Baseball Is There for You

baseball is there

It always starts before I’m ready for it, and then it sticks around. And it keeps going every day for about 7 months (except for Wednesday and Thursday of this particular week, actually). It doesn’t go away until I’m tired of it and spending most of my time thinking about football.

More than any other sport, it’s just…there. I don’t mean that it’s like wallpaper, although I’m sure some people feel that way. I mean that I could put my head down and concentrate on work for a week, come home, turn on NESN at 7:05 ET, and the Red Sox would be playing. You could take off on a Friday night for a 9-day Caribbean vacation, turn your cell phone off, forget about the world entirely, come back late on the tail end of the weekend, and catch the last three innings of Sunday Night Baseball.

I don’t mean to be sentimental. God knows there are enough people who romanticize the sport, treat great players like they’re deities, and find ways to be obnoxiously sanctimonious when discussing a game that many of us started to play at the age of 6. But it does distinguish itself from other sports that compete for our attention.

Football was my first love. I don’t know who decided that football starts at the beginning of September, but it was a smart choice, at least for my money. Growing up, I remember it as one of the only things about the fall that counteracted the dread that accompanied the start of the school year. But football has historically made us wait all week for it, to its benefit (although the NFL has recently distanced itself from this positive attribute with its foray into weekly Thursday Night Football). It’s a weekend game, designed to increase our appreciation of time spent away from daily routine.

Professional basketball and hockey are near identical in their design: they start in mid-autumn, run until late spring, and have 82 regular season games and 4 playoff rounds of 7-game series. But they also have the least predictable schedules. Are the Celtics playing on the third Wednesday of the season? I have no idea. The NBA usually has a full slate booked on Fridays, but other than that, the only thing I can tell you is that there are 4 games on Christmas Day. Don’t even bother asking me about the NHL I don’t have a clue.

But you can set your watch to baseball. Is it 9 p.m.? The Red Sox are probably playing. And if they’re not, someone else is. And because of that regularity, baseball is there for you. No matter what you have going on in your life, you can count on it (a certain strike in 1994 notwithstanding) on a daily basis. The players you look up to will fade, and then your ability to play yourself will follow or lapse into dormancy, and then players younger than you will begin to retire. But baseball will still be there for you, in one way or another.

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