5 reasons to love baseball

3. History – dating back to the 1870’s, baseball has a professional history to rival any sport.

Don’t get me wrong; I completely understand that older is not always better. Milk, for example. Baseball isn’t good just because it’s old, but being so old has allowed it develop some aspects that younger sports can’t have.

Almost every team and set of fans has at least one other that it would consider a rival; usually a team from very nearby. But it takes years to forge the strongest of rivalries. Memory built on unfriendly memory, until the reasons don’t even matter anymore. Yankees-Red Sox, Giants-Dodgers, Phillies-Anyone – baseball has those rivalries aplenty.

The years haven’t always been kind – just ask a Cubs fan, or any of the other franchises that have considered themselves cursed previously – but with them come hosts of positive memories that, over time, become more than that. Names like Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, The Shot Heard Around the World, and the now 76-year-old ivy at Wrigley Field will seemingly live on forever.

4. Baseball is Perfect – in hindsight, maybe I should have started with this.

When a ground ball is hit to the infield, you expect the batter to be out. But only just. The size and spacing of the field, as well as the speed of a reasonably hit ball and good throw, are all just right. You expect the runner to be out, but there’s always that fleeting moment of doubt and you can’t help but be drawn in.

A good base-stealer covers the ground between 1^st and 2^nd base in about 3.2-3.3s, hoping to get there before the catcher receives the pitch and throws to 2^nd. From the start of his delivery, most pitchers take 1.3-1.5s to get the ball to the catcher. A good time for a catcher receiving the pitch and getting the ball to 2^nd base is about 1.8-2.0s. Add it up and that’s 3.1-3.5s, or, to put it another way, split-second excitement every single time. Perfection.

If football is a game of inches, then baseball is milliseconds, and each one is perfectly balanced for the most aesthetically pleasing sequence possible. All those milliseconds add up, and can be the difference between a strikeout and a guy hitting a ball, thrown at 100mph, 500 feet the other way, into a crowd of cheering fans. Which brings us quite neatly to…

5. Guy’s hitting a ball, thrown at 100mph, 500 feet the other way into a stand of cheering fans – it’s just fun.

If there’s one thing to be said for American sports, it’s that they sure know how to create a spectacle. They have the one trophy per year, winner takes it all mentality and combine it with the pageantry and razzle-dazzle, they always do so well. It’s always fun to watch.

Baseball does all this as well as any sport, but also finds a way to not take itself too seriously all the time. Moments ranging all the way from Willie Mays playing stickball with kids on the streets of New York to phenom Bryce Harper telling a reporter he’d asked a ‘clown question, bro’, remind us that these guys are all just real people, out there having fun like the rest of us would be.

Jolly, overstuffed Giant’s 3^rd baseman Pablo Sandoval is known as the Kung Fu Panda. The minor league team in Albuquerque actually named themselves the Isotopes, in reference to a plot line from an episode of The Simpsons.

It’s not all antics that catch the attention, of course. The game is always studded with stars, but if you catch it right now, you’ll get to witness a new generation emerging. Players like Mike Trout, Manny Machado and the aforementioned Bryce Harper are making an impact on the big leagues in ways that almost no one their age has ever done, in a 100+ year history.

So, is baseball boring? That’s a clown question, bro.