Swings

Please let the baseball season begin now. Please don’t make me wait four weeks.

Life is better during the baseball season.

Is there anything more beautiful in sports than a batter, using that odd mixture of relaxed grace and frantic, opportunistic urgency, absolutely destroying a pitch? There is something about baseball that makes those moments truly fulfilling to everyone who sees them and appreciates them. I haven’t hit a true home run (i.e., hardball, organized game/league, against live pitching) since high school, but I remember every one I hit vividly and completely. And I can tell you that there is nothing I have done that has given me such concentrated satisfaction, pride, and exhilaration. It is as if everything I am worth, everything I am capable of, and everything I have in my heart and mind was on display in each of those swings I took, all of which took less than a second to execute. And when I see other people do the same, although it is not me doing it, the effect is so powerful that I feel it too. And sure – I’m living vicariously through other grown men playing a game while wearing sanitary socks, and yes I’m pathetically hanging on to high school sports memories, but shit – it is still sweet.

Baseball is one of those few things that represents a genuine American contribution to humanity. The history, the idiosyncratic rituals, the fat coaches, the spitting, the grass, the inactivity. Ah, the inactivity. It is truly lovely. From my experience, most people hate watching baseball, and the beauty of this is that anyone who loves watching baseball knows exactly why people hate it so much. It is a slow game that consists of extremely brief periods of action separated by long spells of total inactivity. And as such, it reminds me of my exercise regimen, as well as of my work habits and sex life.