I Don’t Like Baseball

Chris St. John is a chemical engineer that just can’t help getting drawn into baseball stats. His work has appeared on ESPN, Baseball Prospectus and Beyond the Box Score. His personal blog is Steal of Home, where his claim to fame is ratting out the White Sox in the Blue Jays sign-stealing scandal. You can follow him on twitter @stealofhome.

I don’t like baseball. Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy baseball. I choose to watch games of my own free will and am entertained. But I don’t like baseball. There is nothing special to me about the game above anything else in this world. The beauty of the game does not transcend description to me. Red Smith quipped, “Ninety feet between bases is the nearest thing to perfection that man has yet to achieve.” To me, ninety feet is just a dimension. I don’t “stare out the window and wait for spring” like Rogers Hornsby when there’s no baseball.  Ernie Harwell wrote, “Baseball is a ballet without music. Drama without words.” I see it as just a game. I enjoy baseball, but I don’t like baseball.

I grew up in a family that didn’t have any interest in sports, yet after a neighbor provided my brothers and me with a massive amount of trading cards, baseball became my obsession. I treated these cards as if they were precious metals. I would spend hours reading and sorting them while Bob Uecker — the voice of the Brewers– indoctrinated me with the religion of baseball. Eventually I began playing in youth leagues, where I still have a vivid recollection of many of the plays I made. When I look back on my childhood, baseball is the first place my mind goes. Even hearing Uecker’s voice brings me back to those countless days spent on my bedroom floor while the Brewers game poured into my ears like a perfect rendition of Beethoven’s 9^th symphony. I like the memories I have of baseball, but I don’t like baseball.

I was drawn to sports at a young age. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the athleticism required. Maybe it’s the competition. Maybe it’s just that it provides me with an escape from my daily life. But I can’t shake the feeling that if I were born in Canada, I would follow hockey. Anguilla? Yacht racing. Afghanistan? Buzkashi. Almost any other country in the world? Soccer. I like sports, but I don’t like baseball.

I’m an extremely analytical person. If a list or spreadsheet can be made, it will be. I’ve created ranking systems for hockey radio stations, my music collection and every fantasy sport I’ve ever played, including baseball, hockey, basketball and football. I created a system that attempts to calculate daily results of individual baseball players. I like it when things go the way they should. A season of baseball is worth much more to me than a season in any other sport. There aren’t 16 or 82 games in a season — there are 162. Terrible teams may get lucky sometimes, but the teams that stand out in the end are good. They have to be. A terrible player may reach base nine times in 10 plate appearances, but he won’t finish a full season with a .900 on-base percentage. In baseball, most things just…smooth out. It is the most statistically modeled sport I know and I like that. I like the analytical nature of baseball, but I don’t like baseball.

I spend a lot of time with baseball. I blog, I analyze, I tweet, all about baseball. My mind is always investigating new intricacies of the game. I study statistics and seek the subtleties. If news happens, I’m usually one of the first to know, simply because I’m always following it. I’m obsessed with baseball, but I don’t like baseball.

But then there are four simultaneous games, the results of which will decide who goes to the playoffs. Two of the teams are nearing historic collapses. One team is a strike away from elimination until a home run sends the game into extra innings. Another team is struggling to force a playoff until they give up an RBI single in the 9^th and complete their collapse. Still yet another team is on the verge of making the playoffs outright until, in the span of a few minutes, they allow their opponent to score twice in the bottom of the 9^th while their rivals win their game with a walk off home run in the bottom of the 12^th. My heart is pounding and my mind is racing. And it’s in those moments of emotion and suspense, of the impossible calculation becoming the actual result, where all that I know to be true about baseball is cast aside for a brief second…those are the moments when I love baseball.