That baseball state of mind
by Matt Worley

We're going to our first baseball game of the summer today. Okay, it's barely Spring. Yes, it was only about forty degrees and raining all day yesterday. You're right, professional basketball and hockey are still inching their way in the direction of the possibility of playing some play-off games sometime soon. But after months of disappointing sports (the K.C. Chiefs didn't make the playoffs, UNM lost to Louisville in the NCAAs, and Kansas' early exit killed our chances at the $93 office pool), we're ready to stretch out and take life simply and easily. You see, baseball was thought of when there was no other entertainment in the world other than drinking, whoring and theater. It's old world, or about as old world as this country gets.

The Albuquerque Dukes are the Triple-A farm team of the L.A. Dodgers, who have been just a little bit disappointing in the last couple of years. Our streak of nearly 20 winning games attended in a row was demolished early in the 1995 season, bringing an end to expectations. This doesn't matter much to us, though. We cheer on the Kansas City Royals in the Major Leagues (due to nine early years living in that midwestern area) and they haven't won in years. As a matter of fact, the Royals already own an interesting statistic this year. Going into Sunday afternoon's game, whenever they score more than two runs they lose. We're hoping that this stat doesn't hold true for the rest of the year.

Baseball is a game of losers and winners. Of fat people and skinny people. Of superstars and relative nobodies with strange nicknames. If you know how to hit a ball or throw one really hard, there is a place for you in baseball. You could be slower than a turtle as long as you can hit the ball real far. You could wear the same underwear the entire season as long as you pitch a ball so no one can hit it most of the time.

Baseball is leisurely and possibly long-winded. It's like a tall glass of lemonade on a hot summer day when you have nothing to do but watch the high flying clouds drift by on their meandering path to somewhere else. It's like having a conversation with someone you don't know who keeps referencing events and parts of their lives you know nothing about, but in a comical way, is still interesting. Baseball could take forever, and yesterday, in a game between the Detroit Tigers and Chicago White Sox, it almost did. That game almost broke the longest game in history record, missing by only one minute. While other sports have also taken up quite a bit of time (who can forget the triple overtime ending game of last year's Stanley Cup Finals in hockey?), it's usually an accident. Unlike football, basketball, hockey, soccer or almost anything else except world class chess games, baseball has no clock. And this makes all the difference.

In 1994, I quit a bad job just so I could attend a couple of Dukes playoff games. It was during the ML baseball strike and the only baseball we could get was the Dukes. They went on to win the Pacific Coast League Championship, and I went on to have other jobs, a few which were also worth ditching for a baseball game, but unfortunately I was only employed in those jobs during non-baseball months. We (as a group of friends) attended around fifteen games during the strike-ravaged season and the Dukes won every single one we went to. The next year they raised ticket prices by a dollar, and we didn't go to as many games.

When watching baseball I have to forget about a lot of things. I have to forget that there might be something better to do (there really isn't). I have to ignore the need to always be on the go, go, go (leads to heart attacks). I have to forget there is work tomorrow, and the fence needs mending, and all of these players (Triple-A and Major Leagues) are making way more money than I am. For this is the game of baseball, thought up some time before I was born, and baseball doesn't care much for those thoughts. Baseball doesn't care much for anything except the game--which is just the way it's supposed to be.

Matt Worley wrote a thesis once about the correlation between sex and baseball, but as he's been out of the loop lately on one of those subjects, he's not sure if the theory is still relevant.

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