Find Your Passion

Here are three ways to help you learn to like baseball and maybe even develop a passion for it.

First: Find a copy of the movie Bull Durham starring Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Kevin Costner and watch it. That one act will do more to help you understand the lure of baseball than a month of reading my guide.

Second: Find a team you like and get to know them. This might be the team your boyfriend watches. Or look in your back yard. I live in Alaska, and many people gravitate toward the West Coast Teams or follow the teams they grew up with. I’ve adopted the Seattle Mariners as my home team since I can watch their games often. But I probably know the Red Sox the best since I’ve watched many a game with The Boyfriend who is a Massachusetts native and I now have a sister who lives in Boston and is a hopeless fan.

It helps if you are a watching a winning team (always more fun to cheer than to mope) but not necessary. Underdog teams are romantic. Witness the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians whose claim to fame is not winning the pennant in most of their fans’ lifetimes. Yet they have the most loyal fans in the nation.

I like the teams who have teams with quirky personalities and colorful characters. Good baseball is great to watch, but fun baseball keeps you coming back.

For example, when I started watching baseball a long time ago, I had no cable but could get the TBS Super Station out of Atlanta. I watched many a game while talking long distance on the phone to my boyfriend. In October post-season, the major TV stations carried the games and I started watching the Philadelphia Phillies with Lenny Dystra and John Kruk. Lenny was a great ball player who had also played for the New York Mets, but John Kruk was the Pig Pen of the Phillies, with a filthy batting helmet and bits of grilled cheese sandwiches hanging off his teeth. I loved him, He was a good ball player but he wasn’t boring and he was always doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. We Girlfriends sometimes gravitate toward bad boys, you know.

Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox is my current favorite, because his pants don’t fit, his corn rows fly out from under his batting helmet, he never cleans his batting helmet because it is bad luck, and he reminds me of Krusty the Clown on the Simpsons. But he is a demon hitter that strikes terror into the heart of pitchers. The Red Sox in 2003 were fun because they hadn’t yet beat the Curse of not winning the Series in 80 years. They all grew their hair and beards grow long and after Red Sox player Kevin Millar said to the press "I want to see somebody cowboy up and stand behind this team,” the phrase "Cowboy Up!" was often was repeated as a rallying cry by fans and players alike. The Red Sox didn’t win the Series that year, but heck, they were fun to root for.

What you are trying to do is build a passion. If you already love the technical game of baseball, you are probably not reading this blog anyway. But if the technical part doesn’t zing you, you have to find a reason to sit through some slow stretches. During the early 2000s, Edgar Martinez of the Mariners would often hit off foul after foul which would extend his plate appearances an extra five to six times past a full count. It made the game go on forever. I loved this extended play not because it was exciting, but because it was Edgar. I adored Edgar (much to the dismay of The Boyfriend.) Because of my passion for Edgar, baseball, even at its slow pace, was terrific fun.

Third: Watch baseball with people who love the game. And listen to them. Ask questions, but not too many. Nothing more annoying than people talking to you while you are trying to pay attention to what happens after a pitch is thrown. But I’ve learned the most listening to the banter between The Boyfriend and Baseball Buddy. Baseball Buddy has been watching baseball for a long, long time and is a forever Cleveland Indians Fan. He has tremendous passion for the game. I know that when the veins start popping on Baseball Buddy's neck, something important just happened. If you listen, you can learn.

Baseball is a game of personalities. In football, faces and expression are hidden under a helmet and shoulder pads. In televised baseball, high resolution lenses brings you up front and personal-- the sweat rolling off faces, the tics tensing in cheeks, the look in the eyes of the batter that says "bring it on." You are watching people and faces and drama and conflict. And that, to me, is way more interesting than a page of statistics.