Why I Love Baseball

My regular peeps might be wondering about my blog silence regarding the Twins swift playoff exit after the near feverish excitment their regular season generated. The reason is simple, pure shock. It was terrible. I watched Game 3 in the Riverview Theater among throngs of shouting fans, quickly silenced by the Okaland A's bats. I had to walk out in the eight inning. Unbearable.

Tonight the mighty Mets lost to the underdog Cardinals in a dramatic game 7 of the NLCS. The ninth inning 2 run hr. homerun of some random, unheralded player decided the fate of the game, neigh, the fate of the world. After the game they showed a Mets dad holding his young Mets daughter in his arms. She was crying and I thought, how sweet and sad. Then I saw he was crying, too, crying not only with the weight of the unexpected loss but with the shared experience of his daughter's loss, crying not over baseball, exactly, but from the dashed hopes in a world that seems to build up your expectations only to slam you down when you least expect it. Sometimes you can only hold someone and share their grief and begin the long wait till spring.

You don't see fans crying after NBA games, or NHL games, or even NFL games. That's baseball, baby. The poet's sport.