the flashy technology and training, the accumulated wisdom of the grizzled old man who coaches the team between streams of tobacco spit, the outcome is blamed on curses. Blamed on a man who cursed the team when he and his goat where not allowed in the park. Whether this man and his goat's relationship was more than plutonic or not, how fateful that decision to not let a man and his goat watch a game has turned out. As well, the curse from a chubby, womanizing booze-hound who could hit a ball a country mile and was known to often frequent prostitutes and bars on his way to the game, as he was traded has forever cursed another city.
This is truly the national pastime, and this is truly so American.
This morning while enjoying my habitual coffee and bagel and watching soft-core porn on the Movie Channel, I reflected upon this. I am so wrapped up in the ups and downs of my beloved Braves and the issues like the baseball labor unions and all that crap, that I often forget about the "game". What it was like to be standing in left field (how symbolic is that to my life!) half of me dreading a ball coming to me in case I screw up, half of me wanting it to come to me so I can be a hero in front of my family in the stands. To dig in against a pitcher throwing heat up there. To dig my shoes in the dirt and spit a couple of times (something about being in a batters box just makes you have to spit, what is that?) and glare your toughest glare at the pitcher, all the while inside fearing one of those pitches hitting you. The game. With no Braves in the running I have enjoyed just watching the play. It's been exciting and fun and has engendered a rebirth of my status as a fan of the game.
Long live baseball!