Why I Love Baseball (illustrated)
princess0fgeeks asked me to ramble about why I love baseball. Here's what I came up with.
(Some of the Reasons) Why I Love Baseball; an image heavy ramble
1. For the same reason people love sports or other fandoms -- you follow a team and you get invested in their progress and you feel like you're a part of that progress and in some way the team is yours. For example, tonight we went to a restaurant we go to often and one of the servers who's also a Giants fan said "so we got Hudson" instead of "they/the Giants signed Hudson." You also become a part of the fandom, so you have that common bond not only with other people now, but with all the fans who went before you. In the case of the Giants, you're part of a 130 year old fandom, which is pretty awesome. You're also part of one of the greatest rivalries in the history of pro sports in the US.
1888 New York Giants, NL Champions
Beat LA, SF Giants style
2. Because it's a gorgeous game. There's the vast expanse of green grass and the red-brown dirt on the warning track, the basepaths and the mound. In San Francisco, depending on where you sit, you can see the Bay and the Bay Bridge. And each park has its quirks and, because there's a lot of leeway when it comes to the dimensions of the field, each outfield looks a little different.
AT&T Park Home of the San Francisco Giants
Buster Posey and Tim Linecum have a conference on the mound
3. Because it's a simple game of catch that isn't simple at all. The pitcher throws the ball to the catcher and the batter tries to prevent the ball from landing in the catcher's mitt. If the batter hits the ball, the rest of the defense tries to catch it either individually or in some combination.
Every single play has so many nuances that you could watch the game for a couple of decades and still see a new variation. The defense shifts into different positions not just based on what they know about the batter, but on what the count is and how many guys are on base already. The pitcher and catcher make the decision about which pitch to throw based on those same reasons and on others--what's the light like? Has the batter been favoring a sore ankle?
This video does a really good job of explaining the mental game that goes on between the pitcher and the hitter.
Click to view4. Which leads us into the next reason--watching baseball, with all its complicated variations and head games is good. Watching it at the major league levels when, during most of the season, there are only 750 guys good enough to be playing in the majors, it amazing. If you have a competency kink, chances are good it'll be triggered a dozen times or so during a game.
Madison Bumgarner pitching
Gregor Blanco making a catch in the outfield
5. Because of all the variations on each play, baseball is a stats geeks wet dream. It's not enough to know a guy's batting average (how many hits he gets divided by the number of chances he has to get a hit). How does he do against left handed pitchers vs right handed pitchers? Is he better in his home park or is he better away? What's his hitting like during the day vs during night games--one of my favorite players admits that he stays up too late and it shows on his day/night splits.
I'm not actually a total stats geek but the sheer variety of the stats never fails to amuse me. Because the game itself has plenty of pauses in the action, the radio and TV guys have time to tell you that our pitcher is coming up on his 1,500th strikeout and how many other Giants pitchers (both in the San Francisco era and in the New York era) have gotten 1,500 or more strikeouts.
Brandon Belt's Game Condition Splits
6. Because there's always another game tomorrow--162 games in the regular season and another month of games in the playoffs. You can get up every day from the end of February (if you follow Spring Training games) to the end of October (if you watch post-season games) and be able to either watch or listen to a ball game. And you can play it all day and into the night. You have to get three outs to end an inning and if you can't get those outs, the opposing team can keep scoring until you do. And there's no such thing as a game ending in a tie. If both teams get through the regulation nine innings and the score is tied, there's no sudden death or anything like that; they just go into extra innings. Back in April, the Oakland A's played for six and a half hours before they finally won the game at 1:40am. Games can be called due to weather but they're almost always continued later that day or made up at a later date.
Box Score for A Giants-Mets game that was over seven hours long
7. Because it's never about just one guy. Unlike basketball where one or two healthy superstars can carry the rest of the team to and then through the playoffs, baseball requires different guys to step up on different days. You can have the best pitcher in the game, but he can only pitch every five days. Your best hitter still has to bat in turn and usually only gets four chances in an average game. And that best hitter? Fails more often than he succeeds. Buster Posey got one hit for every three attempts in 2012 and his .336 batting average was the best in the majors that year. The guy who struck out four times last night can come up to the plate the next day and hit a ball out of the park and into the Bay.
Brandon Belt, having a bad night
Brandon Belt, watching a home run ball leave the park
Because all the other reasons add up to one thing--it's fun. Because on any given night, anything can happen and, if you watch the game long enough, it probably will.
Telesilla and Darkrose pose with the 2010 & 2012 World Series trophies.
Also? Butts.
George Kontos and his fine fine ass
crossposted from http://telesilla.dreamwidth.org/348561.html |
comments | you can comment at my DW using OpenID