Baseball Is Life

It is hard to hit a home run, man. Take it from someone who can count all the home runs they hit on two hands across a 14-year playing career growing up as a kid. But people do it. Every day. In defiance of what statistics say “should” happen, people wake up and hit home runs every single day, because one of the lessons you must learn in life is that something good happening 30 percent of the time is actually a pretty good deal. If you alter your expectations, how you deal with good and bad outcomes changes too.

Baseball forces you to reduce your expectations and accept reality as it is. Ted Williams was the greatest hitter this planet has ever seen, ask any baseball or Naval Reserve gunnery scorekeeper from 1939 to 1960 if you disagree. But with a .482 lifetime on-base percentage (lmao), that means that the best this sport ever had to offer still made more outs than anything else in his career. Pitchers have to deal with the flip side of this logic, as it is expected that they get people out, and when they don’t, they must find a way to control the damage and accept that sometimes people are going to get on base and there’s not much you can do about it because people are out here succeeding every day.

You simply cannot excel at baseball without conquering the mental aspect of it first. It will grind you into dust if you don’t.

Few things in life prepared me better for adulthood than playing baseball alongside the development of my brain. I am so lucky to have fallen in love with a sport where you toil in obscurity struggling to hone your craft, punctuated by moments of brilliance that are quickly forgotten in the aggregate of everyone’s daily work. We’re all in this grind together, and we should celebrate our victories while knowing that ultimately, most of them won’t mean more to anyone else than they will to you and the people who care about you. And that’s fine. It’s good to appreciate the wins and lament the losses, but not at the expense of the next battle coming over the horizon. And there’s always a next battle coming over the horizon, which is the only thing that matters to the present. You cannot change the past, only the future. Every good pitcher has a short-term memory, as the saying goes.

There is nothing like baseball. America’s other big three sports play on uniformly regulated surfaces in generic stadiums that all look the same, but baseball is played on literal diamonds, an elemental game streaking across grass and dirt in stadiums that lean into their differences in size, shape and character while ensuring that no matter where you are, you know you’re always 90 feet away from your next goal. The lack of a clock also definitely plays into the romanticism, as you can take your time with the sport and not feel rushed.

The pitch clock has been an innovation for good, as it has forced the pitchers who double as human rain delays to get with the program, and the game does not feel as rushed as people’s concerns were when it was first introduced. Unfortunately, this is about the only positive you can say about Rob Manfred’s reign as MLB commissioner. He has exceled at his primary job of functioning as a meat shield for the greedy owners who really run the league.

While baseball is a love language, Major League Baseball is anything but. This is where I end the love letter to baseball and pivot to the depressed and resigned rage that animates your typical Colorado Rockies fan. For the uninitiated, imagine if the clusterfuck of the Wilpon-era New York Mets were even dumber and cheaper and poorer, and you’ll get a sense of the hell that Dick and Charlie Monfort have trapped Colorado in. These braindead schmucks who fancy themselves as baseball men while knowing less than nothing about the sport have made the Rockies more of a real estate deal than a professional baseball team. Laughingstock doesn’t even begin to describe MLB’s most hapless franchise. We are hostages in a baseball crazy state. Colorado holds the most unbreakable record in sports, as unless MLB stadiums are going to return to the days of playing in football stadiums, our 55,350 average attendance per game in the Rockies’ 1993 inaugural season will stand the test of time as the most enthusiastic single season from any MLB fanbase ever.

And it’s been ripped away from us by greedy owners. My profound love of the game turns into unbridled rage when those in charge of the team I grew up with enter the equation, and I am far from alone. MLB owners are loath to spend money (there are roughly about 12 teams that seem like they’re actually trying to win), and fans from Pittsburgh to Seattle to Miami to Oakland to Baltimore and beyond all have similar feelings about the wealthy elite destroying the thing they love in the name of personal profit for themselves.

Baseball is rife with contradictions. How can failing most of the time be considered a success? How can one love something so profoundly that they also despise deep in their soul thanks to rich assholes ruining it for millions of others? Well, this is America, after all. We may live in a world where football has usurped baseball as America’s modern pastime, but no sport comes closer to mirroring life, especially life in America, than the boys of summer.