Once again borrowing from Chris O’Donnell, I thought I’d write about my relationship to baseball in 2025.
Like many American boys, I grew up playing Little League baseball. I loved the game, even though I was decidedly bad at it. When I got to the age where I’d be on the more competitive traveling teams, I retired. Instead, I helped out as an assistant coach and scorekeeper for my younger sisters’ softball teams.
My family would go to a couple of AAA games in Louisville most years and I’d watch the All Star Game and World Series on TV usually, but that was about it. I was decidedly a casual fan. It didn’t help that “my” team was 600 miles away, which means 1. we definitely were not going to see a home game and 2. they weren’t on TV basically ever.
Reader, have I ever told you the story of how I became an Orioles fan? Again, like many American boys, I collected baseball cards. Like boys who only had sisters, I often wished I had a brother. So when I ended up with baseball cards for brothers Cal, Jr. and Bill Ripken and they played for the same team I was enthralled. Not long after that, Cal, Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game stream, and I was hooked for life.
So given that the Orioles have been really good the last few years and that I can easily watch most of their games online, you might think I’d be a more engaged fan. Well…I’m not.
Baseball invites a casualness that I don’t get from most other sports. The slowness of the game itself that some complain about is a feature to me. You can sit back, have a conversation, drink a beer or two, and just let the world go by for a bit. And MLB plays 162 games a year, so it’s okay if you miss one or ten.
I’ve tried playing in fantasy baseball leagues, but I just don’t get into it enough to do well. And my life is busy enough that watching more than the occasional game on TV is difficult. So as the 2025 baseball season starts, I’ll mostly catch up on the Orioles via the blogs I read and maybe I’ll sneak in a game here and there. I’ll keep going to the Lafayette Aviators games because they’re cheap and local. Baseball, like most sports, is better experienced in person.
I’ve always wished I could find a way to care more about baseball and hockey. There’s such a vast stretch of time between the NCAA tournament and the NFL season (and if I’m being honest, I’ve only begun to get back into basketball a little bit with Purdue and the Pacers being decent the last couple of years, and even in the Miller era, the Pacers only became appointment TV during the playoffs). None of the other sports just ever captured me the way football did. I think most of that was Indy’s lack of MLB/NHL franchises, and the ridiculous amount of choices for entertainment now doesn’t help – in fact, it frequently leads to paralysis as I struggle to decide what seems interesting enough to devote my increasingly limited attention span to on any given day, as I continue obsessing over the lengthy and always-unfinished to do list I’m neglecting.
The convenience of a connected and on-demand world has come with a flip side of indecision, demolished attention, and the stress/exhaustion of never knowing when and for what your attention might be demanded. I don’t have the answer, but I’d love to find a way to rebalance that.