Game of the Week: Baseball

 

Technically, I have never played a single game of baseball, America's supposed "pastime".  When I was a little boy in the early 1960s my father and I both collected baseball cards off the backs of Post cereal boxes...I was very proud of those although I knew little-to-nothing about the game itself.  Like just about every sport I did in school recess/P.E. classes, no teacher ever taught me the rules, and we always played variants of baseball: in my early elementary school years we played kickball, where the "pitcher" rolls the red inflated ball to the "kicker" at home plate...you got an "out" simply by hitting or tagging the baserunner with the ball.  I was pretty good at that game because I was both a good kicker and runner.  Later on we would play softball, but not like how the women in college play it: the pitchers were required to throw the ball slower and with a greater arc to give each batter a shot at hitting it.  By high school it was clear whenever we played softball which of my classmates had played league baseball away from school: their skill levels were way beyond mine.  I never cared for baseball and its variants because almost all the time...unless you're the pitcher or catcher...you're just standing around on the field waiting for the ball to come your way or waiting your turn at bat behind the plate: very, very boring (see above picture from the South Park episode The Losing Edge).  As a spectator, though, I often enjoy sitting down to a televised Major League baseball game, especially if the score's close: doesn't matter that much whether one of "my" Florida teams is playing.  I like the often intricate strategies within an inning, especially after a runner reaches base and the pitcher is exhibiting problems of some sort...then it gets interesting.  Still, even without this pandemic going on I wouldn't want to be stuck for some three hours in a ball park watching a game live.  And I absolutely have no interest whatsoever in either college baseball or softball even though I live here in Gainesville where the University of Florida teams in both sports routinely excel each year.  No, for me baseball is now an exclusively televised Major League spectator sport...I began following the standings earnestly starting in the 1969 season, although "my" first World Series was in 1965, between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Minnesota Twins...