This is part two of a three part series recounting my experience learning to like baseball. To read part 1, click here.

Batting Practice

Grayson Goyer is a junior at the University of Arkansas. We went to high school together. I have decided not to put any embarrassing details about Grayson in high school in here because as funny as it would be to me, he would never get the chance to respond. The only thing I will say here is that Grayson has attached earlobes and I think that’s hilarious.

In the spring of 2016, Grayson and his family took me to my first ever baseball game. I was not his first-choice friend for a baseball game: Everyone else was either busy or disinterested. I was also disinterested, but I was doing literally nothing else with my weekend, so I went anyway.

It was the Royals’ home opener the year after they won the World Series for the first time since 1985. It was hectic. Outside the stadium, there was a hodgepodge of different, extremely white cultures. “Take me out to the Ballgame” was being drowned out by Garth Brooks. The young men were pounding Bud Lights like cheap beer was going out of style. Older men, far past their days of drinking without fear, sipped PBRs and reminisced over the good ol’ days of ‘85 when the Royals were the best team in the most popular sport in America.

I had believed Cracker Jacks were a myth: some old-timey treat that had gone extinct long before I was born, like Tang. But there they were, sitting on a table surrounded by an assortment of modern snacks. Because I’m allergic to peanuts, I didn’t try them. Even if I wasn’t allergic to peanuts, I probably wouldn’t have tried them. I can’t be convinced that anything that reached its peak cultural relevance in the 1950s still holds up.

I don’t remember anything that happened on the field. I am more anti-fair-weather fan than I am pro-Royal, so I spent the first four innings rooting for the Mets and the last five innings heckling Royals fans. It was a blast, but I missed the entire game while I was busy (being a prick). Because Grayson took me to that game and no one else in my immediate circle of friends would go on record as “liking baseball,” I decided to talk to Grayson over Spring Break of 2019 to figure out why he liked baseball and how I could start.

***

The first games that Grayson remembers watching were Royals home openers when he was in elementary school. Every year, his parents extract him from the monotony of the classroom and whisk him away to witness the start of a new, though doomed, season.

When pressed, he revealed that he primarily enjoyed going because it got him out of class at that point. I thought about skipping a class to go to a baseball game to see if that would make me appreciate the game more. However, upon realizing I didn’t need an excuse to skip class in college, I did, but I did not go to a baseball game.

Many of the things that Grayson told me made him like baseball weren’t really about the game itself.

“It’s like golf, in that you could put it on in the background and do other things then come in when it’s interesting, like when the bases are loaded or something like that,” he said.

I know I would enjoy doing this, but that’s not really enjoying baseball. Grilling and chilling with family would be great without baseball and maybe a little worse with baseball, so that didn’t seem like the method either.

The interview was beginning to seem like a bust in terms of understanding baseball (But not a bust as a whole, because he’s my friend and I love and appreciate him. Great guy. Weird earlobes though.) until towards the end when Grayson asked if I had played Little League baseball. I had not.

“That explains it,” Grayson stated matter-of-factly. “I think for almost any sport, if you want to really enjoy it, you have to have played it at some point in your life.”

This was both intuitive and insightful, but also a bit distressing for my prospects of enjoying baseball. I’m too old to join a Little League team and I’m not good enough for an intramural team. I had never even thrown a baseball at that point. Despite the setback, I didn’t want to give up on the goal of “getting” baseball after that. People start crocheting at the age of 20 as a hobby. Why can’t I pick up watching baseball?

Undeterred, I decided to try a bit of baseball when I got back to campus. There was a baseball in my suite one of my roommates was playing with. I had him toss it to me and I tossed it back a few times, as one does. I told him I had never played catch before and he asked why my dad hadn’t done that with me. I told him it was a long story and we kept throwing the ball. Eventually, I misthrew it and hit our TV. My roommate looked petrified for a second, then he grabbed the ball, put in the corner of the room and told me he was done throwing it with me. I was hurt that he would treat me like a scolded child, but it was totally fair given the circumstances. I tried to ask him about why he liked baseball, but he wasn’t in the mood.

Digging in

As I began the trek up the stairs that lead up to the parking lot that is Kelly Field, the national anthem started blaring on the grainy speakers. The loud, pre-recorded trumpets made the entire stadium feel like a more authentic vision of what I imagined a baseball game to be. Turning the corner into the bleachers at the final stanza, I felt as American as apple pie, hot dogs, cheap beer and baseball. But when the song ended, all that was left of that patriotic dream was baseball.

I was one of roughly 25 people in the crowd for an exhibition game between Washington University and Illinois Wesleyan University. It would have been roughly 26, but my roommate—my baseball guru and Sherpa—deserted me as a result of the TV debacle. He was supposed to be my ward against committing some ancient baseball sin or offending the baseball gods. Instead, everything I did felt sacrilegious.

The crowd was exclusively white parents decked out in gear for their son’s teams. I was underdressed: my sweatsuit didn’t even have a Wash. U. logo on it. The lone saving grace of my outfit was a baseball cap. It didn’t make me feel more at ease as much as it felt like stolen valor. I tried to slink to the back of the bleachers so I could “enjoy” the game out of sight, but all I succeeded in doing was rattling the metal with my heavy steps and drawing even more attention to myself. I sat down at the second to the top row to seem inconspicuous, took off my cap and did my best to watch some baseball.

To the untrained eye (or maybe just mine), baseball is like an advanced game of monkey in the middle. I’m too naïve to appreciate great pitching, so even when Wash. U. was defending, I find myself rooting for the monkeys. I used to think that home runs were the most exciting thing in baseball. I have never seen one, so they still might be. However, the cat and mouse game as runners try to steal bases must be a close second. In the first inning, a Wash. U. runner, a modern Icarus, stepped just a bit too far away from the bag and the pitcher made him pay, pivoting quickly and firing a dart towards first base. The runner knew he was caught before the ball reached the hands of the first baseman. So he took off, hauling ass towards second base and praying for a misstep in the defense. The first baseman fumbled the ball briefly, but still easily threw it to the second basemen. The runner tried his best to juke the second baseman as he approached for the tag, but it was futile. The leather glove hit his shoulder like a punch and knocked the wind out of the crowd. He jogged dejectedly towards the dugout, his wings melted. His exaggerated huffing punctuated the tragedy of it all.

The less exciting parts of baseball weren’t as bad live as they are on TV. For one, baseball looks boring on TV whereas, in person, it simply looks really weird. The stances that batters get into are absurd. One batter from Illinois Wesleyan took the cake for strange batting positions. He spread his spindly legs so far apart he was in a near split and twirled his bat menacingly over his shoulder. He swung at all four pitches that came his way and managed to hit two that barely went foul. When he finally struck out, he scooted his legs back together and walked like a human being back to his team. No one else seemed to be bothered by this half stork, half man hybrid at the plate, so I brushed it aside.

The sounds of a baseball game are a metronome that I could set the pace of my afternoon to. The thud of the ball packing itself into the leather gloves after a strike is as satisfying as hearing the buzzer go off in a game where your team is on top. The thwack of the ball careening off the bat sounds like victory. For a game whose core mechanism is throwing blisteringly fast balls at other humans, it turned out to be surprisingly calming.

As I watched for a while, I realized how relaxed the game seemed to be in comparison to other sports. The players sat back and joked in the dug-out. One outfielder sat in a crouched position for two straight innings without having to take so much as a step. It felt like a backyard game played during a cookout. Unlike basketball, with its “blink and you’ll miss it” pacing, baseball seems to invite you to zone out. I could see why Grayson found that part so alluring. A baseball game is a venue, not an activity. It is the background noise for a hang-out with friends and family. In fact, the game itself was the least important part of my experience while I was there. If we had lost by multiple runs, I would have enjoyed going no less.

As a venue, a college baseball game seems to be more like a coffee shop than a sports bar. Baseball takes itself very seriously. There’s clapping after big plays and shouts only from loved ones. Everyone else is relegated to solemn silence or talking to their companions softly. On the field adjacent to us, a softball game was being played. It was absolutely raucous with chants and claps. They did a rendition of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “The Middle.” They did a version of “Rock and Roll” by Gary Glitter where they were both the instrumentals and the “Hey.” As I watched the baseball crowd golf-clap after another inning concluded, I couldn’t help but feel envious of those party animals over on the softball field, who felt liberated enough to cheer.

The only real passion I saw at the baseball game came in the fourth inning. Two children of an IWU parent were playing at the bottom of the bleachers. When the older one (six) threw a ball at his younger brother’s (three) face, their mom barely flinched. But when he screamed “Let’s go Wash. U.,” she was mortified. To raise a violent kid is fine. But to raise a traitor is unacceptable. The exchange reminded me that I was still at a sporting event. There were still winners and losers. While the crowd had settled into an uneasy armistice, they were still mortal enemies.

Like the lamest iteration of the Hatfields and McCoys.

Wash. U. won the game, but I left after the fifth inning. I had gained a new appreciation of baseball, but I was still not willing to watch three hours of it.

Read part three here.