How Baseball Helps Me to Live like a Kindergartner

Play Ball

This week baseball season begins, filling up a 6 month void in entertainment for me.  I know there are lots of things about professional baseball that are irritating at best and despicable at worst, but I can’t help it: I really, truly love baseball season.  I could go on and on about what makes baseball so great (in fact I have before, since I did my college thesis on why baseball fits in so well with American literature), but for today I’m focusing on how watching baseball helps me to live like a kindergartner.

For starters, baseball is the ultimate social sport, thus helping me to “make friends with everyone.” When you watch a game either at home or at a stadium it’s expected that regular conversation will take place throughout the game.  Although there will be moments of high excitement during a home run, a stolen base, a double-play, etc. most of the game is fairly laid back.  You don’t ever hear someone say, “shush, I’m watching the game.”  Even the most intense fans will watch the sport with a friend and will make plenty of comments throughout. And watching a game with those friends really does strengthen relationships.  I have so many fond memories of going to Padres games with my friends, my spouse, my kids, and especially with my mom who loves the Padres as much as I do.     

Baseball is also a way to prove that “learning is fun.”  One of the most appealing aspects of the sport is how simple or how complex it can get.  On the one hand, baseball is simply a on-going battle between two people: the pitcher and the batter.  Every pitch is a move in that battle and every pitch has a winner.  It’s so easy to understand and admire that even my two-year-old can cheer when a ball is well hit or when an opponent strikes out.  On the other hand, the statistics and probability behind each pitch and each hit can get so complicated that  every season a several hundred page book is published filled with statistics for the announcers to share.  I’m not usually much of a numbers person, but it is truly fascinating how there is a stat for every single thing.  Even if you watch hundreds of game in a season, you’ll still be learning new things each time.  

Finally, baseball is a great way to practice “when things go bad have a little cry and start new the next day.”  In major league baseball most teams win about 50% of their games.  The worst teams win more like 40% and the best teams will get in the 60% range, but basically every team every game as an equal chance of winning as the other team.  So even when you have a home team that isn’t so great (which unfortunately happens to us Padres fans more often than we like) there is always the chance that on any particular day your team will win.  A team might lose by 12 runs on a Tuesday and by Wednesday produce a shutout victory. It’s the ultimate lesson in hope!  Baseball also does a lot of trading in between seasons so that every year fans may say, “well, our team might actually be decent this year.”

For me there is comfort in knowing that every year the season starts again and that every day, when I watch a game, there is a hope that joy will come from a win.  So even when I feel exhausted and broke, even when my job is hard and my kids are driving me crazy, I have knowledge that somehow everything will be ok because it’s baseball season again.