At last, it’s time to play ball
Published 2:52 pm Sunday, March 31, 2013
Baseball is a game of probably-nots.
Will a pitcher throw a perfect game? Probably not — there have only been 23 in the history of the game. And yet it happens. Seattle Mariners’ pitcher Felix Hernandez got one last year.
Will the batter even hit the ball? No, probably not. The absolute best only hit it one-third of the time.
Will the Seattle Mariners make it to the World Series? Probably not, but as of today, they have the same shot as every other team.
Baseball season starts at 7:05 tonight for Mariners fans, as the team opens its year with an away game in Oakland. Like the start of every baseball season, that’s reason enough for honest celebration.
Baseball is a workmanlike sport, after all, and today marks the beginning of another marathon run to October. The team that wins the World Series may play 180 games, including the playoffs. That’s roughly twice as long as any other season in professional sports or, to put it in a different perspective, the number of days in a school year.
Amid declining ratings and occasional indifference, some people question whether or not baseball is America’s pastime. That misses the point.
Baseball never should have been the country’s most popular sport. It’s a game designed for underdogs, also known as “the game of failure.”
Does that sound like it should be a marquee attraction?
At the same time, a game where failure is outright expected engenders its own appeal. It encourages supporting losers — an American pastime in its own right. There’s a reason why the Chicago Cubs remain a favorite despite the fact they haven’t won a World Series in more than a century.
There’s also a reason why teams like the Mariners, with a small payroll and a stadium hidden far from the country’s media centers, grab the imagination.
Michael Lewis summed up the appeal in his modern classic, “Moneyball,” as he wrote about the Oakland Athletics going up against the New York Yankees.
“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win,”
he wrote. “The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”
And inspiration is what it’s all about. While baseball is a game of probably-nots, it’s also the rare sport of infinite possibility, a point underlined by the fact that an extra-inning game can, technically, last forever — or at least until the men on the field collapse.
Like so many things in both baseball and in life, that situation probably won’t present itself — but it might. It just might.
