My Love of the Game
Baseball is a game of 'what if's'.
This past weekend I was coaching my team in a tournament in Kamloops. We were in what is known as the tournament of Champions. It was a great weekend full of great weather. Sunny but not too hot that it was melting. The tournament consisted of six teams. My team, Coquitlam, as well as the host Kamloops, and four other teams from Alberta; Airdrie, Cochrane, Calgary, and Lethbridge.
We rolled though most of the games with the Albertan team, with the exception of Lethrbidge, in which we had a massive slobber-knocker. It was a back and forth game with the end result being a 12-10 win for us in the 6th inning as we ran into a time limit.
Anyways, through the round robin we had finished 4-1 with our only loss coming to Kamloops and they had ran the table. This set up a winner take all final against the two BC teams. We were two time defending champs going for the three-peat and Kamloops was sick and tired of being the bridesmaid.
Back to the point - Baseball is a game of 'what if's'.
Long story short, Kamloops beat us 3-2 in their last at bat of the game. We scratched and clawed our we back from an early 2-0 deficit just to see it all just slip away in the bottom of the seventh. It was another one run game with Kamloops. It was another great game with a great team. It was a really heart breaking loss. The guys played their guts out and just came up a little short.
After the game I was thinking back to everything that happened and how easily things could have been different:
If that ground ball would have been reached in the first.
If we didn't leave runners stranded in the 6th and 7th.
If the grounder was scooped in the 7th.
If one of two pop-ups in foul territory were caught late in the game as both landed inches any from the outstretched glove of the diving players.
If we made a pitching change.
What would have happened?
It makes you think about the entire tournament.
What if the catcher didn't get hurt in the first game and what if the centerfielder get hurt in the second game. Would a different team on the field be enough to make a difference.
This is why I love baseball. This what make baseball so great. This is the part that I think a lot of people miss. It is the chess game that occurs at every moment of the game. Shifting fielders, calling pitches, calling for the steal, the sacrifice fly, and the....SUICIDE SQUEEZE!!!
Your mind is constantly analyzing situations and outcomes. Risk versus reward. A game where success 3 out of 10 times at the plate in still considered quite good.
Baseball is more exciting than people give it credit for. It is a thinking mans sport. A sport for the analytical.
And do NOT compare it to beer league softball because it is NOT even close to the same thing.
This past weekend I was coaching my team in a tournament in Kamloops. We were in what is known as the tournament of Champions. It was a great weekend full of great weather. Sunny but not too hot that it was melting. The tournament consisted of six teams. My team, Coquitlam, as well as the host Kamloops, and four other teams from Alberta; Airdrie, Cochrane, Calgary, and Lethbridge.
We rolled though most of the games with the Albertan team, with the exception of Lethrbidge, in which we had a massive slobber-knocker. It was a back and forth game with the end result being a 12-10 win for us in the 6th inning as we ran into a time limit.
Anyways, through the round robin we had finished 4-1 with our only loss coming to Kamloops and they had ran the table. This set up a winner take all final against the two BC teams. We were two time defending champs going for the three-peat and Kamloops was sick and tired of being the bridesmaid.
Back to the point - Baseball is a game of 'what if's'.
Long story short, Kamloops beat us 3-2 in their last at bat of the game. We scratched and clawed our we back from an early 2-0 deficit just to see it all just slip away in the bottom of the seventh. It was another one run game with Kamloops. It was another great game with a great team. It was a really heart breaking loss. The guys played their guts out and just came up a little short.
After the game I was thinking back to everything that happened and how easily things could have been different:
If that ground ball would have been reached in the first.
If we didn't leave runners stranded in the 6th and 7th.
If the grounder was scooped in the 7th.
If one of two pop-ups in foul territory were caught late in the game as both landed inches any from the outstretched glove of the diving players.
If we made a pitching change.
What would have happened?
It makes you think about the entire tournament.
What if the catcher didn't get hurt in the first game and what if the centerfielder get hurt in the second game. Would a different team on the field be enough to make a difference.
This is why I love baseball. This what make baseball so great. This is the part that I think a lot of people miss. It is the chess game that occurs at every moment of the game. Shifting fielders, calling pitches, calling for the steal, the sacrifice fly, and the....SUICIDE SQUEEZE!!!
Your mind is constantly analyzing situations and outcomes. Risk versus reward. A game where success 3 out of 10 times at the plate in still considered quite good.
Baseball is more exciting than people give it credit for. It is a thinking mans sport. A sport for the analytical.
And do NOT compare it to beer league softball because it is NOT even close to the same thing.
posted by Duncan McAllister at 11:32 a.m.
3 Comments:
That was the best baseball game I've ever seen live. (Not saying much, I've only seen about 10 games.)
I always "What if" officiating...I don't know why...but in your game there was a very close call at first that I think cost your team a run in the top of the seventh...what if the call goes the other way?
Who knows?
Great game, and I had fun meeting your team.
Tony
Baseball is a pretty boring game to watch, if you don't have the right frame of mind. (Cut to the episode of The Simpsons where Homer stops drinking and wonders why people attend games.) I'm glad the majors cut down a lot of the in-between stuff, like batters stepping out of the box and pitchers walking around the mound. The "last pitch" of every batter usually has something exciting, involving split-second decisions, and athleticism. Think a strike out, double play, fly ball to the gap. When I watched a game at the SkyDome, my girlfriend didn't see the big deal, but she did get a kick out of me cheering and getting excited during a Jays' home run.
A lot goes on during a game that isn't visible too, like the managers'/coaches' decisions (I actually believe that the more a manager is shown on TV, the less he actually does, because they are often shown in thinking mode; in fact, there have been managers that were paid to just stand on the steps and let the athletes play). Anyway, I'm a fan of baseball, love attending games when I can, and it makes good background noise when it's on TV, because the crack of the bat signifies something's about to happen.
Very good analases, all the way around. I too was a person that didn't enjoy watching baseball, and never really played it growing up, except in PE class. I focussed my attention early in basketball and anything slower than that, I tended to tune out.
My only quam with baseball is that it takes a freakin' long time to play a game. Take a basketball game on TV. With media time-outs and commercials and all that, at the most, you're looking at a 2 hour investment. Baseball, it's about double. That's a long time.
Being of the first generations whose attention-span has been severely shortened, it's hard to watch a whole game, straight-through on TV. It takes 30 seconds between all actions - the batter stepping up to the plate, the pitcher receiving his signals, the pitcher delivering his pitch, etc. If they could speed that up a bit, I think you'd get a lot more viewers in Canada.
But overall, I've grown to see the analytical side of baseball and it makes it that much more exciting and entertaining.
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