I think I may be the only person in America to fall in love with baseball in a classroom.
I came to baseball pretty late. I didn’t really play growing up. The closest I came was being a batboy in fifth grade -- to the fifth grade team (I wasn’t good enough to play). For many reasons, I just didn’t enjoy it. I proceeded to play every other sport, and forget about that silly sport where everyone just stands around. In high school I went to state championships in golf, tennis, football, futbol and even came close in basketball. Baseball couldn’t have been further from my mind.
Then I ripped my shoulder open. I remember the exact moment I felt the bone slip out of the socket. It was the most beautiful type of Texas day, late fall, just sunny enough, the gentlest breeze. I tried to avoid surgery, but with every crackle of tissue under bone it became more inevitable. Sports, which had taken every outside moment of my life in high school, were gone. I was miserable.
It seems like often that’s when baseball finds people, when you just need a story, or a moment, or to feel that little bit of joy.
We were watching Ken Burns’ Baseball, the Jackie Robinson episode, for a sports class my basketball coach was teaching mostly for all the injured athletes. I knew who Jackie was (who doesn’t?) but I’d never seen him play, watched him steal second, any of it. There’s footage of his first major league hit in that episode. After all the build up, watching him hit first base safely, hearing the crowd roar, well, that was the first time I felt that adrenalinic joy of baseball.
For a moment, I forgot about the stiches, the sling that dug in just a little too deeply to ever be comfortable. No, that moment was everything right about baseball to me -- a reprieve from all the pain, a slice of time that made you believe even for a moment that the world was going to be okay. After all, Jackie had gotten a hit in the major leagues.
If it hadn’t have been for my shoulder I think I would’ve started pitching then and there. Baseball had other plans for me.
Our announcer had just left, and the season was already upon us. I signed up, and no one had enough time to help me, nor did we have any camera people. I was alone, in a booth, with a microphone and a sport I’d never played before. I’d printed out a sheet of old Red Barber baseball terms: can of corn, ducks on the pond, etc. I had figured out what exactly none of it meant. So I did the only other thing I knew how to do. I described everything. The smell of the grass, the expression of the umpire, the outfielder dashing towards that crack in the fence out in center field.
I’ve found there’s a funny thing that happens when you pay more attention to baseball. You end up loving it even more. Somehow, that just makes you want to pay more attention.
When my shoulder healed (well, sort of) I went back to my other loves. It just wasn’t the same. Not only was I now terrible, and in fairly constant pain, nothing had quite the drama, the timing, the timelessness of baseball. I resented it for it. Baseball was the one sport I couldn’t play, and here it was stealing the joy from all the ones I could. In retrospect, I brought that on myself, but baseball and I had a little falling out. I announced other games, but part of me knew I’d crawl back to baseball.
There was something comforting about knowing it wouldn’t judge when I did.
College rolled around, and I got back into baseball a little. The tiniest dip of a toe into an ocean, but I did, went to a game here and there, watched the Astros play. I tried not to love it. And then, once again, I needed it.
I had a traumatic event sophomore year in early 2018 which gave me PTSD, made me quit my job, and sent me home from school. I was broken, unmotivated, and felt like I didn’t have a single thing going for me. One particularly difficult June day after therapy, my mom turned on the baseball game. For 12, tense, triumphant innings, I just sat down and watched baseball. It was the longest time awake I’d gone without crying since February. It got added to the schedule.
My little reprieve, back again, this time just to help me through the days. On the days there wasn’t any big league action, we’d watch the minors, and I fell in love with that too. In August I applied to work as an editor for a small prospects site that was just getting off the ground.
Sometimes it feels like saying I love baseball isn’t quite enough. Baseball has helped me through more pain than seems possible, provided joy I thought I wouldn’t feel again. Baseball is beautiful.
It doesn’t care how you love it, it doesn’t ask for standing ovations in roaring stadiums, although it’ll tip its cap in thanks for the enthusiasm. You can play it with a broomstick if you want. Baseball doesn’t care. You can be a child, a grown man, an angsty teen with a bum shoulder. Baseball doesn’t care. How much do you know about baseball? A little? A lot? Do you watch the World Series or every game you can get your hands on? Maybe you’re just lonely in a press box and you barely know the basics. Baseball doesn’t care
No, baseball isn’t judgemental; age, race, sex, none of it matters to baseball. Baseball loves you back with all its heart. And it’ll be back. Yes sir. And it still loves you in the meantime.