Baseball

When I was younger, I used to follow sports much more than I do now.  Being married to a non-fan of sports will do that to you, as well as having a busier life.  I don't really notice anymore when football season starts, even though I used to live for Raider games.  I was never a huge basketball fan, but now I don't notice either when the season begins or when it ends.  Forget about hockey, golf, tennis.  Never got into soccer.  I missed the entire Olympics this year.

These days I focus almost all my sports energy on baseball, specifically on the Mariners.  Even as a baseball fan, I read about players around both leagues, but I really don't know much about other teams beyond their records.  But I keep up with the Mariners year round, reading speculation about which players might come or go and what the team should do in the off-season to improve, and I follow them every day during the season, even months after they have been eliminated from contention, again.

(My post-season rooting is this:  I hope the Yankees lose.  Go A's.  In that order.)

I have given some thought to why I think baseball is a better game than others.  Maybe it's just because I like it, but I have reasons anway:

• Baseball is a game of statistics.  Like no other game, baseball can be broken down into the results of every at-bat, every inning of pitching, every hit, every walk or stolen base or strikeout.  When I discoverd several years ago that the statistics were getting more sophisticated and people were out there blogging about every little aspect of the game that could be measured, it was a delight for me.
• Baseball is played by real people.  Basktball players are enormously tall, with a few exceptions.  Even the short ones are tall.  Football players are almost all some combination of huge, incredibly strong, and/or track-meet fast.  Normal people can't hope to play those sports professionally.  Baseball players are fast, slow, small, big, strong, not so strong, some even a bit portly.  A regular guy can at least dream.
• It'a an easy game to follow.  Unlike football, you can see what's going on in baseball.  You can follow the result in football or basketball, but I, at least, can't really tell how those results came about, because too much is going on.  Most of the action in baseball follows the ball, and as a result the game is easier to understand and better officiated.
• I'll draw on a cliche for the last point:  it's a game of inches.  There is a luck factor in any game of baseball that helps make it interesting.  Football and basketball are games of precision, but the players control the movement of the ball.  There is no way that a batter can control just where the ball will go off the bat, and that creates a randomness that makes it a little more excellent when a player gets a hit or makes a great defensive play.  Minute differences, a few inches this way or that, can decide a baseball game, and that's part of what makes it fun.

And one last thing.  The Mariners won 75 games this year, which counts as a positive year for them.  Finally, they are beginning to show some signs of life.