by Mike Walk, or a Faithful Student of His from the School of Glorious Foolishness
Baseball is a game steeped in tradition, nostalgia, and the quiet dignity of watching grown men adjust themselves on national television. My own love of the sport began in childhood, when I discovered that baseball allowed me to participate in athletic activity while utilizing the same amount of energy I normally expend napping.
Back then, us neighborhood kids played on a field that was LITERALLY a field, complete with a foul line made from a tether-ball pole and several pieces of driftwood. We didn’t have a scoreboard. We barely had a ball. Our idea of protective gear was “not standing directly behind Paul when he swung the bat.” Paul had a swing like a collapsing barn and the spatial awareness of a squirrel.
When I eventually found myself playing actual organized baseball (read softball), my position was usually right field, a tactical zone chosen because it received the fewest balls and the most shade. There, I could practice important baseball techniques like whistling songs, chewing grass, aggravating ant piles, and gazing into the middle distance with the stoic expression of a man pondering his place in the universe. Once every three or four innings, a fly ball would sail in my direction and I’d lunge heroically after it, usually tripping over a clump of weeds and landing in a gopher hole. “Nice effort,” the coach would yell, which is adult code for “Don’t ever reproduce.”
The strategy of baseball is subtle. While football and basketball reward things like “speed” and “power,” baseball rewards you for standing completely still until something interesting happens, which can be anywhere from five seconds to forty-five minutes. In fact, most of the game consists of players quietly communing with the dirt while the pitcher and catcher attempt to psych each other out using ancient eyebrow-based communication.
Pitching is a mystical art passed down from grizzled great-uncles who smoked non-filtered cigarettes and said things like, “Back in my day, the mound was uphill both ways.” A pitcher must possess accuracy, velocity, and the willingness to throw a ball directly into a batter’s ribcage if necessary. If the batter charges the mound, both teams engage in a large, swirling, slow-motion brawl known as a “bench-clearing,” or “donnybrook”, which consists mostly of stern glares and polite nudges, unless you’re in the minor leagues, in which case someone usually gets hit with a sunflower seed bucket.
The great thing about baseball is its timelessness. I don’t mean that poetically—I mean it literally has no clock. The game ends only when it is good and ready, or when the umpire dies of boredom. There are no timeouts, only long, meaningful pauses where everyone reflects on the last forty seconds of absolutely nothing. It’s a sport with the pace of erosion.
Now, there’s a lot of talk these days about speeding up the game. “Pitch clocks,” they say. “Faster innings!” they cry. But what these reformers fail to understand is that baseball is not supposed to be fast. It’s not meant for people in a hurry. Baseball is meant for summer afternoons, lazy flies buzzing, the comforting slap of leather on leather, and the gentle rhythm of a sport that occasionally remembers to do something super athletic.
I attend games whenever I can. I sit in the bleachers, under the nuclear heat of the sun, with a hot dog in one hand and a beverage of uncertain provenance in the other, listening to the soft hum of the crowd and the crack of the bat, and I remember the pure, uncomplicated joy of watching Paul Sanders whack a ball into the stratosphere and then sprint triumphantly to third base—because he was too stupid to know where first base was.
Baseball. It’s not fast. It’s not flashy. But by golly, it’s the only sport where you can fail fifty percent of the time and still be considered a hero.
And that, my friends, is my kind of game.
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