5 reasons to love baseball

It’s not just the jumble of words and numbers that it looks like.

Are you a fan of winter sport looking for something to get angry about over the summer? Maybe you’re getting tired of your normal sport(s). Maybe you’re just looking for something new, another team to add to your collection. Baseball has acquired an unfair reputation as boring, but, as an avid fan of pretty much any sport I sit myself down in front of, I’m here to put forth my thoughts on why you should give “America’s pastime” a chance to win your heart.

1. It’s not over ‘til it’s over – tired of teams with a 1-0 lead shielding the ball in a corner?

Most team sports have some kind of limit, usually time, that will eventually run out on one team. In order to win a game of baseball, you have to get your opponents out 27 times. To do that, you need to keep throwing the other team legal, hittable pitches that could, in theory, lead to an infinite number of runs.

The Quarterback can’t take a knee, and the field cant be put out to the boundaries, and so any team, facing any deficit, still has a chance to win, as long as they have 1 out remaining. This keeps the tension and excitement alive to the last second in ways other sports don’t.

It’s also at least partly responsible for the birth of a position on the team unlike almost any other in sports: the Closer. He’s a pitcher set aside for only the most high pressure situations, and every appearance is assured of some drama.

It isn’t just individual games, though. In a 16 game season, what goes around might not necessarily come around. A baseball season is 162 games, however, and this acts as a great leveler. In 2012, 86% of MLB’s 30 teams finished with a win percentage from 40-60. Clearly, a much closer competition then the NFL (28%) or NBA (43%).

That means seasons going right down to the wire, with none but the very top teams assured of the playoffs, while few but the very worst are eliminated until the bitter end. This season-ending spectacle has only become more ferocious with MLB recently expanding the playoffs to include a 2^nd wildcard team.

2. Statistics – no, seriously, don’t leave yet. Just hear me out.

As I mentioned above, a baseball season is 162 games. That’s a lot, by any standards. Games come thick and fast, each team playing nearly every day. You don’t have to be away for long to miss a lot. Tracking a player or team’s stats is a quick and easy way to keep up with what’s going on.

Of all popular professional sports, baseball might lend itself to these kinds of stats better than any. Even some of the most simplistic of stats can be very useful for evaluation – if a player has hit a lot of home runs, or gets a hit more often than most. The same can be said for a pitcher with a low Earned Run Average, a measure of how many runs he allows per innings pitched.

If that’s as far into things as you want to go, then those numbers will keep you happy and informed. Just don’t go shouting about them too loudly in certain parts of the internet.

For those more statistically inclined, you can go exactly as deep into it as you wish. Many fantastic stats are already coming into common use: park factors, for comparison of players playing most of their games in different sized stadia; improved measures of fielding; and even quantifications of luck. All of these, and more, are available to enhance your viewing experience. You know, if that’s your thing. Just don’t go shouting about them too loudly in certain parts of the real world.

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.